Rise of the LARPers-Fake Asians on SNS

Fake Asians-Fake Opinions-Real Damage

Most people like to pretend to be something that they are not when they are young. This is, in fact, how children interact with the world around them and, in a way, are able to place themselves in someone else's shoes. For children, this is quite normal. On the other hand, we also see people who like to play the part of a person in a medieval fair or as some kind of character in a science fiction or cartoon fandom. This phenomenon is known as live-action roleplay (LARP), wherein a person takes on the persona of a specific character.

But what happens when such live-action roleplay finds itself onto the internet, where adults use this for nefarious purposes? Today we will discuss the phenomenon of LARPing as an Asian.

The website known as X, which was formerly known as Twitter, is a place where numerous ideas and opinions can be shared and viewed. It is also a place to monetize the responses of individuals who either click on or interact with certain posts, resulting in revenue for the poster. This type of monetization has unfortunately had the impact of enticing certain people with less-than-savory motives. Whether it be addiction to clicks or for the money itself, certain accounts seem to be trying to outdo each other by posting more and more controversial or extremist views.

Two such accounts are well known on Twitter, one claiming to be Japanese and another one claiming to be Korean.

The first individual we will discuss goes by the moniker Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper with the handle @politicalawake. This individual pretends to be a Japanese nationalist account. However, considering his Japanese, it becomes blatantly obvious that he is by no means a native speaker at all. For example, he continually uses the term “anata” for “you” or “watashi” for “me,” which in Japanese, in many cases—along with other pronouns—is dropped. The vocabulary choices are childish, and grammar forms are likewise rigid and unnatural, as could be expected when using translation software like Google Translate. Several Japanese people have also noted that he is by no means a Japanese speaker, and we'll get more into this a little bit later.

We can also consider the time zone of his posting. He consistently posts in a manner consistent with the time zone of the UK. This comes as he claims to work at a convenience store in Yokohama, a story he has continually tweaked in order to make himself seem more credible. In order to prove his identity to critics, he later posted a picture of a passport, which unfortunately he had gotten from online, and it was quickly discovered that he had done so using reverse image search.

Later, in a conversation between myself and cultural scholar and font designer @KaihatsuYT, we were discussing the problematic nature of the font chosen for the Assassin's Creed advertisement, in which the font could have caused confusion because it appeared to be Chinese rather than Japanese. In fact, one of the characters in there is an archaic form of a character in Kanbun, but one that is also still used officially in Korean Hanja. The scholar had made a comparison of four different font types: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Kanji, and Hanja. However, due to the typeface memory, it did not display the final character properly in Hanja, and I was simply pointing it out to @KaihatsuYT since it wasn't his direct area of expertise.

That’s the background. However, @politicalawake, not being a native speaker, misunderstood what was being said and copied the erroneous version before its update. Basically, he plagiarized and stole the work of @KaihatsuYT and passed it off as his own on social media, only to make a fool out of himself. After being threatened with legal action for intellectual property theft, he quietly removed the post. It all just goes to show the lack of sincerity of the individual.

Further of equal concern is the fact that he is unable to tell the difference between basic things even in videos or images. One example is a family of tourists behaving extremely inappropriately and rudely on public transport. He posted that this is a typical example of how people behave in Japan. The only problem was the video was not of Japan. Even without seeing any writing or hearing any sound, the particular type of plastic seat is not found on any train in Japan. It was actually something that was happening in China, but he had reported it as happening in Japan because he didn't know the difference between the two. This also happened later when he mistook a Chinese celebrity for a Japanese celebrity.

Unfortunately, many people think that he is Japanese and that his opinion is somehow common to that of the Japanese people. In this regard, he actually undermines serious issues that do need to be discussed, such as over-tourism and the behavior of certain foreigners in the country. These are valid concerns. However, there is a serious danger that by crying wolf constantly under false pretenses and quoting inaccurate information, such individuals actually enable further harm to Japan. Interestingly, he did confess to being British but then later claimed that he had not written the post and that he had been hacked. One really has to wonder what he gets out of it and whether his motivation is simply an addiction to internet clout or whether the financial reward is his incentive.

This odd Briton, however, has a female counterpart that pretends to be Korean. This person goes by the handle @SoulOfBolshevik. This individual seems to be motivated mostly by some sort of internet fame complex and claims to be Joseon-jok, which is what the ethnicity of Koreans is called specifically in northern China. This too was a clue that she was obviously lying, because she seemed to confuse North Koreans and Joseon-jok, even though Joseon-jok are classified as ethnically Korean Chinese (Chinese by nationality).

She displays some interesting linguistic tics. At first, her English was quite fluent, almost to the level of a native speaker, and one would assume that she was in fact a native speaker—if not a slightly sloppy writer. When individuals started to doubt her ethnicity, she quickly switched into a more broken form of English, but it was obviously artificial and, I dare say, stereotypical. Her basic Korean understanding was also atrociously terrible. She didn't seem to have any basic idea of how the language actually worked. And for someone that claims to be Joseon-jok, her spelling was reminiscent, once again, of Google Translate, which uses South Korean standard spelling—making it very odd indeed that someone from northern China would be writing with the spelling of South Korea.

You can imagine someone having grown up all their lives in England and going through the English education system suddenly speaking with an American accent or writing with American spelling and grammar. No doubt, you would find it more than a little bit odd.

Another dead giveaway was the way that she Koreanized her name. Her name was Sarah, and she Koreanized it as 사랗 rather than 사라. The ㅎ (h) in Korean i

s silent at the end of words—especially names—and no name would contain an h at the end in that manner because it is completely obsolete. This is not just a South Korean dialect issue; Korean names simply do not use it in that manner at all.

Further, the original pictures she posted of herself show a young woman who has facial features that are more in line with Eastern European bone structure. So while it is possible that she has some sort of Eurasian ancestry, it seems highly unlikely that she is Korean in any shape or form. Then again, that is assuming that even the original pictures she posted are actually her—or that the account is female at all. I'm not the first one to point this out. In fact, when this was exposed, she later used artificial intelligence to alter her photos or, in other instances, simply stole pictures from other people’s social media platforms and claimed them as her own. At the moment, she goes by the alias Na Hae-Soo.

What’s the moral of the story?

Just because you agree with someone doesn't mean they're really who they say they are, especially on social media platforms where people hide behind avatars, and especially those accounts that never post videos or show themselves interacting with the real world. These fakes, fraudsters, and grifters don’t have any real cause beyond stoking division and making money.

So before you get upset, give money or before you believe every word, it’s always best to do a fact-check.