During last year's annual pitch accent war, Khatz (i.e. from AJATT) also returned to the Internet briefly with a series of short videos sharing his opinion:
VIDEO 1:
【AJATT: Youtube版】Khatzumoto answers about Japanese PITCH accent?VIDEO 2:
【YT AJATT】Japanese Pitch accent question Part 2 ー日本語のアクセントについてVIDEO 3:
Khatzumoto, Humble One, Prince of Japanese, He Who Braggeth Not, Gives the Last Word on Pitch AccentKhatz is a strange mix of random tangents, stream of consciousness, and in a contradictory way, sometimes getting to the point rather quickly. It's kind of weird hearing his randomness now in spoken audio format
The thing about the pitch accent debate, though, is that different approaches may suit different people. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy imitating movie music themes and TV ad jingles on the piano, and I became quite good at it. But then of course there also exist people who are tone deaf, and depending on their starting point it could take a lot of training to become good at such a skill. I think Khatz probably became good at imitating because he enjoyed doing it(*), just like Richard Simcott stated that he really enjoyed playing a game where he would try to impersonate the accent of a native speaker of some language B who was speaking a foreign language C. So we'd have an Englishman, for fun, trying to speak French with a German accent. I do think this sort of fun activity is a great way to develop good observation and imitation skills, but different people may also enjoy different things.
(*) Also, Khatz was already bilingual before learning Japanese, and his other language is a
tonal language.