Pledge to a new tomorrow

If you lived in a world without freedoms, rights, or say, would you care? 

A decade after the takeover, you are approached to join the resistance. Your contact, a librarian, trains your brain to:

• pinpoint how democracies can fail;
  
• list the three principles of democracy (self-governance); and
• answer why democracy is important anyway. 

The librarian walks you through the case of modern Japanese history. You uncover how the shogunate's closed country policy crumbled, how the Meiji regime opened the country only insofar to defend Japan, and how the emperor and military canceled the semi-democracy of the Taisho period to set up an authoritarian regime.  

You will identify some Japanese writers (Endo Shusaku, Soseki Natsume, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Basho, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Hagiwara Sakutarou, Sei Shonagon, Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio, and Murakami Haruki) who expressed their position as an individual in society. Like them, you can reflect on how the takeover could have happened and its human cost. 

As the authorities close in, you are forced to make a choice:

Live in fear or risk it all for a new tomorrow.

What will you do?

Here's your chance to find out!

(C) 2022. Fort Condor Productions.

Cherry Blossoms along the Tidal Basin in Washington DC were a gift of friendship from one democracy, Japan, to another, America in 1912. Photo by Library of Congress