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Comment by whym | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the Zoom interview was conducted in his native language. If not, he might have been trying to say "I learn from how Jesus founded Christianity and apply that to how I operate my company," which is a bit strange thing to say but not as creepy as "I'm Jesus."

It looks like Kumagai is (at least previously he said he was) a Christian. https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/29818?page=3

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Even if he is Christian; it's kind of strange to me that people don't realize that other cultures will use Western cultural references that might be very "heavy" in a different, much more casual way. I mean, Western companies talk about code "ninjas" all the time; and I have heard a few samurai and zen references too.

Japan talking about Christians isn't particularly different. Christianity and comparisons to it are made relatively casually, with much less cultural weight than they would have in the US or Europe. Here's a Japanese rap song [1] whose lyrics [2] go, "As the Bible is to a devout Christian, so to me is is the Zulu Nation" (translation [2]).

So in my opinion the "internet Jesus uses secret creed" thing is at least mildly clickbaity. It'd be the equivalent of seizing upon the name "Zen of Python" to write an article about "A Language with a simplicity driven by Buddhism".

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnJMBcQFNME#t=2m51s

[2] https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-aklo-rgto-eng...

>Western cultural references that might be very "heavy" in a different, much more casual way

Just to prove your point - crucified Santa Claus [0]

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-21/how-the-iconography-o...

I'm Zulu. What on earth are they singing about?

Probably a reference to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Zulu_Nation

The lyrics reference that directly.

That makes sense.

Japan in particular is completely unsurprising as Christianity features prominently in a lot of anime

Many people I know here in Japan wear crosses and have figurines of the Virgin Mary and so on not because they care about Christianity at all, but because it looks cute.

That clip where Anno is asked why the Evangelions are named that way is always relevant.

https://youtu.be/rGJ_Kq8qifQ?t=379

It does not shock me and it probably was actually "a Jesus" with the indefinite article which does not exist in Japanese.

Non-native English readers see everywhere terms like "product evangelist", so that's not a leap at all to call a very good evangelist "a Jesus".

Could be that he maintains polytheistic views. That’s the default for most Japanese person rooting for the culture, the lord in Christianity in this mindset is just an another god and his religion that one may or may not buy into.

It's not a great leap to assume that relaying your equivalent role to an audience by referencing a familiar icon would be effective.

"You know the office? I'm basically Michael Scott." "To these people, I am Steve Jobs."

Christianity has a particular bug about calling oneself "Jesus", as in, "the second coming of Christ" and goes on high alert over it. That's what I got out of it, at least.

if it was in Japanese, he probably referred to himself as "kami-sama" rather than Jesus Christ, in which case it could be interpreted as your <god of reference> depending on your own religion.

EDIT: if he actually referred to himself as being "Jesus Christ" it would make absolutely no sense, since Jesus never had priests working under him.

He did have 12 disciples tho.

A disciple can be a random follower. Priest is something different altogether.

>EDIT: if he actually referred to himself as being "Jesus Christ" it would make absolutely no sense, since Jesus never had priests working under him.

Huh? He had apostles/disiples, and he explicitly prepared them and send them to found churches all over the world...

They were not priests.

In traditional Christian thought, they were priests in both the universal Christian sense and in the sense of the ordained office, since that office is fully contained within the office of bishop, which is fully contained within the unique and only partially (exactly as far as the office of bishop) transferrable office conferred upon each of the Apostles by Christ.

> Jesus never had priests working under him.

In the traditional Christian understanding on which the concept of apostolic succession is grounded he did, because the the apostles are ur-bishops and bishops are priests.

According to the actual bible, all christians are priests.

TBH that would be even more weird. Customers are kami-sama, never yourself.

I think we're reading a bit too much into this: he was riffing off the "GMO-ism is a religion" theme and went a bit far with the metaphor, but Jesus is meant here as a "leader of religion", not literally God because trinity and all that. (Japan not being a Christian nation, the average Japanese knows next to nothing about Christianity.)

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