Welcome! I'm the gaijin — Rob Morgan

     I’ve been playing games and watching anime for almost 40 years — long enough to remember when both were niche obsessions you had to explain to people. Manga came later. And somewhere along the way, Japan itself became the real fascination: the language, the culture, the history, all of it. These days I’m grinding toward fluency and, eventually, a move to Japan. Gaijin Grind is where I share a healthy dose of otaku opinions — plus my Japanese journey.

     My gaming life started at age three, when my mom brought home an Atari 2600 with Pac-Man and Pitfall. Watching my TV turn into something I could actually play left a permanent mark on me. I was hooked — and gaming quickly became a great escape from a rough daily life.

     Those were also the years of waking up early on school days for cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe. Then one morning I couldn’t sleep and got up extra early. I flipped on the TV expecting the usual, and instead found a weird little kid with a monkey tail, drawn in an art style unlike anything I’d seen — strange, but I couldn’t look away. That was my first episode of the original Dragon Ball. Right after came a goofy girl named Usagi Tsukino — better known as Sailor Moon — and that sealed it. I was hooked on this new kind of “cartoon.”

     I was a bullied outcast in a tiny town, so naturally I did what any normal neurodivergent kid would do: I spent most of my time in the library, buried in books, researching what anime was, where it came from, everything I could find. That’s when I tumbled down the Japan rabbit hole and picked up the lifelong obsession with the country, its culture, and its history that I carry to this day.