Don’t Use Reiwa to Enhance "Nationalism" 変なことに令和を使わないでください

Japanese follows English.　英語の後に日本語が続きます。

How many Japanese care about the change of the era name from Heisei to Reiwa? I, who’ve been living in Japan since I was born, don’t give a damn about it and if it matters in any way to me, who’s working as a translator and interpreter for so long, that’s only because it makes it further complicated to convert the Japanese year to the Gregorian one. As I wrote in another post, interpreters have to convert the Japanese year to the Gregorian year in a second by adding/subtracting certain figures to/from the Japanese year in the original text.

However, another thing has been bugging me. What was prime minister Abe trying to achieve by saying that Reiwa isn't from Chinese literature but Japan's oldest collection of poetry? Did he want to to make further complicated the already strained Japan and China's relationship? Non-Japanese readers may not know this, but these two Chinese characters (i.e., 令和) are so general and common in Japan that if Abe hadn't mentioned it, few would have noticed or care about whether the term is from China or Japan. 

It's a fact that Japanese culture is based on and deeply intertwined with Chinese and Korean cultures, so using the change of the era to enhance the so-called "nationalism" by emphasizing that the name of the new period isn't sourced from China is outrageously stupid.

令和なんですけど、何でいちいち中国からではなく日本の万葉集から取ったなんて言う必要があるんだろう。言われない限り誰も気が付かないでしょ｡｡。先日、韓国の空港で官僚が酔っぱらって暴れたことは記憶に新しいですが、国益へのダメージはそれよりひどい気がします。何が言いたいの、安倍さん？