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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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As one of our resident weeaboos and a big fan of Japan generally I'd say this is mostly true rather than the writer having an axe to grind. You see this all the time in anime and older games (especially in stuff from before western studios dedicated to localizing stuff into English became more commonplace, those have their own major issues related to wokeness and similar things that I won't dive into right now). There's just all kinds of gibberish and Engrish found all over inside of these works, and it's due to most Japanese people just not learning English very well (if at all).

Some fun examples off the top of my head:

Animes and mangas being given nonsensical English titles by their Japanese authors. My favorite example of this is the manga All You Need Is Kill. You probably know it better from its film adaptation (starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt): Edge of Tomorrow.

Opening and closing credit songs for animes being in horrible Engrish. For example the first line to the closing credits song for the first season of Frieren is broken English, with the singer saying "And you alright" instead of "Are you alright?" or "And you're alright" (not sure which was intended). Or the opening credits song to the 4th season of Legend of the Galactic Heroes clearly being sung by someone who doesn't speak a lick of English.

My favorite random example from the Studio Ghibli film The Cat Returns. In the background in one of the early scenes in the movie, there are banners in the background of some town square that read "Crossroad". Near the end of the film there is another scene in the same location and the banners now read "Crossload". I might have the order mixed up here, it's been a few years since I watched it. Studio Ghibli is basically the premiere animation studio in Japan, often called the "Japanese Disney", so that even they make mistakes like this is telling when it comes to the typical level of English fluency in Japan.

English is just a hard language, especially when coming from a language like Japanese. This has at least had the beneficial effect of somewhat insulating Japan from the world of woke retardation, so I can't really complain. And honestly the Engrish and other mistakes and issues are endearing.

most Japanese people just not learning English very well (if at all).

In my experience the trick seems to be that they all have been through plenty of English classes in school, but with transliterations of words into katakana as training wheels. So often if you struggle to communicate, you can just try wrangling the words into the closest fit kana syllables you can think of (i.e. engrish) and it gets through perfectly. Though I saw some memes more recently complaining about how this is bigoted and insulting to do, so YMMV. I exchange studied there for an year, got great language practice for most of it since communicating anything was inept clumsy Japanese or bust, then toward the end of the year this clicked for me and I started getting through in English as well.

Peak Japanese internationalism I've seen was a technical conference where Japanese grad students gave a talk in English, legible but clearly thoroughly rehearsed. Then for audience questions their professor had to pitch in and translate for them. And finally another Japanese professor tried asking a question (in English), the first prof couldn't parse him, and the three parties had to switch entirely to Japanese to get through.

Agreed that the insulation must be a pretty great thing on net. And, like, probably those references to English or Christianity or anything Western that are pure style and garbled substance, are kind of evenly matched by equally garbled style-only weeaboo references to things Japanese in Western pop culture. They just are the rare nation that manages to produce enough Civ culture points to go tit for tat on it :D.