Posted by Noel Chiappa (98.166.150.196) on October 06, 2010 at 22:47:24:
In Reply to: Identify an old japanese book posted by Frédéric S. on October 06, 2010 at 18:56:48:
Dates are easy to read: start by looking for the year character 年 ('nen'). Once you have that, you should be able to find the following sequence: 'nengoō' reign name, {number}, year character (年), {number}, month character (月 'gatsu' - literally, 'moon'), {number}, day character (日 'ka' - literally, 'sun').
For the {number} sequences, if you don't know Japanese numbers, there is a partial table here:
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/prints/zodiac.html
and numbers of the form 'XY' are written 'X 10 Y' (X 十 Y).
For the nengō reign names, here is a table of all the recent ones.
http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/dates.html
Once you have all that, the year is given by the start date of the nengō period in question plus the _first_ number (before the 'year' character), which is the regnal year of the emperor named by the nengō name, and then the month and day as given in that sequence.
Try it for this book, it's easy. (Hint: it's on the right hand edge of the 5th page, and read downward.)
Noel
PS: Yeah, I ought to put this on a web page. Will soon...