Zenkoku Nippō

[Zabuza825]

Government reverts writing reform, adopts Traditional Characters!
by Haruto Kirishima

---

The National Legislature has officially passed a law regarding writing reform, formally changing the system for writing Tieguoese characters from the current simplified forms used back to their original, traditional counterparts. The law also outlaws the use of their traditional counterparts for all official government functions as well as for business functions, and it also outlaws the teaching of simplified characters in school. To help the Akitian people adjust to the change, the law also mandates that the government create free courses for adults who are unfamiliar with the traditional characters. In addition, to help make it easier for businesses to adopt the change, the government has sanctioned the development of a software tool to automatically convert simplified characters back to their traditional counterparts.

The portions of the law outlawing the teaching of simplified characters goes into effect immediately, but the full law doesn't come into effect for another 7 years. This ensures that the people will have time to adjust to the change. The only exception to this law would be characters used in personal names.

By returning to traditional characters, the government is undoing a historic wrong done years ago. During this time, Akitsu was consumed by a desire to modernize that was so radical it smashed traditional Akitian values. The character simplification is one of two writing reforms that came during this period, the other being the switching of the Akitian horizontal writing direction from right-to-left to left-to-right and changing the spelling with written kana to make it closer to spoken language (this latter change is unlikely to be reversed due to the massive confusion it would cause).