There Was a Time I Thought That Way Too: Baki's Most Condescending Life Lesson

The Internet’s Favorite Way to Win an Argument by Losing One First

Every language has a phrase for telling someone they are wrong without technically saying they are wrong. English has “Bless your heart.” French has an entire tonal register. Japanese has a sentence from a martial arts manga in which a teenager once fought an earthquake, and somehow this is the version that feels the most intellectually devastating.

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From Baki by Keisuke Itagaki. © Keisuke Itagaki / Akita Shoten.

The phrase is 「そんなふうに考えていた時期が俺にもありました」 — “sonna fuu ni kangaeteita jiki ga ore ni mo arimashita” — and it translates roughly to “There was a time when I thought that way too.” It originates from Chapter 223 of Baki, Keisuke Itagaki’s monument to the proposition that all human conflict can be resolved through increasingly implausible hand-to-hand combat. During a Chinese martial arts tournament, someone observes that boxing is limited because it lacks kicks. Baki, the protagonist, agrees — he too once thought that way. Then he redefines the act of moving one’s feet across the ground as “kicking the earth,” thereby reclassifying all of footwork as a form of kicking.

The logic is insane. The rhetorical structure is flawless. The internet noticed.

A Grammatical Anatomy of Condescension

Let us disassemble this sentence with the precision it deserves.

• そんなふうに (sonna fuu ni) — “in that way.” The word sonna is deliberately vague, a demonstrative that gestures at the other person’s entire worldview without dignifying it with specifics. It is the verbal equivalent of waving your hand in someone’s general direction.

• 考えていた (kangaeteita) — “was thinking.” This is the past progressive form, and the tense is doing critical work. Not “thought” (a single event) but “was thinking” (a sustained condition). The speaker held this belief for a duration. Long enough to live in it. Long enough to outgrow it. The past progressive implies a process of evolution that the listener has not yet begun.

• 時期が (jiki ga) — “a period.” Not a moment, not an occasion — a phase. The word jiki frames the belief as a developmental stage, something you pass through on the way to maturity. It is the same word a parent might use to describe a child’s dinosaur obsession. The particle ga marks it as the grammatical subject, placing this phase at the center of the sentence’s architecture.

• 俺にも (ore ni mo) — “even for me.” Here is where the sentence becomes a weapon. Ore is the blunt, masculine first-person pronoun — it signals confidence. But mo (also/even) is the payload. That single particle creates false solidarity with the listener. “Even I, the person who has clearly transcended this level, once stood where you stand now.” It frames condescension as empathy. It offers a hand while standing on a higher step.

• ありました (arimashita) — “there was.” Past tense, polite form. The politeness is the final turn of the knife. The speaker is not being rude. The speaker is being civil about the fact that you are still operating at a level they left behind.

The complete structure achieves something remarkable: it sounds like humble self-reflection but functions as a declaration of superiority. The speaker admits to having once been wrong — thereby establishing that they are now right, that the listener is currently wrong, and that this wrongness is a stage one simply grows out of, like a phase or a rash.

Why Japan Deploys This Daily

The meme has escaped Baki entirely and entered the vernacular of Japanese internet culture as a universal response template. Common deployment scenarios include:

When someone says they do not need a rice cooker because a regular pot works fine. When a junior developer announces that version control is unnecessary for small projects. When a new employee claims they can maintain work-life balance. When anyone, anywhere, expresses confidence about a timeline estimate.

The phrase thrives in corporate settings. Japanese office culture already operates on layered indirection — meetings where disagreement is expressed through silence and approval is expressed through different silence. “There was a time I thought that way too” fits this ecosystem perfectly. It disagrees without disagreeing. It corrects without correcting. It is the most passive-aggressive sentence in a language that elevated passive aggression to a communication protocol centuries ago.

There is also the Baki-specific absurdity that fuels the meme’s popularity. This phrase comes from a manga where characters have punched imaginary mantises to train their reflexes, where a caveman was revived to fight modern martial artists, and where the protagonist’s father stopped an earthquake by punching the ground. The fact that the series’ most enduring cultural contribution is a rhetorical technique rather than a fight scene is, in its own way, the most Baki thing possible.

What Gets Lost in Translation

The English approximation — “I used to think that too” — captures the denotation and misses the connotation entirely. The English version sounds like commiseration. Two people sharing an experience. The Japanese version sounds like a sensei watching a student make a predictable mistake and choosing to be gracious about it.

The key difference is temporal architecture. In the Japanese, the past progressive (kangaeteita) combined with jiki (period) creates a narrative of personal growth that the listener is implicitly still waiting to experience. English “used to” is flat — it marks something as past without implying a journey. The Japanese version tells a story in which the speaker is the protagonist and the listener is a flashback.

There is also the matter of ore ni mo. “I used to think that too” places speaker and listener on equal footing. “Even for me, there was such a period” (ore ni mo) places the speaker above and extends a hand downward. The “too” in English creates symmetry. The mo in Japanese creates hierarchy.

How to Deploy This Like a Native

If you wish to use this phrase authentically, observe the following principles:

1. The target must be confident. This phrase does not work against doubt. It works against certainty. The listener must believe they are right. Your job is to let them know that their certainty is a phase.

2. Never explain why you changed your mind. The power of the phrase lies in the gap. You once thought that way. You no longer do. The listener is left to imagine what revelation awaits them, which is always more devastating than any specific argument.

3. Maintain absolute calm. This is not a comeback. It is a eulogy for the listener’s current worldview, delivered in advance.

4. Context is optional. The beauty of the Baki original is that the “correction” — footwork is kicking the earth — is completely unhinged. The phrase works regardless of whether your alternative perspective is reasonable or deranged. In fact, it may work better when it is deranged.

Baki is a manga about a young man who wants to become the strongest creature on earth. He achieves this not through superior technique but through the conviction that every physical law is a suggestion. His greatest contribution to Japanese culture is a sentence about being wrong in the past tense.

There was a time when that would have surprised me.