Some citizens in Beijing on Monday evaluated Japan's new era name, Reiwa, as "strange" and expressed disappointment, saying it doesn't make sense in their language and was not derived from Chinese classics.
On Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, many young people had tried to guess the name of Japan's new era, traditionally composed of two Chinese characters, believing that it would derive from Chinese classics as in the past.
Contrary to their expectations, however, the 248th era name, the first of which was created in 645, was derived from the Japanese classic "Manyoshu," a collection of poetry from the late seventh to eighth centuries.