Hello Everyone! A Little History, Why I Support Tsunami and You Should Too.

Day 2,785, 16:56 • Published in Japan Russia • by shirosakura

Hello everyone! My name is Athena, and I'm a returning player to the eWorld and a relatively new player to eJapan. It's nice to meet you guys~

I wanted to announce the launch of my newspaper, 桜新聞, the Sakura Newspaper. This will be two things: a way for me to communicate my personal thoughts and feelings to the eWorld, and also a potential outlet for Free eJapan Press Releases and Tsunami business. I hope that I'm able to reach a lot of people through my words, and work to make eJapan a better place!

But to the point of the article, I wanted to take about the Tsunami movement, and the ideas that I had for it, for us, moving into the future. For a myriad of reasons, it's true we now find ourselves shut out by the current government, but that's no reason to not be taking steps to improve ourselves even more. Matter of fact, a lot of good things are already happening that everyone can get involved in!

History (for a little background)

To say that a lot has happened is the understatement of century. To make this as simple as I can I manage, there was a time that eJapan was ruled by a unified coalition government. To make a convoluted story short, people were mistreated, others felt slighted, and all around feelings were hurt. So the largest majority of that coalition (the DNP-CtG-TLS group) split off and claimed an electoral victory for themselves, changing the political landscape of Japan. Things existed like this for awhile, until the remaining opposition parties, in a attempt to regain political power in Japan, what is today's Tsunami coalition launched a coup in an effort to regain power. It failed. And three days later, the ruling coalition responded in kind with launching a coup on Day 2,713 of the new world, Saturday, April 25th, 2015. They succeeded despite citizen opposition, and Japan has existed as an autocracy ever since. There are now two sides, the ruling and internationally-recognized military government, and the unofficial government in exile, Free eJapan.

That's about as simple as I can put it without going into a long series of events that are still disputed today. If you want to read more about what happened, Madame Yang wrote a pretty comprehensive piece on why things played out this way and why our side is so torn up about this.
Why Should You Support Tsunami?

What Tsunami stands for, what the Shinsengumi, the Otaku Party, the United Lollies of Japan all ultimately fight for is the restoration of democracy and for a free and fair eJapan. The way things stand, the way our government is designed, leaves very little room for political input from the people of eJapan. Our congressman and president are essentially figureheads who have no real lawmaking powers, and under the current autocratic system all national decisions rest in the absolute authority of the dictator and their cabinet. In eRepublik, the only system of checks and balances the people are afforded are our powers to vote. Without that, the people have been stripped of their right to *fairly* participate in the government.

How does this manifest itself? When leaders can't be held accountable, they are free to do as they please, whether you like it or not. Don't like something? Want to see it changed? Short of declaring political allegiance, you voice has no incentive to be heard. Transparency in the government is virtually nonexistent, because in a system where you don't have to answer to the people, why do so, right? Effectively, the voices of all of those who don't speak with rulers are silenced, and there's nothing the minority can do about it. This is what makes these types of dictatorships so dangerous.

So, as you probably figured out by now, there's a ton of bad blood between what is essentially two opposing sides. I'm not officially affiliated with either party (I'm just a really concerned party member), but I'll be the first to say that we did a lot of things wrong, and we paid for it. Was the former ruling coalition free of any wrongdoing? Absolutely not. But I'm not them. And in the end, they aren't the party I've decided to invest my time and my elife into. Why? Not for the actions of their past, but for the plan for our future.

I'm willing to let the past be the past. Everyone keeps saying that in order for eJapan to move forward, we must be united. I agree, we need to end what has essentially become a long game of "he said, she said." But in order to do that, in order for us to have a stable transition to democracy, it's going to take a real effort from both sides to stop focusing on what happened and instead put our energy towards what's happening. We need to focus on the future.

I'd like to reiterate the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing I'm saying is a new or novel proposal, and this article would not be possible without paying homage to the once and future leaders. But I don't think there's a more fitting way to start my paper than like this.

My next article will be an Op-Ed of sorts, and will focus on what my ideas for the future of the Tsunami movement are. If you think I need to make any (reasonable) corrections to any of the history section above, please let me know in the comments, otherwise, feedback is greatly appreciated! I'll see you guys later!