I am recovering from the whirlwind week in Washington D.C and my brain is only marginally more functional than my body. I’m slow and in pain.
So it delights me, even as I return to convalescing, to see that Twitter’s current happening is the discovery that a large chunk of Japan is on Twitter and they are active posters.
In past eras of Twitter the language barrier was high. Auto-translated posts are a relatively new feature such that if you only spoke English you didn’t see content that wasn’t English. I wasn’t seeing any Japanese posts but once I saw Nikita’s post, I was keen to tilt my feed. So I went on a mission to find and like as many posts as I could from Japanese accounts.
And what a world of joy it has been. Americans are showing up in droves to Japanese Twitter users with encouragement, support, and good will.
It is very sweet as you will see seemingly random posts with tens of thousands of likes and comments cheering on the hobbies, struggles and daily lives of random Japanese users. Everyone is getting in on the spirit.
I’ve spent part of my afternoon liking BBQ posts, American country music sung by Japanese artists, and generally exploring what that particular corner of Twitter (no it’s not TPOT) has to offer.
Americans have a lot of love for the Japanese, their culture and their way of life. Weebs are a large American subculture. Probably larger and more vocal than say Francophiles or Anglophiles. And as it turns out the Japanese like Americans just as much as we like them.
A cultural exchange of brotherly love between citizens of two very different countries is a wonderful change of pace from the toxicity of culture warring and actual war. Just look at the comments on a post with Americans well wishing a Japanese man battling cancer.
I don’t care even one iota if this is a deliberate algorithmic change that I have thrown myself into but it’s nice to see everyone encouraging and happy. And I’m happy to see the friendship between our two nations.
