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Oshiro Airi
大城愛里

AGE: 58 (born 1946)
GENDER: Female
ETHNICITY: Baizoan-Japanese
RELIGION: Catholic, Buddhist
PRIOR OFFICE: Sovereign

"I have served my nation, my people, and my god. Though this turn in my health is unexpected, I abdicate without regrets. Thank you, to all of Baizou, for your service, prayers, and civic engagement. I pass the throne to my son, and I pass the torch to all of you."

—Airi in a written letter that served as her final message as Sovereign

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Yutani Hiroji
由谷悲論自

AGE: 67 (born 1937)
GENDER: Male
ETHNICITY: Baizoan-Japanese
RELIGION: Atheist
PARTY: Libertarian
TIME IN OFFICE: 1998–present (2004)
PRIOR OFFICE: Prefectural assembly

"The American William Buckley said his magazine 'stands athwart history, yelling Stop.' But 'Stop' isn't good enough. I say, 'Go Back!' Go back to when the world was small enough that one person could understand it! To when you could eat an apple without contributing to racial oppression, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, environmental degradation—to a global system of anthropogenic suffering!"

—Yutani Hiroji during a roundtable forum called "Anti-nationalisms: Cases for Alternative Modernities"

Though he is older than fellow conservative Councilor Akitamoto, Yutani Hiroji is far from an elder statesman. An outsider in both his experience and his views, and considered a radical even by fellow Libertarians, Yutani seems to find consistent approval only from his constituents in Semamoto (狭元).

Yutani's family were subsistence farmers. When his parents lost the land to public development, they moved to the city to work in factories that first fueled Baizoan modernization and later the Imperial Japanese war effort during the Asia-Pacific War-era occupation. While Yutani was too young to remember much, he has often referenced feeling a "palpable sense of fear, that all we were doing was keeping our heads down."

After the war's end, Yutani's family found financial stability as the postwar government enforced new labor laws in the "New Dealer" impulse that thrust the Labor Party into governing coalitions. Hoping to hold the powerful accountable, Yutani studied journalism and philosophy at the University of Semamoto, and after began working as a reporter and philosophical columnist

Outside work, Yutani married, raised a family, and had a conventional life. In his spare time, Yutani globetrotted, but the world did not impress him. In a column for the Semamoto News, Yutani has insisted that "revanchist conservatism is the planet's destiny within ten or twenty years. As it was in Nineties America, so it will be everywhere."

As he grew older, Yutani became more impatient, and in his perception the world seemed set on repeating the same mistakes he had seen it make in childhood. More than fifty years old, he entered politics for the first time as a prefectural assemblyman. In 2004, Semamoto elected him as their representative to the Upper Parliament.

Most of the Libertarian Party is comprised of hyper-rationalist philosophical liberals in the vein of Randian objectivism, but Yutani instead characterizes himself as a conservative—not because he shares Lotus values so much as because he wants to turn back the clock on politics and history. As pessimistic as the kanji in his name, themselves chosen to replace his birth spelling, Yutani is overtly anti-modern. While he declines to append a name to his school of thought, commentators have called the thought expressed in his books, speeches, and interviews "radical regressivism," "devolutionary pessimism," and "primitive localism."

In his own words, Yutani has said, "The modern world has become too complicated. A generation ago, it made sense to try and solve problems at bigger and bigger scales. By now, we should realize human systems are much better at making problems than solving them. It's time to humble ourselves and take a step back." To Yutani, addressing systemic injustice through systemic action is ill-advised, "because systems are what created these problems to begin with." Despite being a national legislator, per his writings Yutani aspires to reverse globalism, nationalism, and modernism and return human society to autarkic localism, free of national organization, global connection, and even technology, and therefore—according to Yutani—also free of the avenues whereby humans subjugate each other in the world of modernism. While critics have pointed out that regional and even global connections are almost as old as human civilization, Yutani continues to advocate his regressive vision for humanity.