Following a comprehensive two-year linguistic survey, a report published Wednesday in the academic journal Language revealed that 58 percent of Japanese speakers worldwide are 23-year-old white men from the United States. “Our findings indicate that a majority of individuals who can fluently speak and comprehend Japanese are actually Caucasian post-collegiate American males, many of whom order in Japanese at sushi restaurants and were one of the few white members of their universities’ Japanese clubs,” read the report in part, which noted that American-born 23-year-old men who taught English for a year in Kobe or Sapporo after graduation currently outnumber all other speakers of the Japanese language, including the entire population of the East Asian island nation and its millions of emigrants living throughout the world. “Though the Japanese dialect was spoken almost exclusively by individuals of Japanese origin until the mid-18th century, it is now largely a vernacular utilized by young white men who decorate their apartments with traditional Japanese prints and are devoted fans of manga artist Hayao Miyazaki.
