Beginning in 2001, The Perry Bible Fellowship is perhaps one of the greatest web comics of all time. 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:

Then they all line up to paddle his ass over it.

It's a similar joke from the "Send in the Whores" sketch from Kids in the Hall, poking fun at the frat-like environment in 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 fanbases love to latch on to. I mean, you'll still hear Simpsons fans calling things "cromulent."

And Gazorninplats is probably one of the only jokes that people still remember from Garfield and Friends. It's safe to say that the word weeaboo 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 weeaboo I've ever met has a million excuses why they're actually not a weeaboo. But in general, it refers to a person who's not Japanese, but they're obsessed with Japan and Japanese things.

The kind of person described by the word has been around for centuries, but it was becoming increasingly more common throughout the late '90s and early 2000's 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 Kairo Seijuro style.

I distinctly remember reading this blog by this woman who swore that her body had been taken over by the soul of the deceased X 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 [obsessed with Japan]. "Japanophile" is probably the earliest one, and then in the 2000's "Wapanese" became more common, especially on 4chan, which itself was a hot bed of online wapanese activity.

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 weeaboo 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 weeaboos on 4chan: people like applemilk1988 or the Girugamesh 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.

One of the most common or reliable post formats throughout 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 kind of 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 kinda pretend that the guy really wrote it — y'know Maybe 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 2000's.

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:

This post so perfectly takes things that annoyed people about weeaboos 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 but 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 kind of 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 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. So, this right here was the perfect 4chan weeb character. And of course, like any good copypasta, Ken-Sama spawns a lot of parodies, too.

You get a bunch of guys who are similarly obsessed with different cultures, most famously, Kenichi Smith or Rawhide Kobayashi, the Japanese-Jap-American who loves barbecue, rodeo, and fireworks.

But unlike a lot of other 4chan characters, Ken-Sama 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 to 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 Ken-Sama. You even got a Google Person Finder entry. First name Ken, last name Sama. People were making tributes. There were multiple copypastas 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 is made to /r9k/:

There's a picture of a guy that's supposed to be Ken-Sama, 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.

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 a "what's your excuse, incel" kinda 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 2channel, where Japanese users were saying it was in fact him.

Now, this being 4chan, 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 Ken-Sama ever. They just see what appears to be a progress picture 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 weeaboo, 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.

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 @A_Squeaver made a tribute video to the deceased Ken-Sama. The video would be taken down by a woman named Marisa Ebers or @nerdknits. When @A_Squeaver 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 Ken-Sama.

The original Ken-Sama photo can be traced to a post from her blog made on September 7 of 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.

I can only imagine the conversations that these people have had over the whole Ken-Sama ordeal.

Can you imagine? It's getting late one night, you're 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 know your tired 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 weeaboo for 20 years. They're picturing you walking up the street in 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 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.