It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What excited you most in 2025?

It turns out there are two subtly different terms for non-Asian people who find themselves with an interest in Japan: one can be a japanophile …or one can be a weeaboo (or weeb).

Both are similar terms, but like anything we do in this crazy culture of ours one is a reference to a tastefully pursued hobby and the other is a a pejorative insult meant to look down one’s nose at someone who is oddly obsessed with a narrow aspect of the same thing. One term leans positive while the other is a gut punch.

Like, think about it this way: if you were really into wine I could compliment you and call you an aspiring sommelier or an enthusiast, collector or someone with a refined palate. Alternatively, if you were really into wine, wink wink, we could call you a lush or an drunk.  

It read it with that vibe. 

Essentially people who get nerdy about Japan and try to learn about the culture, the language, the food and more lean towards the label of Japanophile. But the latter term, weeaboo, gets slapped on folks who maybe turned their karate class and Crunchyroll subscription into weird personality quirk. Get it?

I have met many of both this year. I jumped head first into the Japanese language going so far as to take a class offered by the local Japan Society, and I had a great time honing some of the lessons I had picked up on my own through tools like books and duolingo, all of that in the months before actually hopping on an airplane and jetting off to Tokyo and beyond.

I don’t want to imply that my Japanophilia has popped out of nowhere in 2025, tho. I have been flirting with the film and food and literature of Japan for decades. I think my first “this is different and I love it” moment was in a theatre in the early 2000s watching “Spirited Away” on the big screen. I have long since added Murikami’s translated works to my top five authors list. And you’ll  almost always find a small stack of Usagi Yojimbo comics on my nightstand (which I fully understand is an American comic written by a man with Japanese heritage about Japanese history, but… it fits the theme here, no?) I’ve been tangentially interested for years and years. 

But then in early 2025 we booked a trip and I thought to myself that it presented an interesting opportunity to go a little deeper: and so I did. I started learning hiragana and katakana characters on my phone. I picked away at some of the language. I bought books. I watched videos about the place. I dug deep into making lists of interesting Japanese foods. I prepared for our trip to make it more than a tourist jaunt, but to open my mind to observe the culture and the world when we arrived and immersed ourselves in Japan.

And as I write this we’ve been home for about a week, and I keep practicing my Japanese and I keep poking at my literature and I still have a lot of Japan videos recommended to me on YouTube (though now I can watch them with a kind of “we saw that” familiarity or comparison mindset.) 

I pushed into a Japanophile vibe in 2025. And I’m glad I went so deep before we went so far.