Japanese belongs to you. It always belonged to you. All human knowledge belongs to you. And just like you have to pay the storage company to get access to your stuff, you — everybody — has to earn their Japanese through repeated exposure.

And just like property taxes, even after you own Japanese “free and clear”, you need to pay the gods of repeated exposure if you want to maintain your access to, your power over, that metaphorical real estate.

Japanese belongs to you. It is yours. Yes, there are conditions — but they’re literally the exact same conditions to which every single other human speaker of Japanese — without exception — is subject.

Everybody earns. Everybody pays. Nobody eats for free. Not the Emperor, not SON Masayoshi, not the Shogun, not Akira TORIYAMA, not Haruki MURAKAMI, not babies, not hot chicks (no ladies night!), not pregnant mothers, not children, not you. Heck, even AI will need repeated exposure in order to stay current.

On the face of it, that one line, “Japanese belongs to you”, smacks of what the cool kids these days call “entitlement” and “cultural appropriation”. This isn’t the time or place to discuss the merits and demerits of left-wing idealism (spoiler alert: it’s mostly demerits these days [lol]), but I will say this:

There are good and bad kinds of entitlement, good and bad kinds of cultural appropriation*. Feeling entitled to be excellent and awesome at Japanese is good. “Appropriating” a culture by imbibing it, internalizing it, sharing it, becoming it, embodying it, passing it down and talking about how cool it is and where it came from is good, like, why does this even need saying? Indeed, before the SJWs took over the social sphere, we used to say that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.

Japanese belongs to you. Come. Claim your birthright.

*One easy example of the bad kind is where they would steal people’s music without paying or acknowledging them in the US in the 1950s and such.