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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   1771 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone been using Xitter recently? The algorithm change is causing a lot of Japanese posts to show up on my feed. Further, the autotranslate has allowed for some of the most frictionless communication between Japanese and American users ever. This is the most fun I have ever had on Xitter. I urge everyone to try it while we're still in the honeymoon phase and before it gets changed.

Update: It seems that a lot of Japanese users have been getting annoyed because American Evangelicals have been proselytizing toward Japanese Twitter users. Theological debates have broken out. It seems that many Japanese people are annoyed with the holier-than-thou tone of the Evangelicals.

There was a tweet once along the lines of “Japan is Wakanda for white people”; I have to admit that I’m guilty of suffering from this view. So I can’t help but feel a sense of dismay towards this development. With the language barrier between the Anglophone internet and the Japanese internet torn down, all of the sludge from our side can freely diffuse into their previously-pristine reservoir, making one big globally-homogenized slurry. Your update sentence being an example of that.

(Of course, I need no reminder that sakoku ended a good 150 years ago, and that Japan’s culture is far from insulated from the West’s. And I don’t need any wake-up call to tell me that Japan isn’t some perfect weaboo paradise, and that its internet has plenty of its own toxicity (like “anti-“ threads). But still! There are levels to cultural connectedness.)

"... Japan is Wakanda for white people...”

Lol. What does that even mean? Japan and American culture are very proximal but it's a misnomer to not think of them as insulated. There's some bleed over with a mutual fascination between one another. My ex-girlfriend once described Japan as a society of "polite xenophobes." I think I understood what she meant.

I think the meaning is that Japan is some idealized version of what a European society would look like. Rules-based, polite, and homogenous. Of course, the Wakanda comparison breaks down when we realize that Wakanda was made up by people trying to sell comic books and Japan is a real-world place with a real-world culture and society.

You’ve got it backwards, I think.

Glorious Nihon was also made up by people selling comic books. Er, manga. The average weaboo is vastly overconfident in his knowledge of Japan.

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