Japanese is my native language. So why write this blog in English? There are several reasons.
The cost of writing in a foreign language
Until recently, writing in English meant spending far more time than writing in Japanese – drafting, checking grammar, looking up expressions. LLMs have compressed that gap dramatically. I can now draft, revise, and polish English text with an efficiency that was simply not possible a few years ago. The effort gap between writing in my mother tongue and writing in English has become small enough that it no longer feels like a decisive factor.
Writing in a language that is not yours
Japanese requires a lot of decisions before you even get to the content. Formal or informal register (desu/masu or plain form)? Which first-person pronoun (watashi, boku, ore, or something else)? Every language has such choices, but the difference is that in your native language, you feel the full weight of them.
English has its own subtleties, of course. But as a non-native speaker, I am largely exempt from them – or at least unaware of them. That turns out to be liberating. I am not trying to write poetry here. I want to describe facts, share observations, and record what I think. Having fewer choices – or more precisely, being unable to see most of them – makes that easier.
Reaching whoever finds it interesting
I am not writing for a specific audience. If anything, I would like these posts to be found by anyone, from any country or cultural background, who happens to care about the same topics. For better or worse, English has established itself as a global lingua franca, and it is the most practical choice for this kind of open-ended reach.
Not wanting to get tired of social media
I also want this blog to serve as a kind of personal log – things I have been working on, things I have been thinking about, things I have enjoyed. Social media platforms are designed to let you do exactly that, but they come with a cost: the moment you consider posting something, you start thinking about the reactions. Likes, replies, retweets. That feedback loop subtly reshapes what you write, and sometimes stops you from writing at all. A personal blog with no comment section and no analytics does not have that problem.
Owning the medium
Everything published on the open web will almost certainly be ingested by AI training pipelines. That is just the reality now. If I am going to put things out there, I want to do it on a medium I control as much as possible. This site is built from plain Markdown files stored in a GitHub repository, rendered into static HTML by a small Ruby script, and served from my own server. The content is mine, the edit history is mine, and the format is as durable as anything I know of. Text files in a Git repository will outlast any blogging platform.