Nerds!

In a previous post I mentioned that JETs were nerds. In fact, most of the foreigners who come here are nerds (or, at least nerdy in some way). I had wondered, “what is it about Japan that attracts nerdy people?” Wrong question.

I was talking to Kae about the new JETs coming in this summer. She said that she had heard that the ones coming to our town had all studied Japanese culture. She wondered aloud if they were otaku. I said that they probably were. Most JETs are nerdy – even the ones that didn’t study Japanese culture in school. I wondered aloud why this was so. So, she asked me if I thought that Japanese people were nerdy.

The Japanese, as a people, are nerds. That’s it. It was so obvious, but I somehow never put it into those words. I had previously wondered why Japanese people liked nerdy things like fantasy, video games, and cartoons, but the answer is embedded in the question – because they’re nerds. The people here are polite, obsessive, and lack self-confidence – they’re nerds. They love cute things, corny music, and anything associated with Disney – nerds.

So, I told her “yes.”

Now, the question is “why are Japanese people nerds?” Is it a recent phenomenon or is it ancestral? The samurai weren’t nerds, were they?