A Foreign Otaku Was Told Japan Sorts People Into SHADOW and SUNSHINE, and Instantly Knew Which One He Was

What's going on

Japanese has a pair of slang words for sorting people by social temperament: inkya and yokya. The first character in each is the one for shade and the one for sun — the same two characters as yin and yang — and the tail end is a clipped form of the word "character." An inkya is the quiet one, the indoor one, the one who eats lunch alone and prefers it that way. A yokya is loud, sociable, the middle of the group photo. Both get used constantly, mostly as light self-description, and neither carries much weight.

Someone explained the system to a non-Japanese otaku friend, and in doing so translated the two words straight across: SHADOW and SUNSHINE. In English, cut loose from the ordinary sound of the Japanese, they stop being playground slang and start sounding like classes you pick at character creation. The friend reportedly went quiet for a moment, then announced in the lowest voice he could manage that he must therefore be… 𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒅𝒐𝒘.

Japanese readers found this argument completely convincing. What followed was a large number of people reclassifying themselves on the spot, filing status reports on the shadow's morning commute, working out where the in-between people belong, and proposing subclasses. The stretched italic lettering that keeps showing up (𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒅𝒐𝒘) is a Unicode trick used to make plain text look portentous; the 🥷 handles the rest.