Retired by Decree, Kept by Custom

The Meiji government ended the traditional calendar's official status by decree in 1872, announcing with only a month's notice that the second day of the twelfth month of Meiji 5 would be followed immediately by the first of January 1873 on the Gregorian calendar, a change driven by the practical need to align Japan's administrative and diplomatic calendar with the Western powers it was rapidly opening relations with. Kyureki did not disappear from religious and festival life once it lost its civil authority, though.

Many traditional observances continue to be kept by their old lunar dates rather than by the fixed Gregorian date assigned to them after the reform, most visibly Obon, the midsummer festival honoring ancestral spirits, which some regions and shrines still keep by the seventh lunar month, kyu-bon, rather than by the fixed August or July Gregorian dates most of urban Japan now uses. Fishing and farming communities in particular have continued consulting the old lunar dates for tidal and seasonal purposes long after 1873, and annual almanacs still publish the kyureki dates alongside the Gregorian calendar specifically so festivals, planting and tidal work tied to the older reckoning can still be tracked. The calendar is retired from government use but not from the religious and practical life that continues to consult it.