Mental Tools

The Ten Commandments of AJATT

by khatzumoto

Thou shalt not be a foreigner. Be Japanese. Be a pretender. Pretend to be Japanese. Pretend the language belongs to you. Pretend you are merely taking back what is yours. Pretend you have a birthright to this language. Way, way back in the day, an African theater buff ( 🙂 ) named Terence wrote: “Homo sum,…

by khatzumoto

Yesterday, I was walking around Yoyogi Park in Tokyo with a friend, feeling butthurt at all the hipsters who were cooler and better-looking than me. We got to the other side of the park and stopped by the dog run to look at dogs. …and bitches… … Awkwaaard. Anyway, I wish you could have seen…

by khatzumoto

We are often enjoined to “remember our roots”. Like Simba, we are to “remember who you [we] are!”. People who “forget their roots” are considered shallow and evil. I remember once reading some UK forum post (yeah, don’t ask) about how Catherine Zeta-Jones was “too good” to speak in an English/Welsh accent and had “forgotten…

by khatzumoto

Here at the ‘JATT, I’m often bombarded by questions that are as deep in their cute, noobish sincerity as they are shallow in significance. I often brush these questions aside with a grandfatherly chuckle, but I realize that there’s a good reason why they get asked. AJATT does a lot of myth-busting and idea-replacement, or…

by khatzumoto

Don’t believe in the method; believe in yourself. Methods are a dime a dozen. Methods are interchangeable. You’re irreplaceable. You are the core artifact in and of the system. The method must be cut to fit you. We do this with clothes all the time. We only pick clothes that fit. If they don’t fit…

by khatzumoto

Your peer group is not your age group. Your peers are Japanese toddlers, not gaijin forum trolls and not Japanese people your age. If you hadn’t been schooled, you’d know that your peer group is not your age group. Your age group is determined by your parents’ sex life — just like your nationality and…