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Weeb
"a derisive term for a non-Japanese person who is so obsessed with Japanese
culture that they wish they were actually Japanese"
**
2020 delivered this term to me.
after elementary school Dragon Ball Z, childhood in a dominant culture
community meant all the things you’ve heard before:
assimilation, deracination, racial melancholia, etc.
2020 also delivered Hunter X Hunter, a journey worthy of lockdown.
how do you reconnect with something you never had but were meant to
but maybe not maybe you just meant to but maybe not because it didn’t?
HxH elements of resonance: [spoilers]
a father far away driving the plot
an atom-bomb-like explosion that ended it all when the protagonist lost his head
(is it even a spoiler nearly every anime references the atomic bomb)
a language i have struggled to learn for over a decade
the Master of the Swamp wasn’t the only one hooked in the first scene.
(ty for indulging 🙃 see the following panel from the manga:)
**
** unemployment is delivering me back to 2020. time and space & japanese media painful, depressing, joyous, healing memories, buried slowly surface in sleep at the sink, on the couch waking moments ** things i have felt enriched by recently: + a sweet, nerdy, mostly asian american community + naruto references + the naruto (& shippuden) series and manga + Haikyu + the Japanese film festival where I watched the documentary + The Making of a Japanese, by Ema Ryan Yamazaki + in the post-screening Q&A, Yamazaki shares that she is British-Japanese and went to a Japanese elementary school and then finished her education at international school. “I got the best of both worlds,” she said. + my partner lovingly, “and you got the worst of both worlds” + (a cocktail of self-sabotaging perfectionism, social anxiety, and an obtuse American individualism) + the closeness Yamazaki’s documentary allowed me to feel with my father’s culture + another documentary, about two Japanese high school baseball teams that strive to enter the ultra-competitive single-elimination national baseball tournament: Yamazaki’s previous film, Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams. + the intimate view of intense sport in a world completely different from mine somehow explained everything, including the harsh punishments my father gave when i performed badly in my sport. + the methods that i have for years blamed for many of my mental maladies — being told to sear this terrible feeling of loss in my memory, to wallow in it, to feel as badly as possible, crawl to the depths of despair and never forget it, in order to train harder so you never feel that again — were just Japanese sport pedagogy. + (yeah not very Ted Lasso 🐡) + the realization that my father, who strove to become as american as possible, who became a christian, voted republican, wore the jeans and t-shirts, worked as a trucker and a hardware store clerk and a slew of blue collar jobs, worked on his american accent every day of my childhood — this man, was actually a deeply japanese man + (who deeply wanted me to succeed) he knows this. i didn’t. a recent family text from him came complete with epiphany: cultural etiquette is hard to shake. he could never rid himself of his japanese formation. now that i want to become more japanese, i wonder if it’s too late for me to undo my american formation. i think this makes me a Weeb: a non-Japanese person who is so obsessed with Japanese culture they wish they were actually Japanese + recent ponderings about my father’s looming presence in my psyche and how that man actually now exists more in my brain than in his: the father in mind whose corrections leap out at me is actually now just me. + i am the person who reminds myself of those pesky mistakes from yesterday, 3 months ago, 2015, and curses myself. i am also that critic to others. + my real father has since evolved, as i am striving to. ** on the first page of each new journal, i write a few prayers: from winter 2024, a moment of self-knowledge i swiftly drowned in the palliative swamp of memory: a wish for a 2nd-generation japanese-american friend with whom to share cultural anecdotes with, and/or someone who was also only half japanese, and/or someone to illuminate for me what is my dad’s personality and what’s just japanese, if their inner critic howls 24/7 about the most mundane things, if they too have woken up at 3am to their own voice — “FUCK!” — remembering a mistake they made 3 years ago, if they also put the pot of boiling water in the exact center of the stove fire, if they too annoyingly shush their partner’s stomping gait in fear of the neighbors below, or in fear of a scary stomping childhood antagonist. i’m embarrassed by this wish. there are so few second generation japanese people in the US. i’m embarrassed to have written it here. let's brainstorm in spiral: how can i wish for a friend from a certain ethnicity? how do i not come off as super weird or needy if i meet such a person? given how few of us there are, what are the chances our personalities click and we’re in circumstances where a friendship would be possible? if we do become friends, would i know when we were close enough to ask such questions without scaring them away? if i did scare them away, wouldn’t i have deserved it for having this ulterior motive? plot twist: given the pace of our self-realizations, my dad might just become that japanese friend. lol. dw, i won’t get my hopes up. ** Japanese anime characters (and real people too, i think) explicitly name their loneliness. Americans hide their loneliness in shame, as if it speaks to personal failing and not the absurdly individualistic society we live in. i am liberated by the ease of 「寂しい」. ** things i now treasure: + my twisted perfectionism, my do-or-die mentality, even as i try to curb it and heal that bb kuri somewhere in my soul. **
** thanks for reading. yours, kuri p.s. this fall i’m taking my first intermediate japanese course after a decade of struggle. i can't believe i did it. p.p.s. i’m new to substack and there are so many charms & chimes on this thing it’s taking adjustment. i sincerely apologize if it’s heckling u for cash — that is not my intention. idk how consistent i'll be with this, but i'm glad you're here with me now. 💙