For years, Japan sat comfortably behind what we might call the ultimate linguistic firewall. Three writing systems. Thousands of characters. A level of complexity that made the rest of the world simply shrug and scroll past.
If someone in Tokyo posted something dreadful on the internet, who in London or New York would ever know? The alphabet itself was the camouflage.
When the Curtains Got Pulled Back
Then X rolled out that little translation button.
Tomohiro Machiyama—screenwriter for the live-action Attack on Titan adaptation—has pointed the finger squarely at this feature for dismantling Japan’s carefully curated global image. His argument is straightforward: machine translation exposed the less savoury corners of Japanese internet discourse to anyone with a smartphone.
The idealised vision of Japanese society? Rather difficult to maintain when you can read the comments section in your mother tongue.
A Split Reaction
The response divided rather neatly down the middle:
- One camp argues this is a necessary reckoning—romanticising any nation is a fool’s errand, and perhaps it’s time the world saw Japan with clear eyes.
- The other camp counters that every country has its unpleasant elements, and amplifying them serves no constructive purpose.
The Algorithm Has No Interest in Nuance
It detects conflict and pushes it to the fore. The more heated the exchange, the more engagement it generates. Doubly ironic when you consider that the platform revealing these tensions is also the platform most responsible for broadcasting them.
The Irony That Tickles
Here’s the bit that genuinely amuses.
Machiyama writes for a franchise built entirely around walls. Physical barriers. The fear of what lies beyond. The anxiety about how the outside world perceives you.
Attack on Titan is fundamentally about what happens when those protective walls come crashing down. And now here he is, lamenting the collapse of a different sort of wall—one made of kanji and hiragana rather than stone.
You couldn’t script it better if you tried.
Comfort and Truth Rarely Share the Same Postcode
The question of whether this transparency represents progress or simply creates more noise—that’s rather harder to answer. Ignorance was certainly comfortable. But comfort and truth rarely occupy the same space.
What Else Remains Hidden
What other cultural assumptions might we be harbouring simply because we haven’t yet found the right translation tool?
And when a nation’s reputation rests partly on the inability of outsiders to understand what its citizens say to one another—is that reputation built on anything solid at all?
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