This Bears Repeating...

A Japanese friend of mine read my latest article for Toyokeizai and really enjoyed it. However, after she read the comments on Yahoo, she started feeling very distressed.

JF: OMG, Have you read the comments on Yahoo!?

Me: Nah. I gave up on reading the Yahoo comments. I just check to see how many comments there are. If there are a lot, regardless of positive or negative, that means I wrote an engaging article. If it has only a few comments, that just means I wrote about something that was unremarkable.

JF: I see. Well, I read the comments. So many people…

ME: So many people...what?

JF: Their comments were so…stupid. It’s like they didn’t read your article at all.

Me: Maybe they didn’t. Some people just hate the idea of a non-Japanese person having a platform of any kind here. Here I have one with thousands of readers. So naturally, some people are gonna resent that on principle.

JF: I see. I don’t know how you do it.

Me: Do what?

JF: Continue to write such great work, knowing that so many of the readers are not going to…appreciate what you wrote. Some of them seem like they can’t understand you.

Me: I'm not surprised when Japanese readers can’t get me. And honestly I really don’t expect many to get me. I mean what I write goes against most of what many people here have been taught since childhood.

JF: What do you mean?

Me: Well, the premise of most of my work, particularly for Japanese readers, is that black people are not a monolith. We’re not even a real thing, except for the thing that racism forged us into. That "kokujin" is a label that means nothing. How many articles have I mentioned some version of that in, including this one?

JF: I dunno…maybe all of them? (She laughs)

Words by Baye, Art by Miki

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Me: Right?! I try to put it in all of them, but my editor keeps telling me I’m repeating myself. I tell her, it’s because this bears repeating. It’s the most important thing I want to say. It’s the key to understanding everything I write. Without it I am easily misconstrued, and misunderstanding is virtually a certainty. But my editor feels I've said it plenty enough times.

JF: You haven’t. At least judging from these comments today, you haven’t.

Me: I know. That’s why I don’t read them anymore. Many people here aren’t able to bring the premise that “black is not the thing you think it is” to every reading of any article of mine. Because everything they have ever seen, heard, or read on the subject before my work has established black as a thing, and black people as a definable group, as real and indisputable as Japanese people or white people. We are an entity with characteristics identifiable on sight. Dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, etc, so here I come telling them that everything they have ever learned about me is wrong. Naturally, they think (I pitch my voice for this): “Who the hell do you think you are to come to our country and tell us what we know about you is wrong!? We know you and we don’t need you to tell us who you are!”

JF: (laughing uncomfortably) That sounds like one of the comments.

Me: (Shrug)

JF: Well, I don’t care what they say. It was a great piece!

Me: Awwwww thank you! How many comments were there?

JF: 300 or so.

Me: That's not bad.

JF: No, they were mostly bad...

Me: lol

Thanks for reading, guys. Check out my books if you dig my work!

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