Snowden felt passionately about Japan from his early teens. He had spent a year and a half studying Japanese; he dropped ‘Arigatou gozaimasu!’ and other phrases into his first Ars chat. Snowden sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name. He dubbed himself: ‘E-do-waa-do’ and wrote in 2001: ‘I’ve always dreamed of being able to “make it” in Japan. I’d love a cushy .gov job over there.’ He played Tekken obsessively; playing an everyman-warrior battling evil against the odds shaped his moral outlook, he later said. Between 2002 and 2004 he worked as the webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a Japanese anime website.
Snowden was keen to improve his language and technical skills. In 2009 he signed up for summer school at a Tokyo-based campus affiliated to the University of Maryland’s University College.
During Japan, Snowden’s online activity dries up, however. He pretty much stops posting on Ars Technica. Japan marks a turning point. It is the period when Snowden goes from disillusioned technician to proto-whistleblower. As Snowden had sight of more top-secret material, showing the scale of NSA data mining, his antipathy towards the Obama administration grew. ‘I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in,’ Snowden says, adding of his Japan period: ‘I got hardened.’
Between 2009 and 2012 Snowden says he found out just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities are: ‘They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.’ He also realised another uncomfortable truth: that the congressional oversight mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. ‘You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.’
By the time he left Japan in 2012, Snowden was a whistleblower-in-waiting.