Katsuhiro Harada’s work on the Tekken franchise has allowed him to travel the world and meet many of his international fans. While he considers himself relatively good at reading and writing in English, he has admitted to occasionally struggling with foreign fans’ comments and messages using slang, citing a hilarious misunderstanding of a 2019 cookout invitation as an example.
After Leroy Smith was announced as a Tekken 7 DLC character in 2019, a group of elated American fans invited Harada to a cookout. Unfortunately, he misunderstood the invitation, thinking he’d somehow offended his African American fanbase.
He reveals that it was during this time that the slang word “cooked” started appearing more frequently online. Used to describe people and things in completely abysmal states, Harada often encountered the term when arguing against articles that seemed to be hell-bent on spreading hate toward video games. Whenever Harada would completely shut down an argument, fans would reply with “cooked.”
With that knowledge, Harada assumed that the word “cookout” was a stronger variation of “cooked.” Instead of seeing the fan invitation as a friendly get-together, he thought that they wanted to “beat him up and roast him.”
Eventually, someone explained to him that a cookout invitation was one of the highest honors one could receive in the African American community, the equivalent of being trusted enough to be invited to an event that only close friends and family members could attend.
Another instance of Harada misunderstanding American slang was when fans kept calling him the “fxxking GOAT” and spamming his posts with goat emojis. What was meant to be a form of praise was instead seen as an insult, with Harada thinking people were comparing him to an animal. Notably, when faced with this kind of “hate” (though it turned out not to be the case in both instances), Harada’s first instinct was to try and learn more about the culture as to prevent offending people again, an attitude many of his fans have praised.
