Bored Panda reached out to the creator behind the “Japanese Stuff Without Context” Facebook page, who happily shared some insights into the project. “Five years ago I founded this odious page, and boy has it been a wild ride,” they said.
The creator explained its origin story: “One day while wasting my time on the internet, as one does, I came to the realization that I had saved several gigs worth of random weeb crap onto my PC over several years. ‘Wow,’ I thought to myself, ‘I can't believe I've saved all of this stuff, and to what end? Surely I'm never going to go browse through it again. But what a waste it would be to just delete all these silly memes and goofs!’ So I got the idea to, little by little, post all of it online and share them with others around the world! So I did just that.”
According to the creator of “Japanese Stuff Without Context,” “cultural norms between Western and Eastern cultures in general are very disparate. Japan has a lot of soft power through their media influence so Westerners may have a disproportionately higher exposure to it, and often without sufficient context to understand what’s going on or why.”
They continued: “So naturally it ends up seeming bizarre from the outside looking in, but the reverse is true as well. Although there is no shortage of stuff that is just objectively weird. This page takes advantage of that window of perspective by stripping all context from images and videos, leaving its viewers to exclaim ‘lol wut.’”
According to the creator of the page, many people seem to get a lot of their information about Japan from Japanese media, especially anime, “which doesn’t accurately represent the culture.” They explained: “In anime the way people act and talk is often made to be radically different from how Japanese people actually do, often for dramatic or comedic effect. Real life ain’t cartoons, people. But by all means, enjoy your shows, your games, maybe even have a series of discardable 2D waifus, just don’t confuse all that stuff with everyday society in Japan, it’s very different.”
When asked what is their audience like, the creator of the page described them as “a bunch of fine folks coming together for a good ‘ol ‘Haha, funny pic.’ Laughter is a universal language. It bring people together.”
“However the target audience is anybody that isn’t Japanese, because otherwise they might get the context of my posts and we just can’t have that here. My interaction with the viewers is pretty sparse though. There is the occasionally snarky reply I might have but that’s about it,” the author of “Japanese Stuff Without Context” told us.
The creator also said that after they run out of content, they will “probably abandon the page and leave it as a foundering relic among the refuse of memes in the turbid ocean that is the internet.”
Having said that, they assured the fans that “I have years worth of weird stuff stored away so that won’t be anytime soon. Unless I get bored with it or something, or accidentally break one of Facebook’s vague and arbitrary or retroactively enforced rules and it gets deleted, or I decide to become a reclusive monk without access to electronics, or if maybe civilization falls apart so we have to resort to archaic formats for memes such as that of the famous Kilroy during WW1,” the author of “Japanese Stuff Without Context” concluded.
