Beginning in 2001, the Perry Bible Fellowship is perhaps one of the greatest web comics of all time. And it was sometime between 2004 and 2005 that they would publish what would likely be the most consequential comic in its nearly 25-year history, Weeaboo. It depicts a business meeting where the speaker says, If we waste any more time on Weeaboo, we'll be bankrupt by the end of the month. A guy at the meeting pipes up and says, Did somebody just say Weeaboo? Then they all line up to pat on his ass over it. It's a similar joke from the send in the horror sketch from kids in the hall, poking fun at the frat-like environment that some workplaces by taking the dynamic to an extreme that's absurd in this context. What does Weeaboo mean? It doesn't matter. The comic works better because it means nothing. But there's just something about these kinds of made-up words, which apparently are called nonce words that fan bases love to latch on to. I mean, you'll still hear Simpsons fans calling things cromulent. I'm biggins? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield. I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

And Gzorn and Platt is probably one the only jokes that people still remember from Garfield and friends. And it's safe to say that the word weebu has had a bigger impact than any of these other nonce words. So much so that a lot of the people who use it in 2025 have probably never even heard of the Perry Bible Fellowship. I know people have come to put all kinds of caveats to this. Every weebu I've ever met has a million excuses why they're actually not a weebu. But in general, it refers to a person who's not Japanese, but they're obsessed with Japan and Japanese things. The person described by the word has been around for centuries, but it was becoming increasingly more common throughout the late '90s and early 2000s as Japanese pop culture began to build more of a presence in the West. And this was especially true online. That classic looking for a Japanese girlfriend shirt was everywhere. You got plenty of white dudes giving themselves fake Japanese names, Kyro Sejro style. And I distinctly remember reading this blog by this woman who swore that her body had been taken over by the soul of the deceased ex-Japan guitarist, Hide, and now she's him reincarnated.

At some point, I think she was even sending faxes to their drummer, Yoshiki, which, side note, I've wanted to cover that story for so long, and it just seems like every trace of it has been wiped from the Internet. People would come up with all kinds of words to describe these people. Japanophile is probably the earliest one. And then in the 2000s, wapanese became more common, especially on 4chan, which itself was a hot bit of online wapanese activity. And then in 2005, in an attempt to mitigate the overuse of the word and the hostility that came with it, 4chan Mods added a filter that converted the word wapanese into weeaboo. Of course, rather than putting an end to the Wapanese Wars, this instead caused as Weebu to become the universally accepted word to describe this type of person. There's been quite a few people who've been the face of Weeaboo's on 4chan, people like Apple Milk 1988 or the Garukamesh Kid, both stories for another time. Today, I want to talk about one that I've been seeing pop up a lot again recently for some reason. Sometimes as the subject of ridicule, sometimes as an inspirational story, and almost always completely divorced from reality.

This is the story of Ken Sama. This video is sponsored by Racon.

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One One of the most common or reliable post form in stroke 4chan's history is where you take a picture of a guy who seems to exemplify a type of guy, and then you write a post as if it was him writing it. One example that comes to mind is, Shit was So Cash, which is written in the voice of a New Jersey Guido. His name is John, and he hates every single one of you. This post is a great way to break down the characteristics of a type of guy. At the same time, with 4chan being anonymous, you can pretend that the guy really wrote it. Maybe your shit really was So Cash. Of course, one of the types of guys that found themselves the most under the microscope in early 4chan was the weeaboo. You could probably fill entire libraries just with 4chan posts about weeaboos in the 2000s. So of course, you had posts in this format made as a weeaboo character. And the one that's really stood the test of time came in 2009. Accompanied by a picture of a tall, long-haired white guy with his hands folded wearing a kimono, the copypasta reads,, my name is Ken Sama.

I'm a 27-year-old American otaku, American fan for you guys jeans. I draw anime and manga on my tablet and spend my days perfecting my art and playing superior Japanese games. Disgaia, Final Fantasy, Persona Series. I train with my katana every day. This superior weapon can cut clean through steel because it is folded over a thousand times and is vastly superior to any other weapon on Earth. I earned my sword license two years ago, and I have been getting better every day. I speak Japanese fluently, both Kanji and the Osaka dialect, and I write fluently as I know everything about Japanese history and their Bushido code, which I follow 100%. When I get my Japanese visa, I am moving to Tokyo to attend a prestigious high school to learn more about their magnificent culture. I hope I can become an animator for Studio Ghibli or a game designer. I own several kimonos which I wear around town. I want to get used to wearing them before I move to Japan so I can fit in easier. I bow to my elders and seniors and speak Japanese as often as I can, but rarely does anyone manage to respond.

Wish me luck in Japan. This post so perfectly takes things that annoyed people about weeboos in that time and just turns them up to 11. The insistence that everything Japanese is superior just because. Talking about Japanese things that everybody knows about by acting like it's the most obscure thing ever. Pretending to be an expert on the culture while at the same time, only having surface-level knowledge and also getting a ton of things wrong. If you were involved in any subculture at this time that was in any way adjacent to this, you knew a few people that were exactly like the person that was being made fun of here. You You knew people who thought they were going to go to Japan and become J-pop Idols. You knew people who thought they were going to go over there and take over the anime industry by storm. And then the picture of the guy that they chose for this post fits it so perfectly. Not only is he wearing a kimono, but he just generally looks like the guy that would be like this. This right here was the perfect 4chan Weep character. And of course, like any good copypasta, Kensama spawns a lot of parodies, too.

You get a bunch of guys who are similarly obsessed with different cultures, most famously, Kenichi Smith or Rohide Kobayashi, the Japanese-Jap American who loves barbecue, rodeo, and fireworks. But unlike a lot of other 4chan characters, Kensama wound up getting extended lore. On March 11th of 2011, Japan would be hit by the most powerful earthquake in its history. This was followed by a massive tsunami that came on so quickly that people in its range had no chance to escape the safety. The event would take the lives of nearly 20,000 people with thousands more injured or missing. And in the days following the disaster, websites were put up to help people try to track their loved ones who may be missing. Among those said to be missing was Kensama. You even got a Google person find our injury, first name Ken, last name Sama. People were making tributes. There were multiple copy postas made describing his last moments, and it seemed like the Ken Sama story had come to an abrupt end. But the stories of his demise were greatly exaggerated. In August of 2021, this post has made the R9k. I can't fucking believe that this is Kensama.

Not only he slim down, he now has a QT Japanese GF. There's a picture of a guy that's supposed to be Kensama, now slimmed down in Japan with a Japanese wife, and there'd be more pictures of him posted to the thread. The replies are a mixture of people believing this outright, others saying it's fake, and then you got a few people who are skeptical, but they're hopeful that it's true. God, I hope this is actually him. It's nice when meme subjects end up doing well in the end. This new update to the Ken Sama saga would spread further as posts on fit would focus on his apparent weight loss and how his life has seemingly improved because of it. This was reposted to a bunch of different boards, either as an inspirational thing or what's your excuse, incel thing. And each time it was accompanied with debate over whether or not this was real. In one such post, also on R9k, one poster claims that the photos were originally found on the Japanese Two channel, where Japanese users were saying it was in fact him. Now, this being four chain, you get a mixture of people who are in on the joke and just playing along.

You get some people who are convinced this is really true, and you get other people who are skeptical but open to the possibility. Where people get way more confused is when this breaks containment and makes its way onto Twitter. A lot of these people have never seen anything of Kansama ever. They just see what appears to be a progress of a man they've never seen before in their lives, and they're like, Hell, yeah. Right on, man. Good job. Even ignoring the fact that these pictures would be over a decade apart and he somehow looks younger now, outside of a vague resemblance in their hair texture, which isn't even the same color, these men just don't look alike, which I guess on some level, if you're a weebu, that's got to be the ultimate flex. If you're a white guy who wants to be Japanese, then all of a sudden, you got these other white people who are like, Man, you guys look all the same. Then I guess you won. And although it was abundantly clear from the outset that Ken Sama was not really the guy in the picture and it was all a joke, now these before and after shots go viral every few months, and a whole bunch of people who have never seen this before are convinced it's real.

In fact, the true identity of Ken Sama had been revealed years ago. So after the earthquake incident, a Twitter user named Ace Weaver made a tribute video to the deceased Ken Sama. The video will be taken down by a woman named Marisa Ebers or nerdnits. When Ace Weaver asked her why she did this, She responded that this was actually a picture of her husband, who's in fact not dead and not named Kensama. The original Kensama photo can be traced to a post from her blog made on September seventh, 2005. In the previous entry, Marisa had spoken about how she was impressed with the work of this costume shop named Seems Like Magic. Her and her then-boyfriend, now husband, Braden, each bought a kimono from them. She mentions that she really wanted to show her readers how nice these kimonos were, so she was going to try to convince Braden to help her take some photos of them that night, and convince him she did. He's such a good guy to pose for pictures right before bed when his hair's all wonky. I can only imagine the conversations that these people have had over the whole Ken Samba ordeal.

Can you imagine? He's getting late one night, tired, your hair's all messed up, and your significant other is like, Hey, before you go to bed, can you just take a picture of this kimono for my blog? I don't know your tire and your hair is messy and whatnot, but only a few people are going to see it anyway. You reluctantly pose for a single picture, and now millions of people have seen you half asleep in a kimono. You become the a place of weeboos for 20 years. They're picturing you walking up the street of a kimono, bowing to strangers. They're writing a whole fan fictions about your life, a fitness journey, a hero's death. And then, just as the people who believe this come to learn that it's fake, a whole new crop of a cup of people come along every few months that believe it all over again. This has to come up any time she tries to convince him to do anything. But anyway, that's the story of Ken Sama. If you like this video, turn on notifications and check out my video about Kyros Sejiro. I'm out..