It might not sound like a big deal, but for the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for establishing standards when it comes to displaying text (and emoji) on devices around the globe, it means extra work on their end to accommodate the nonexistent era character, referred to as U+32FF by the organization. The current Heisei era character is “㍻,” or U+337B.

Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character. But it can’t do that until it knows what it’s called, and it won’t know that until late February at best. Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out in early March, which means it needs to be finished before then, and can’t be delayed.

The bad timing means Unicode may have to update the scheduled version 12 release with a smaller 12.1 release.

"The characters encoded for these calendrical symbols in Unicode have compatibility decompositions, and those decompositions depend on the actual name chosen for the era. Because the decomposition, once assigned, is immutable, involving Unicode normalization, the UTC cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just guess and release the code point early."