Breakfast With Trolls
When I was a child, a troll was a creature from a fairy tale. They didn’t seem to do much other than lurk near bridges looking menacing. I never knew what they wanted, exactly, but they seemed to be easily avoided. I thought that a wise princess should run across bridges lightly, quickly, being careful not to wake the troll. If she timed it correctly, she could be on solid ground before he could even grasp at the hem of her gown.
Then I grew up, and the trolls caught me.
I think I woke up the trolls when I co-wrote a critique of an essay that justified wartime Japan’s “comfort station” system, which imprisoned women in frontline brothels and forced them to service Japanese soldiers during World War II. This provoked the ire of the notorious “netouyo,” online rightists who harass anyone who criticizes the wartime Japanese state.
But the trolls tell me that I am wrong about this. They contend that I provoked them by posting an image of a knock-off Korean Lego set. The toy depicts the assassination of the Japanese statesman (and first Japanese Resident-General of Korea) Ito Hirobumi by a Korean nationalist in 1909. My post noted that Japanese rightists like to post this image and complain about the offense to their nation, and that they usually accompany their critique with derogatory language about Koreans. This, apparently, was a grave insult to Ito Hirobumi, his family, the Japanese nation, and all 126 million Japanese people.
In any case, the trolls woke up, and they were not happy. I received a flurry of messages calling me a racist and an “anti-Japan” scholar. “I hope you’re not alone when you die,” one said. Another promised to avenge my attack on Japan. Yet another said, “How would you feel if it were a professor being assassinated.” “You should be ASHAMED,” one wrote. “I’m suing you for defamation!” The trolls attacked my university (“Amy Stanley is the worst RACIST who ridicules the Japanese” “Amy Stanley is a very ignorant Japanese historian. She doesn’t understand Japanese at all.”) They called me an ungrateful Jew, which sent me down the rabbit hole of Japanese anti-Semitism (“don’t you know that Japan was the only nation that saved the Jews?” one wrote). Another man sent me a grizzly description of the rape of a child, which – months later – I still can’t get out of my head.
My university administration was appalled. They offered support and even released a statement. They urged me to contact the police. I spoke to a detective who listened respectfully, then asked whether I knew who any of the harassers were. “Yes,” I said. “The ringleader uses her real name, because she’s actually a fairly well-known grassroots operative. She’s a Japanese woman living in Darwin, Australia, and she has tweeted about me roughly three hundred times.” The detective was dumbfounded. He looked as though the complexity of the world had suddenly and catastrophically exceeded his capacity to understand it. I laughed helplessly. “Yes,” I said, “I know.”
At first, I tried to follow the rules. I blocked and ignored. But the trolls were unexpectedly persistent. They just wouldn’t leave.
Most of my Twitter feed makes me think of an academic conference, full of the usual scholarly people. But the trolls were an entirely different crowd. If I could envision my professor followers wearing tweedy business casual, and the students wearing hoodies, the trolls wore sparkly alien antennas and sequins and giant feather boas, glittery tiaras on purple beehives, garish purple suits and wide ties. They sat in their own corner, munching on popcorn and throwing it at people. They stood on their chairs and shouted dramatic curses, summoning hail and frogs and plagues of boils. Occasionally they would all rush the podium at once. Every so often, one of them would get horrendously insulted and storm out, snarling and muttering. But he’d come back.
Eventually, they always came back.
I became fascinated with some of my minor trolls, who stayed around long enough that I could identify them by their personalities and distinctive interests. An account called Don Kayakuda made me think of a retiree in an aloha shirt, but his personality was more like a 1930s schoolteacher, delivering lectures about my (lack of) sincerity and my terrible character. AGlobalist just seethed with malice, mostly toward Koreans. At one point, an account called Indology Teacher surfaced and started calling everyone in Japanese studies a white trash Nazi. She accused me of dying my hair to look more Aryan, but she was primarily invested in promoting Buddhist chauvinism while pretending to be a college professor.
The strange thing about these accounts was that they only had one register – rage. They almost never made jokes. They didn’t post silly pictures of their dogs or complain about losing socks in the dryer. They didn’t attend dance classes or make dinner. They were angry about politics, and that’s all they were.
Who were these people, really? Sometimes I tried to find out. A strange account came out of nowhere to mock me for writing “light novels,” to question my Japanese ability, to accuse me of working as a CCP agent, and to point out, repeatedly, that I am an ungrateful Jew. An easy search lead to a page of porn stories that he’d written in the early 2000s, when he was an English teacher living in Gunma. The content was the usual – an assortment of young Japanese women falling at the feet of a gaijin god – but there was a real person behind his tortured syntax. “Almost involuntarily did she start tugging at the buttons of his 501s,” he wrote, “fascinated by the white polkadot boxers that were being tented by his trouser snake.” For a moment I could see the anxious young man, just like many I used to know when I lived in Japan, sitting awkwardly in his standard-issue jeans, trying to imagine himself into a different kind of life, one where even his boxers might be fascinating.
When the trolls’ ringleader in Darwin changed her Twitter image, I studied her face, trying to figure out whether she would be someone I might befriend, in a different situation, if I didn’t know that she made videos denying the Nanjing Massacre and spent most of her waking hours inciting Twitter mobs. I didn’t think so – there was something pinched and poisonous in her expression. But she, too, was a real person. I tried to imagine her kitchen table. She seemed like the kind of person who would eat toast and not cereal, who would never let her dishes sit in the sink.
So I stopped behaving, because I realized it didn’t matter. The trolls had come to stay. They were part of my life, day in and day out, and they lived in my imagination, whether I ignored them or not.
I started to post questions. I asked the Professor of Indology how she liked her eggs, and whether she’d ever been to Prince Edward Island. I asked Don Kayakuda if he had considered taking up a hobby – maybe line dancing? I asked AGlobalist whether had any strategies for dealing with stress. These questions made them enraged, predictably. But I didn’t care – they were always enraged. You’re a person, I thought to myself. Act like a person.
In a way, I’m still living in a fairy tale, believing that the right question, the right answer, the right series of magic words, might transform a beast into something more mundane, more recognizable. It’s more likely that the beasts are only beasts, that there really isn’t anything else there.
But tonight, as I sit up typing, a woman in Darwin is scrolling through my feed and taking screenshots. I imagine her sitting at her table, eating her breakfast, drinking tea. After a while, she gets up and puts down the phone. She carries her laundry basket to the laundry room and loads the washing machine, separating the whites and the darks. She thinks of when she last called her mother. She writes a grocery list in her head. She wonders if she should buy new shoes. She pushes her hair back from her face and catches it in a clip. And on the other side of the world, another day begins.