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HomeResourcesNo. 6: Year Dating in Japanese Patent Numbers Japanese Patent Translation Bulletin No. 6 (March 26, 2009) Year Dating in Japanese Patent Numbers by William Lise Unlike US patents, Japanese patent publications have designations that indicate the year of the document. Up to and including the year 1999, however, the year was "encoded" in the Japanese system of numbering the years by the year of the Emperor's reign. For example, patent application publications in 2009 have numbers such as 2009-123456. The Showa period numbers ran up to and including the year 64 (1989), these followed by Heisei years. The first 6 days of 1989 fell in the year S64; the remainder of the year was H01. The year 2009 is Heisei 21. You can use the following formulas for obtaining the Western year from Showa or Heisei years preceding patent documents numbers in the form of Snn or Hnn, where nn is the year. In Japanese othography, the S and H are replaced by the first kanji characters of Showa and Heisei, respectively. For Showa years: Western year = Showa year + 1925 For Heisei years: Western year = Heisei year + 1988 Thus, a laid-open patent numbered S60-123456 (or 60-123456) was laid open in 1985, and one numbered H8-123456 (or either H08-123456 or 8-123456) was laid open in 1996.

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