5

 Recently, on a social media platform known as X, 

a feature was implemented that automatically translates posts written in languages other than the user’s own 

and displays them in algorithm-generated suggestions. Users seem to be calling this the “Tower of Babel.”

Since Japanese is my first language, my primary concern here is how Japanese users—most of whom are, 

so to speak, Japanese citizens—are perceived by users of other languages.

And as it turned out, the answers to that question were largely what I expected.

As I mentioned in my first post here, I am a Japanese citizen, but I detest the nation of Japan and its people.

I feel no sense of belonging to them. Instead, what I do feel is

a sense of responsibility for the immense crimes of aggression and tyranny 

that this country has inflicted upon the peoples of neighboring nations—not only in the past but continuing to the present day.

Therefore my expectation was that the vast aspects of the Japanese people—their utterly unconscious 

arrogance, rudeness, hypocrisy, childishness, and extremely entrenched racism—would be recognized by users of every language in the world,

and that is exactly what happened.

Going back a bit, shortly after “The Tower of Babel” appeared, 

Japanese users first made a name for themselves through discriminatory remarks against Black people.

And recently, the topic that led to Japanese people being called 

“people with a Nazi-like mentality who superficially pretend to be ‘kawaii’ or polite” 

and “Hitler with an anime face.”

This stemmed from a discourse in Japanese that mixed moralism with racism, 

labeling the activities of a user community—which had made it possible to play a certain online game 

through irregular means after the publisher had shut down the service and blocked the servers, rendering it unplayable—

as “piracy.”

As for the specific positions regarding this piracy issue, I do have my own thoughts and opinions, 

but I will refrain from discussing them in detail here.

In any case, their rhetoric—which uses Japanese to berate pirated users, and by extension, a specific nationality, 

as if they were the very embodiment of piracy, even though their words are being automatically translated and laid bare—

suggests that rules and laws are more important than human lives or livelihoods, and that since pirated content users violate them, 

they deserve absolutely no mercy.

At the same time, however, they are rife with hypocrisy, 

as numerous examples have been pointed out where their actions contradict their professed “respect for the law” 

or their own sense of legal compliance.

As has often been pointed out in the field of philosophy I have explored, and as I have been aware of for many years,

while many Japanese people place great importance on morality, they lack a sense of ethics.

Consequently, when people learn the moral principle that “we must obey the law,” 

they reach a state where they don’t care if people die or get hurt as long as the law is upheld.

And as long as they aren’t breaking the law, they don’t care how much they violate ethical standards.

Furthermore, in Japan, most acts of discrimination aren’t prohibited by law. Can you grasp the horror of this?

And behind the repugnant behavior of the Japanese in this debate over piracy lies a mindset that could be called “content nationalism.”

Having fallen behind other nations in every industrial sector since the economic crisis following the Lehman Shock, 

the Japanese now rely almost exclusively on the subculture content industry as their sole source of self-esteem,

and have come to believe that, simply because they were born Japanese and live in Japan, 

they have the authority to decide whether or not to grant access to Japanese culture to outsiders.

And this is despite the fact that most of them did not create it themselves.

To put it bluntly, virtually all Japanese people—including, of course, those who are not creators—but especially creators, 

harbor a sense of ownership over works they had no part in creating,

as if they had created them entirely on their own. Moreover, it is a sense of superiority.

This alone is quite bizarre, but what is even more appalling is that Japanese people have a tendency to “deify creators.”

They claim this is “respect,” but it is not an attitude of respecting them as human beings.

Above all, it is clear from the fact that their so-called “respect” does not apply to artists who are not Japanese.

There is an animator named “Ikuo Geso” who has worked on many projects for Studio Trigger, which has a large global fanbase.

He frequently angers people with thoughtless, childish, shallow, and harmful remarks and behavior,

but recently, in connection with a scandal—where it was revealed that a manga artist named Shoichi Yamamoto, 

who had been working part-time as a high school teacher, had sexually abused his students,

and that an editor at the publisher Shogakukan had covered up Yamamoto’s actions while continuing to hire him, 

leading to a boycott—

Geso commented, “Do you want creators to be saints?”

What do you think? Doesn’t Ikuo Geso’s attitude encapsulate all of the bizarre ways of thinking among Japanese people that I’ve described so far?

Namely, the belief that creators, by virtue of their creative talent, should be exempt from all ethical scrutiny—and that, on the contrary, 

even sexual crimes against children should be permitted.

And the mindset that they possess innate qualifications as creators simply by virtue of being Japanese.

As a result of these overlapping beliefs, they view themselves as beings transcending ethics.

“The Tower of Babel” made this true nature of the Japanese known to the rest of the world.

Consequently, the Japanese have finally been reminded by the people of the world that their country was “an ally of Nazi Germany.”