An American man who grew up in Japan says he likes to mutter in fluent Japanese near Japanese speakers, then act like he never said a word

Josh Collins spent his formative years in Japan before he came back to America. Recently, he admitted that one way he likes to use his Japanese language skills is to “mess with people who speak Japanese and make them think that they’re crazy.” In a post that got over two million views on Instagram (oyasumisushii) and TikTok (oyasumisushi), he shared that he likes to throw random Japanese sentences at unsuspecting Japanese speakers and then act like he never said a word.

In the post’s caption, Collins described it as “kinda like a super power with a bad accent,” and admitted that he finds it funny. He told viewers the last time he did this was at a Triumph motorcycle demo in Indianapolis. He then acted out the conversation by shifting camera angles, explaining that he opened by asking in Japanese whether they had ridden the bike yet.

When the person looked confused, Collins switched to English to ask if they were planning to ride it. He then acted out the person’s confusion and dropped a few more words in Japanese before insisting he did not speak Chinese. Throughout the conversation, he slipped in random Japanese sentences, only to pretend he had been speaking English or to say he “didn’t speak Mandarin.” He capped it off with a traditional Japanese sign-off, leaving the person even more confused.

The internet loved Collins’s prank

Most users in the comments found the prank hilarious and shared stories about how they use their own bilingualism. Some shared that they had caught people talking about them. Others described using it at work, with one user writing that the language came in handy when a Japanese team visited a Toyota factory.

At its core, Collins’s prank is a form of code-switching, the practice of using more than one language or variety in a social interaction. According to EURAC Research, it is a complex cognitive process that helps speakers navigate different linguistic systems.

EURAC Research suggests that frequent code-switching can strengthen executive functions like attention and self-regulation. It also involves specific brain regions, such as the frontosubcortical regions that help suppress the language not in use and the temporal regions that function as a mental dictionary.

Viewers had plenty of jokes of their own. One user called it “Bilingual gaslighting,” while another quipped that Collins was an example of “chaotic neutral.” Japanese speakers said they wouldn’t even need the whole conversation, with one user noting they would “flip” just hearing Japanese in Indianapolis.

Another user shared that they once pulled a similar trick at a party on a guest who was smoking weed. They wrote that they kept slipping in Swedish words until they “Ended up speaking mostly Swedish to a very high and confused American.”

Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify the Japanese rider’s side of the story, as this account originates solely from Collins’s TikTok and Instagram posts.