Hello friends we need to talk about this twitter account:
You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.
Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:
He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.
Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:
And this:
He is not cute or funny. Stop platforming him.
The chips and salsa thread went viral in June and his website seems to have gone live in July. This confirms what I suspected which is that said website with it's explicit disclaimers was made in response to the big viral hit.
Consequently, back when he first blew up it was potentially a bit harder to figure out that his stories are fictional. That said, the New York Times worked it out so I'm comfortable accusing outlets who ran the story describing him as a Japanese world cup tourist of legitimately terrible journalism.
Regarding some comments in the notes:
Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.
He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.
I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.
It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??
Yeah his whole bit is racist and it is troubling that so many people took a guy badly roleplaying as a medieval samurai to be a 21st century Japanese tourist.
