Rabbit holes, land tax reform, and the angel Gabriel

Last Wednesday my work took me down a rabbit hole that started with the question "Why does Japan's school, church, and financial year start in April?" My journey took me to land tax reform in the 1800s in Japan, to international financial years, and then to British history, all the way to the angel Gabriel! When I got there I realised I'd probably gone too far and needed some help.

I'm very thankful for the internet. Without which I'd be much more
limited in my ability to research.

Early on in my journey into editing I heard someone say, "Editors need to be jacks of all trades". That is, they need to know a little about a lot of things. Our specialty is written communication and helping that to be the best it can be for whatever audience and medium we're working with. But the content we work on is often quite varied. I find I have to research all sorts of things, some fascinating, some very complex, others just plain confusing.

The result is that I often learn lots of interesting things, but also that I can feel out of my depth pretty easily. Take last week for example, I love history, so that was fine, but land tax reform is not exactly my area of expertise! Then part of the trail was in Japanese, which is definitely not my area of expertise. I'm thankful that very early on as a young professional in a rural hospital I learned to network and to ask for help.

Last week I also started writing a social media update myself about why it's hard for Japanese companies to transition to working at home. That also took me down intriguing trails, including statistics about the sizes of houses around the world (I was surprised to find that Japanese don't live in some of the tiniest places, and that Australians live in some of the largest places, on average). I'm waiting on more information from a colleague to finish writing that piece, it was harder to write than I'd imagined.

Sometimes we're fact checking when we editors (and writers) do this, or just checking terminology, at other times we're just trying to get a more complete understanding of the situation so that we can ensure clear, simple communication (usually I find out a lot more than needs to be communicated).

And so, you're wondering what Gabriel has to do with Japan's school year starting in April? Well it turns out that the tax reforms in the 1870s in Japan was partly influenced by Britain, a major global power at the time, starting their financial year in April. According to legend England and Ireland used to start their year on March 25, in commemoration of the angel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus (read about it here), and it gets more confusing as their financial year now starts on April 6! A bunch of fascinating facts, but much more than I needed to know to do my job last Wednesday.