The change came on January 1, 1873. It was the early Meiji period, and the Japanese were in the process of modernizing and conforming to the practices of Western countries.

Farmers didn’t use the lunar calendar even before then because it didn’t suit their occupational purposes. They used an old Chinese solar calendar.

Tanabata was 7/7 in the lunar calendar, and in most places it still is 7/7, just the new calendar.

This is probably going to be more than you want to know, but here goes:

For starters, I am not one of those who think ethnic identity is very important. (And I speak as someone who grew up with a moderately strong ethnic awareness in the household.) I agree with J. Krishnamurti, who said:

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
Freedom from the Known, pp. 51-52

That said, I am also not very big on world parliaments because their implementation at this point would be too contrived. Heck, is too contrived, as a glance at the UN makes clear.

Second, the Japanese changed quite a bit during the early Meiji period, and calendars were the least of it. Did it affect their sense of “identity”? I don’t know, but if it did, it also improved it, making them realize they were a part of the world. They had been isolated for more than 200 years.

I don’t think they have any problem with a sense of identity today. They sometimes develop a greater sense of being Japanese and Asian after they spend time abroad and can compare, but that’s true for anyone of any nationality.

If that awareness doesn’t continue to grow into the realization that people have a lot more in common than not, however, I consider it arrested development. Again, regardless of the person or nationality involved.

What loss of identity??? I often hear this “loss of Japanese identity” from French, English and other Europeans, ironically enough, since they are the ones who have lost their identities.

The Japanese hang onto their culture far more than any European country I know of. What is this lost identity???

Good points, and I did not mean to say that other countries know their identity any better than Japan or that Japan does not have a deep cultural identity. Good points and well taken, you right.

What I meant was the sense of identity, in terms of when young Japanese people are asked what their country stands for, what their flag stands for, what their national anthem stands for, what their future holds, who they are as a people, this kind of national identity, not the cultural identity which is deep and profound. I just sense that Japanese do not know who they are, not in terms of culture, but in terms of who they are as a people.

Of course, this is true of all countries, and I don’t mean to single out Japan. But it’s a good question, because of all Asian countries, Japan has Westernized the most. Did this result in any kind of loss of national conciousness, national ID? I don’t know. Maybe not. But when I speak with young Japanese people today, over the last 15 years, they seem not to have a very deep sense of their country as a country, as a people. They do, of course, have a deep sense of their culture. But culture and national identity are two different things. No?

Maybe not.

“What I meant was the sense of identity, in terms of when young Japanese people are asked what their country stands for, what their flag stands for, what their national anthem stands for, what their future holds, who they are as a people, this kind of national identity, not the cultural identity which is deep and profound.”

And there you get to the heart of it. Many Japanese–not all, but I’d bet most–don’t look to a flag or a national anthem to stand for what their country is about. This is not so apparent to Americans, who have no shared ethnic identity, just a shared poitical/cultural identity, and so have more of a need for a flag or a song.

The Japanese identity is an ethnic identity (regardless of their mixed origins in the mists of time)combined with a cultural identity that developed because of their ethnic identity and fostered partially through isolation.

Someone else said it very well–Japanese Christians and Japanese Communists have more in common with each other than a Japanese Christian has with a Western Christian or a Japanese Communist has with a Western Communist.

Doesn’t that answer your question?

And yes, I realize that some Western countries formed by ethnicity have made a big deal about anthems and flags in the past (Germany comes to mind), but the Japanese are different somehow. One factor might be that it is an island nation.