About my Samurai Travels Through America series.
People see a samurai talking about chips and salsa and assume the goal must have been realism, journalism, or persuasion.
For me it was none of those things.
The foundation was comedy.
A lot of Japanese comedy starts with an obviously ridiculous premise and then commits to it completely. You take something absurd and refuse to break character. The audience understands the premise is impossible, and the humor comes from watching the character apply that worldview to ordinary situations.
That was the samurai.
A man from a completely different time trying to understand chain restaurants, diners, parking lots, free refills, and all the small things that modern Americans barely notice anymore.
To a Japanese audience, that setup is immediately recognizable as comedy.
What I did not expect is that many Americans seemed to react less to the joke itself and more to the feeling behind it.
One thing that may be difficult to explain is the role comedy plays in Japan.
Of course we laugh because things are funny.
But comedy is also a way of dealing with everyday life.
Life is difficult. Prices go up. People worry about work, family, money, health, and the future.
So there is a tendency to look for small moments of humor, gratitude, absurdity, or beauty in ordinary life.
People often try to make each other laugh not because life is easy, but because it is difficult.
I think that mindset influenced these posts more than people realize.
I was not trying to expose anyone.
I was not trying to embarrass anyone.
I was not trying to convince anyone of a political position.
I was trying to take ordinary things and look at them from a strange angle.
The surprising part is what happened next.
I expected people to laugh.
Instead, people started talking about their grandparents, their hometown restaurants, childhood memories, road trips, first jobs, favorite diners, and places that no longer exist.
At some point I realized many people were no longer talking about my posts.
They were talking about their own lives.
That was never part of the original plan.
The original joke was simply that a confused samurai had arrived in modern America.
What seems to have happened is that some readers used that outsider's perspective to look again at parts of American life they had stopped noticing.
Whether that was because of nostalgia, affection, pride, or something else, I honestly don't know.
I'm still trying to understand it myself.
The idea itself is actually very old.
Take an impossible character.
Place him in an ordinary situation.
Then see what happens.
That's all it was.
I expected comedy.
I did not expect nostalgia.
I certainly did not expect 150,000 new followers in a week.
But that's what happened.
And thank you all for enjoying it.
I'll keep the samurai wandering around America a little while longer.
Although, after getting carried away and posting nearly 100 times a day, absolutely nothing started going viral anymore. 😂
X is genuinely difficult.
One week: 150,000 followers.
The next week: 5,000 impressions and double-digit likes.
Incredible technology. Nobody understands how it works.