User:Julian Grybowski

Julian Grybowski is the name of a contributor to Wikipedia. Namely, er, me, the writer of this article.

I am a 32-year-old grad student studying international relations; as an undergrad, I majored in cultural anthropology with a minor in Japanese. I also devote a fair bit of time and energy to the fields (some more academic than others) of typography, science fiction, British comedy, Japanese history, and Japanese comics and animation. I currently reside in the United States while I attend school, though I previously spent eight years in Japan, and my wife and three children currently reside in Osaka. I intend to move back over there one I finish my master's degree.

My initial contributions to Wikipedia were to articles relating to the manga and anime series One Piece and Dragon Ball, though my interests gradually fanned out into such disparate areas as evolutionary biology, men's formalwear, typography, and Japanese rail transportation (though I make no claim at being an expert into these last three). My most extensive contributions to Wikipedia include:
 * the Tozai Line of the Kyoto Municipal Subway (much of the page I translated personally from the Japanese version at the time, with only a few confusing or seemingly-opinionated bits left out). I had a personal investment in the article, since I rode the line every day for about 3 and a half months in 2006. I hope to do more Japanese translations in the future, if only to clean up the bizarre syntax on some articles whose editors appear to have resorted to Babelfish for the sake of having something for an English version.
 * the Kansai dialect of Japanese, spoken in the area where I currently live. Non-standard dialects in general are one of the things that fascinate me about languages everywhere.
 * the JR Nara Line, which I also rode every day for three and a half months when I studied in Kyoto. I translated the Japanese article into English, because the English version at the time was lacking. It sounds like they'll finally be duplicating most of the line, which is good news in my book (not that it'll help me get to class on time over a decade ago).

While I tend to let a lot of minor edits slide, I jump into action when I see serious factual errors or vandalism in articles I am knowledgeable about. I try and keep people honest with themselves about their own biases, though I admit there are times where I'm tempted to let certain things stand if I don't disagree.

Mainly, though, I'd really just like to get through to certain people that established facts are non-negotiable unless you're willing to put in the time and effort to disprove (well, disconfirm) them through repeatable experiment. My study of anthropology has taught me that humans will be humans, which is quite admirable in its way. But I am also highly conscious of the fact that nature doesn't care what humans think, and those who wish to impose their own belief systems on reality are going to be worse off in the long run. So I try to keep an open mind about things.