Era Change Fuchiko

If you have been unaware of the hype leading up to the ascension of the next Japanese Emperor, you haven't missed much. The main political issue is that the Emperor is a powerless figurehead who nonetheless represents the face of the country to the outside world. According to the constitution, the position is "for life," but the current Emperor, Akihito, is 86, and he's getting tired of all the stress, so he announced a while back that he wanted to abdicate and just relax during his remaining years. Of course, this triggered a raging debate over whether he should be forced to die in office, or be allowed to step down while he still could. And, if he stepped down, would this be a precedent that would require a major re-write of the constitution, or just the creation of a one-time waiver. The final decision was to write the waiver, and allow his son, Prince Naruhito, to ascend to the throne.

This decision is not just something that changes which dignitary gets to sit at the main dining table during State events. Each Emperor represents a specific era name that is used on all official documents, calendars, and store sales receipts. There was a big debate over what the next era name would be, until Prime Minister Abe pushed for Reiwa. This caused something of an outrage from China, oddly enough. Previous era names had been drawn from Chinese literature, while Reiwa is the first to be from Japanese poetry. Certain government officials claim the translation should be "beautiful harmony," while one reading of the first kanji could be "command" or "order." However, "beautiful harmony" is not an official translation, and is not legally binding.

Reiwa is to officially start on May 1st. To celebrate this, Georgia coffee is running a contest for an extremely limited set of "Era Change Fuchiko" figures. 100 Fuchiko's hold the old Heisei sign, while 100 more hold up "Reiwa".

Just a few weeks ago, Georgia had "Desktop accessories Fuchiko" figures. There were supposed to be hundreds of thousands of these figures packaged with random vending machine can coffee cans, but after buying over 30 cans of coffee over the course of one month, I failed to win even one. I'm not going to bother with something that has even worse odds.