Japanese cancel dates

Japanese cancels are not dated using the western Gregorian years. Instead the years are numbered according to the number of years in the reign of the Emperor. As far as ice hockey cancels are concerned we need only concern ourselves with the last three reigns: the Shōwa (from 25-Dec-1926 until 7-Jan-1989), the Heisi (from 8-Jan-1989 until 30-April-2019) and the Reiwa (1-May-2019 until the present day). The date of the cancel will be in the form of YY-MM-DD where YY would be the year of the reign. A minor problem might be in determining which reign we should be considering and we might need to use secondary information about the cancel or the cover to determine that. To help with converting Japanese era numbers to western Gregorian years we have the table below.

Shōwa 1 1926	Shōwa 2 1927	Shōwa 3 1928	Shōwa 4 1929	Shōwa 5 1930	Shōwa 6 1931	Shōwa 7 1932	Shōwa 8 1933	Shōwa 9 1934	Shōwa 10 1935	Shōwa 11 1936
Shōwa 12 1937	Shōwa 13 1938	Shōwa 14 1939	Shōwa 15 1940	Shōwa 16 1941	Shōwa 17 1942	Shōwa 18 1943	Shōwa 19 1944	Shōwa 20 1945	Shōwa 21 1946	Shōwa 22 1947
Shōwa 23 1948	Shōwa 24 1949	Shōwa 25 1950	Shōwa 26 1951	Shōwa 27 1952	Shōwa 28 1953	Shōwa 29 1954	Shōwa 30 1955	Shōwa 31 1956	Shōwa 32 1957	Shōwa 33 1958
Shōwa 34 1959	Shōwa 35 1960	Shōwa 36 1961	Shōwa 37 1962	Shōwa 38 1963	Shōwa 39 1964	Shōwa 40 1965	Shōwa 41 1966	Shōwa 42 1967	Shōwa 43 1968	Shōwa 44 1969
Shōwa 45 1970	Shōwa 46 1971	Shōwa 47 1972	Shōwa 48 1973	Shōwa 49 1974	Shōwa 50 1975	Shōwa 51 1976	Shōwa 52 1977	Shōwa 53 1978	Shōwa 54 1979	Shōwa 55 1980
Shōwa 56 1981	Shōwa 57 1982	Shōwa 58 1983	Shōwa 59 1984	Shōwa 60 1985	Shōwa 61 1986	Shōwa 62 1987	Shōwa 63 1988	Shōwa 64 1989	Heisi 1 1989	Heisi 2 1990
Heisi 3 1991	Heisi 4 1992	Heisi 5 1993	Heisi 6 1994	Heisi 7 1995	Heisi 8 1996	Heisi 9 1997	Heisi 10 1998	Heisi 11 1999	Heisi 12 2000	Heisi 13 2001
Heisi 14 2002	Heisi 15 2003	Heisi 16 2004	Heisi 17 2005	Heisi 18 2006	Heisi 19 2007	Heisi 20 2008	Heisi 21 2009	Heisi 22 2010	Heisi 23 2011	Heisi 24 2012
Heisi 25 2013	Heisi 26 2014	Heisi 27 2015	Heisi 28 2016	Heisi 29 2017	Heisi 30 2018	Heisi 31 2019	Reiwa 1 2019	Reiwa 2 2020	Reiwa 3 2021	Reiwa 4 2022
Reiwa 5 2023	Reiwa 6 2024