East Asian age reckoning is a concept and practice that originated in China and is widely used by other cultures in East Asia and Vietnam, which share this traditional way of counting a person's age. Newborns start at one year old, and each passing of a Lunar New Year, rather than the birthday, adds one year to the person's age. In other words, the first year of life is counted as one instead of zero, so that a person is two years old in their second year, three years old in their third, and so on. Since age is incremented on the new year rather than on a birthday, people may be 1 or 2 years older in Asian reckoning than in the Western system.
The system is also widely used by Koreans, with the exception of the legal system. In Eastern Outer Mongolia, age is traditionally determined based on the number of full moons since conception for girls, and the number of new moons since birth for boys. In Japan and Vietnam it is used for traditional fortune-telling or religion, but it is disappearing in daily life among people in the city.
Read more about East Asian Age Reckoning: Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Famous quotes containing the words east, asian, age and/or reckoning:
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show
virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and
body of the time his form and pressure.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“He wasn’t off a mere degree;
His reckoning was off a sea.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)