I pay a fair amount of attention to international news, and I've never heard of this before.  So, I'm gonna say you're right.  

I saw an article about it in my newspaper. "Reiwa" is apparently hard to translate, they said it means something like"wholesome time" with "time" referring to seasons..

It's alright I guess. But as much as we harp on the US to finally go metric we should do the same for Japan to finally shed that useless era crap. I know that whole emperor thing is a pretty big deal in Japan, kinda like the Queen in England, but seriously, it needs to stop. Monarchies should not exist in this day and age.

How are they getting their money these days? I don't think it's needed to take stuff away from them, they'll probably ruin themselves soon enough as long as we don't give them preferential treatment. They're gonna be a normal family in a few generations.

Well, yeah of course the public estates have to go back to the state, just as any artifacts. But they can keep their assets and of course should not get any more money from the governement. Some family members have actual well paid jobs, so that should be fine.

What a time to be alive, we can see a transition of Japanese era.

First time in 1300 years, they broke the tradition and used a era name that is not from Chinese classics, which corresponds to rise of Japanese right wings in recent years.

Also I just read a news about people in Japan complaining 令和 reads as Reiwa rather than Leiwa, because people tend to use the first letter for short. For example 令和10年 will be R10... the problem is 令和18年
R18

Yeah, that doesn't happen too often. Should be very interesting, especially for people interested in the Shinto religion.

I wouldn't really call it a problem. People just like to have fun with words.