I want you to dream.
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2024/10/1 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. As the final piece I ran there prior to the site's shutdown, this is also the last post that will be mirrored here. Thanks for reading through this abridged archive and look forward to new entries from here on out!
It's 12:15 in the early afternoon on a Saturday as I write this. The controlled chaos of the business days at the Tokyo Game Show is over as the less controlled chaos of public ones takes hold and the throngs of visitors clog up the Makuhari Messe to the tune of hundreds of thousands. I'm sitting in my hotel room in downtown Tokyo thankfully nowhere near any of that action; two days on the show floor was already pushing my luck and that was with a decent amount of elbow room to maneuver around. I'm leaving to go home to Kansai tomorrow and either have friends I could be seeing right about now or I could at least doing the rounds at my favorite shops and arcades one last time before I pack my bags and get ready for the three-hour train ride back. Instead, I'm sitting on this shallow desk writing one last meaty post for Cohost before the locks get changed and I can't write anything more on here. And I'm perfectly okay with that.
Between the traveling I have in store tomorrow and the work I immediately have to get back to on Monday, I just don't want to leave it to chance whether I'll have the bandwidth to write this thing any later than this exact moment. I've loved this place too much the last couple of years not to send it off properly and enough of you have been extremely kind this past week and change in telling me, both online and in person, just how much my work as a translator and writer has meant to you over the years. So I'm gonna do this right today, September 28, 2024, in that hotel room, until I feel I've done it enough right and can call it good. I'm still working on a few things for what comes next, so while my presence online will probably be in a state of flux for a little while, I promise you all that at the very least, I'm not disappearing.
Now, with that out of the way, let's sit down and talk for a bit.
I've been mulling over a lot what to write for this thing for the past couple of weeks ever since the shutdown itself was announced. It is tempting to launch into platitudes and wax about what this site has meant for me and my relationship to the Internet like so many other people understandably have. And make no mistake, Cohost has been my home, my refuge as I've weathered some turbulent seas between my exhausting Japan move, equally exhausting family issues, and just plain existing online as a Japanese game translator in recent years. It's truly meant the world to have this place after losing the few other online homes I had in fairly quick succession. But while it is true that I still don't have all the answers to what I'll be doing after this, I have some gut feelings about the general trajectory, the direction about where I think things will be heading, should be heading for the sake of my career and, frankly, mental health. I'm turning 35 next year and I've made a lot of inroads into the sorts of places I eventually want to be and the things I want to be doing in time and it's led me to believe that, perhaps for my next phase, it's time to be a little more subdued, a little more selective with when, where, and how I choose to appear in the public eye. So because I may well not have a better venue to have this sort of conversation for a while, I'm just going to keep things simple and reflect a little on my work and what I hope in my heart of hearts people take away from it so far after it's all been said and done.
The thing you have to realize is that before I was a Japanese game translator, before I was a guy who did anything people paid attention to, before I was even a Japanese major sitting in his very first language class at 18, fresh out of high school, I was just a kid from Colorado, born and raised, desperate to get the hell out of dodge for countless reasons and the only way I had of getting out was my dreams. My dreams of learning Japanese and putting the US forever behind me in search of a place I could feel real, enduring happiness for the first time in my life. So often, people, especially other white folks and especially other white Americans in particular, treat mastering something such as Japanese like being preternaturally tall in sports; an innate gift, if not outright genetic, that a lucky few get to enjoy, but that nobody else can count on attaining. Or worse, the very idea of anyone other than an Asian person speaking an Asian language at all, let alone with any degree of competence, never enters their imagination. It just doesn't happen, it's just not reality that people who look like me speak like them. Not now, not ever.
Yet here I am. Here I am, I live in Japan now, get around speaking nothing but Japanese to locals, and I've translated many millions of Japanese words a decade into this career. And just as much as the actual time and effort spent putting in the work to learn this stuff the old fashioned way, what I most credit with being able to make it this far is seeing other people, other foreigners, find their way in this country and make their own success here despite not looking any more similar to the locals than myself. The young JET Programme returnee and department TA at my university who was my first ever Japanese teacher for the initial year of my studies, a sweet woman in her late 20s who was a fellow blue-eyed dirty blonde like myself. The Black politics professor I had at 19 while studying for a summer in Tokyo who had professional ties to outright Diet members, yet wasn't shy in telling us he'd vote for the Japanese Communists if he could. The department head at my next Japanese university who didn't know a lick of the language before my own age as I write this now, yet managing to ascend to one of the most powerful positions on the school's board of directors.
I made it to the end of my formal studies and into my career doing what I do now, past plenty of brick walls and moments of self-doubt, in large part because along the way I had people like them directly in front of me that I could look at and prove to myself, factually, that those goals I set for myself, the dreams I had to free myself from a suffocating home and how I wanted to attain that liberation, all of it wasn't possible merely in the abstract. It was possible in reality and I knew for a fact that was the case because those people had taken the journey themselves and come out the other side victorious. My own victory would inevitably look different from theirs, profoundly so in some ways. But at least if I had any trails to blaze, they had already laid down the first markers for me to follow before I became comfortable enough to hike the remaining length on my own in those later years.
I'm not done writing this story. There's still so much I want to do, games I want to translate, genuine dating sims I want to write and design from scratch, ambitions I want to fulfill and changes I want to bring about with my own two hands and so much more, and getting to Japan is ultimately just going to be a stepping stone toward those next chapters. But I hope, pray that if nothing else, wherever you are, whatever age you are, younger than me, older, or the same, that my trajectory and my life's work so far proves that dreams don't just have to be nice things to imagine about from afar. That they can be tenable, that you have it in you to make your life better for yourself and on your own terms if you're not happy with where you are and what's happening around you. And I hope that if your dreams involve learning Japanese and living in Japan, too, that in my own small, humble way, I myself am now someone you can point to all these years later as someone who's Done It themselves and that it helps you along your way. For as much as I've always shunned "senpai" as a title when people have hoisted that onto me at school and then later at work over the years, when I think about what the kanji broadly means—not simply "one who's come before," but a kindred spirit, the proverbial bird of a feather—perhaps I can finally find it in me to embrace it if it means helping someone else find that courage to also shoot for those stars and search for a better existence.
You can do it. You can do the thing you've been thinking about for a long time. It might take a hell of a lot of improvisation and rerouting along the way, and not everyone will get it, why those things you yearn for, nourish you and give your life meaning, are so very necessary to you and your happiness. Why you sacrifice so much for it, why you persist in building that bridge to the other side when you can't know what's across the way until you've constructed it and cross it yourself. Why you risk uncertainty and a fragile independence in a world so often bereft of justice and rewards so few, when hopes and aspirations and outcries can not only go unfulfilled, they can get you hurt or killed for seeking the wrong kind of difference in the wrong place from the wrong kind of people.
But I get why you do it anyway and you do it because what is your life if not something to take ownership of? What is life if not to be felt and heard, and to feel and hear the lives of others in turn? What is life if not something that you make matter?
You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.
It might be deeply idealistic of me to think that way. It might be naive. But a better world doesn't come from compromising on what matters most and that goes as much for yourself as it does the bigger picture. Give yourself that chance because until you do that, you're not getting any of the countless other chances you'll need from everyone else along the way. On this site that dared to have a dream itself, I ask you, Cohost, implore you, to keep having ones of your own anyway. Dream, and in dreaming, make the world a better one for yourself and for the fellow dreamers whose lives yours will inevitably touch along the way. Make dreams coming true no longer the exception, but the norm.