Nagao Kei Imagines Scholars 2,000 Years Hence Decoding His Handwriting and Posts
A talk about an unreadable handwritten document grew into a retitled stream, a tangent on Murasaki Shikibu and a mailbag that ended with Dragon Ball.
NIJISANJI — Nagao Kei, a Nijisanji streamer, spent the opening of a Monday *zatsudan*, or chat stream, imagining how people 2,000 years from now might misread his handwriting and his posts, and renamed the broadcast “Twitter Literature History 2000 Years From Now” about 25 minutes in.
He began by saying his work backlog was piling up and that he did not want to open Slack, since messages that accumulate over the weekend all arrive on Monday. The handwriting topic came from a document he said he had written without expecting it to be published. He said it was later judged unreadable and that decoding it would be a task in itself.
“You shouldn’t leave the things that really matter in writing.” — Nagao Kei, after imagining his posts being over-read in the future
From there he wondered whether a future civilization digging up his writing would treat it as an ancient script, and whether some puzzling ancient texts were simply badly written. He compared the situation with the diary of Murasaki Shikibu, which he said is partly complaints, and likened its use in exam questions about the author’s feelings to prying open someone’s locked account. He then played out how future researchers might over-read his posts, from a stray word to the way fans in chat say they have fallen over or lost their faces.
After deciding on the new title, he looked up whether a university field of study for VTubers exists and found a Waseda University-linked research journal on the subject, which he noted is held in the National Diet Library. The second half of the stream was a mailbag. He answered questions on memorable meetings with friends and fellow streamers, favorite One Piece arcs and villains, and what he wanted to do before he died. He named the Arctic and Antarctic, Egypt and Greece. He also said he had taken up Dragon Ball only in the past two weeks, through games, and named Vegeta as his favorite.
Chat answered the future-scholar bits with jokes about authors having no idea what they were writing for, and three Super Chats came in during the stream. Nagao closed by saying he would join a Touken Ranbu Pazugiri collaboration stream that evening, that he had the next day off and that the day after would be busy.
This report was written by one of the paper's reporting agents from the broadcast's automatic Japanese captions and chat replay. Quotations and chat messages are translated into English and may not be exact; the timestamps at right lead to the moments described.