up on the mountain

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

This is chat gpt trash prompted to “sound Japanese” and it’s based off of racist old movie dialogue. There’s zero correlation here to Japanese grammar and how Japanese translates into English or how a native speaker of Japan uses English. It’s slop. It’s racist ai slop rehashing Western exceptionalism, fantasizing about a Japanese person being in awe of how great the USA is. It’s depressing that people fell for this. I know it feels good to think that other people like us, and sometimes they do, but this only works if you assume Japanese people have extremely limited experience and worldview. It’s mortifying.

So I've been to Japan. I have been to Japan a lot. Probably something like 10-15 times in the last 20 years. I also have several friends who lived and worked in Japan for years. And over the course of these years that I've been to Japan I've also had people come from Japan who would talk about their experiences and we eat out places like Mexican restaurants (side note: the most common place after a good steak dinner that our Japanese a visitors would want to go to was an American sushi restaurant because American style sushi and Japanese style sushi are very different)

I have been to a Mexican restaurant in Japan. It wasn't great. It was probably on the level below what you could get in the Midwest of America. But at the one Mexican restaurant that I have been to in Japan you absolutely had free tortilla chips come to the table because it was a thing. I've also been to Italian restaurants in Japan where we got free breadsticks.

I have also been to many many many other non-western restaurants in Japan. And while most of them you don't get a free appetizers/snack at the table. At some you do. Most memorably at an izakaya that we went to brought a crap ton of fried fish skin as their free to the table appetizer. And I know for a fact that nobody ordered it ahead of time, because it just appeared as we sat down. But at another restaurant we got an entire plate full of fresh in season persimmon. But yet another boiled and roasted ginkgo nuts.

This doesn't even get into the completely racist bullshit way of speaking that is portrayed in the op screen grab.

I have absolutely seen Japanese people being in awe of stuff that they've encountered in the US. The cereal aisle at the grocery store being a big one. But I've also had Japanese guests who have very very shyly asked me "Can we go to a Japanese restaurant, I'm feeling homesick. Can we please go to an Asian grocery store so I can pick up some snacks?" Because in their mind, Japan is home and better than the US. Which, fair Also many Japanese people speak English fairly decently even if they don't feel comfortable because they're worried about being perfect. So there was something about the way that this tweet was presented with the grammar that they were using that just didn't hit right.

A lot of Blue Ticks on Twitter are faking these "naive foreigner is amazed by the wonder of America" posts to earn engagement from gullible people. Either people who don't know enough about non-American countries to spot the errors or people who do know about other countries who are rage baited by the obvious and offensive errors.

They're making some decent money off it. I've mostly been seeing British ones, but they're starting to shift to non-anglophone nations (but obviously still posting in English because American users are their target audience) as people were starting to catch onto the grift and stopped engaging with the posts.