Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be discourse. I have no idea what I am talking about. But I do have what I think is a somewhat novel perspective on this, even if it isn't actually informative or entirely correct.

Okay so there's this meme. I mostly see this in discussion about Spoon¹ because it's the only competitive multiplayer game I pay any attention to, but I'm pretty sure it's also a thing for other games. The meme, so it goes, is that seeing players with Japanese names on the other team is a frightening omen, because you're probably about to lose, because these players are, in some way, supernaturally good.

The weird thing is, I live in Australia, so considering the proximity in physical distance and time zone, Spoon ends up matching me with people in Japan a lot. And in my personal experience, the meme doesn't make any sense! Lone players with Japanese names² don't seem to be standout MVPs any more often than average, and even the rare times the matchmaking decides to make what is apparently a full Australia vs. Japan battle it's still a coin flip.³ Japanese players just don't seem to be any better on average. The only significant difference I've noticed is that Japanese players are much less likely to "Booyah!" right at the start of the match, and I think this is because - hold on, let me check the wiki...

Okay yeah, this is a translation thing: the signal called "Booyah!" in English is "ナイス" ("Naisu") in Japanese, which is apparently a loanword of "nice" and "chiefly used as an immediate approving response to an action", so it's a slightly unusual thing to say right at the start of a game before anything's even happened.⁴

Anyway. The meme is that Japanese players are better, and generally I see people giving two explanations for this. The first is that Japanese players are just somehow better at the game; being more dedicated, or serious about winning, or just playing more, or something.⁵ Sure, maybe, but if this had a major effect (which somehow transcends the matchmaking?), then I think I should be able to notice it myself, considering how often I'm playing with them. The other explanation is basically "lag". Fair enough, I have nothing but the smoothest connection to Japan thanks to it being pretty close and most of that distance being one undersea cable, so if lag confers some advantage that'd explain why it isn't something I've noticed. Then again, I'm still not totally sure lag is always an advantage - being in a Spoon game with somebody who's lagging badly always feels to me more like everybody suffers together.

So I have my own two explanations of what's going on. First, maybe it's basically just a self-sustaining meme. Partly just through plain confirmation bias - if you hear that Japanese players are supposedly really good, you're going to take note of when the guy with the E-liter who's totally cleaning up happens to be Japanese - and partly because maybe you're liable to get self-conscious and play worse against somebody who you think is going to be better than you. Adding to this is that if you can't read Hiragana at all, you can't tell if people are playing under coordinated team names or terrible joke names, which adds a bit of an aura of mystery to playing against them.

The second thing that I think might be going on, and I swear I actually planned to open the post with this and then accidentally wrote way too much, is time zones. In online video games, the Japan/North America time zone matchup is just favourable to Japan! Americans being the deciders of internet culture they are, I think it's this time zone effect that largely explains the meme.

Japan is somewhere between 13 and 17 hours ahead of North America depending on what NA timezone you're in exactly. So while in New York you're staying up late to play video games at 3am, somebody in Tokyo is playing their first match of the day at 5pm, and maybe if you weren't sleep-deprived it'd be a close game which is why the matchmaking put you together, but you're probably going to get destroyed through the incredible power of circadian rhythm. And if you're playing at a reasonable time, maybe late afternoon or early evening, the matchup is still a little weird, because these times are around Japan's morning. In my view, anybody who's playing an online video game at 9am is probably at least a bit dedicated to it, and this might be the case where they just seem to have more skill.

Surely, at least, playing a game as part of your morning routine is a better predictor of dedication than just being from a country, right?

I don't even know. Probably all these things (skill, lag, psychology, timing) contribute to it at least somewhat. I couldn't find anybody mentioning timing as a factor, though, which is why I bothered to write this whole thing. Look basically all I'm saying here is that you probably shouldn't be afraid of Hiragana; you should be afraid of everybody who's less tired than you are.

1. Splatoon; I'm committing to this bit.
2. The terminology situation is weird here because it's completely impossible to tell where any given player is actually playing from. This whole thing is based on whether people have names written in Hiragana or the Latin alphabet, but supposedly some people who only know English put down random Hiragana to leverage the meme as a psychological tactic, and surely some Japanese players also put in English names, so there's a lot of noise in the data and really I'm not sure anybody can say what's actually going on. I've written "Japanese players" a few times in here even in cases where I can't actually be sure, just because it's less words than the more accurate version.
3. There's only one of these in my last 50 battles and my team won, no doubt on account of my own incredible skill.⁶
4. This made me wonder how the name of the "Booyah Bomb" translates into Japanese and apparently it's effectively called "Nice Ball". In the North American French localisation it's literally "Excellinator", which is excellent.
5. A couple reddit comments I found while looking this up to make sure I didn't just imagine the whole thing claimed that this advantage comes from Japan being the country where Spoon was made. I hope that those were just trying to get at the fact that Spoon, starting with the first game on the Wii U, has always had better sales in Japan than outside it, so any random Japanese player is a bit more likely than the global average to have been playing since the very first game. This is actually a fair point made more clearly in some other comments and I am hiding it in this footnote because it doesn't fit the weird argument I'm trying to make here very well.
6. Actually it probably has more to do with the two people on my team who got more splats than anybody else having Respawn Punisher.