Free Harajuku Sunday by S. Michael Choi

indeed assaulted someone in your apartment, I strongly encourage you to turn yourself into the police and confess your crimes.   Maybe in this way you can at least to some degree ameliorate the impact of your actions.”

    “Listen you stupid A.L.T.   You are not even a teacher let alone the lawyer you think you are.   I have no idea why you think you are regarded as some kind of professional, when all you are is just another backpacking punk-on-a-lark who's discovered a clever way to make a half-way decent salary without too much effort.   Go back to being a tape-recorder: all you are is a trained monkey who speaks when and only when the Japanese teacher allows you to.” (etc.)

    In the first few weeks of the Great Expat Cyberwar, it seems that the nerdboy/anti-Soren coalition is going to win.   Soren has made one critical misstep—posting originally under a recognizable log-in, (S*O*R*E*Nstyle) he assumes that everyone else that steps in will pay the same courtesy.   Instead, his log-in is immediately under assault by seemingly dozens, even hundreds of separate people, but who may in fact only be just an obsessive, dedicated cadre of computer nerds generating multiple accounts.   Or, of course, it may not be; there are, actually, scores of people that Soren has offended or insulted in some way over the previous two years, and some of these people, having gotten wind of the unfolding crisis, log-in just once or twice to put in a bad word against the man.   The first thread, the one on which Soren first clashes with Redd, is just six or seven people with a total of seventy or eighty page views.   In two weeks time, page views for threads involving Soren and Redd are totalling over two hundred, on average, and by the end of the month, as soon as either party (or their closest allies) post something, immediate emails are being flashed around Tokyo, and the thread is immediately viewed upwards of seven or eight hundred times within a matter of hours.   The snowballing is self-evident and the drama has five hundred people enraptured the first week; pushing five thousand by week two.   Then people (always anonymous, quite possibly sock-puppets of Redd or Julian) start putting up pictures of Soren—a car crash they claim is his and Photoshopped Soren heads on monkeys or other absurd situations, sometimes half a dozen or more a day, such that the entire site goes down and has to be reinstalled due to sheer bandwidth consumption.   Coalitions war on each other, dissolve, reorganize, start up anew. It seems every single weirdo and nutcase in Tokyo, every little weird guy with a psychological tic come to Japan, comes out of the woodwork to point out various flaws or outrages committed by Soren or his gang, every wrapped-up nutjob or freakcase, every loser and weirdo. And this is true; this isn’t hyperbole; I actually see some of these people shortly later, and it’s like every mental defective, Tourette’s syndrome weirdo, and mental hiccup in Tokyo is out.   These are people who couldn’t pick up a girl in a Paris bar.   And even I am drawn into this battle, not quite an ally of Soren, but certainly a clarifier of the worst charges; I think my stature within the expat community rises because I do my part to put out some of the easier-to-put-out fires posting now under my real name; I am to some degree a person of moderation and diplomacy, despite the initial awkwardness when I thought people were accusing me.

    Redd: “The problem with Americans is that they think they can just barge into anywhere and start taking over.   What's true for foreign policy is true for individuals.   As an Australian, I know there are certain culture differences that each country respects and obeys that American people just can’t...”

    There are certain generalized topics—international politics, religion, sexual mores—that draw in just about everybody and whose page counts and viewer numbers exceed even the usual Soren vs.