Originally published at: Smoothbrain launches fireworks in the middle of Tokyo's busiest pedestrian intersection | Boing Boing
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he reportedly told police that he “wanted to stand out”. Police say the man was a self-employed individual in his 30s
Are social media “influencers” as big a thing in Japan as they are in the U.S.?
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I personally don’t like the term “smoothbrain” because it implies that the stupid behavior was the result of a medical condition, and plenty of people with atypical brain anatomy are perfectly decent folks who don’t do shit like this.
Seriously, having an average brain size is not nearly as important as a lot of people assume. This guy has a tiny amount of brain material compared to most people but still lives a normal life:
There are also a number of known cases where people have lived normal lives with no cerebellum at all. Apparently other parts of the brain are able to take over those functions.
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I prefer this method of protest better than the typical American method of capping off a few magazines from a AR-15 into the crowd.
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Please tell me a heist when on at the same time!
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Reading this, I initially wondered if it was an American, because that’s the kind of thing Americans like to do. (Doing something to get attention, e.g. setting off some fireworks, and then proselytizing, incoherently, would be totally American white evangelical move, for instance.) But no, it sounds like a local asshole.
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I’m not sure of the view from the inside, but from what I’ve seen they’re at least aware of the concept of becoming internet famous and are leveraging it in various ways. I’ve seen some newer anime with characters referencing uploading to video sites and at least one with a character making an income off the process. There’s also the Vtuber thing, which was largely popularized by Japan’s COVER Corp and its HoloLive agency.
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When I first got to Japan as a teacher in the mid-90s, I attended some summer English club retreat with students and teachers from the high school I’d be teaching at. I was pretty shocked when, after dinner one night, THE TEACHERS broke out bottle rockets and roman candles, and HANDED THEM OUT to the students, who proceeded to shoot them off in an open baseball field (all dirt, of course). And by “shoot them off,” I mean “mostly at each other.” It was one of the most insane pieces of culture shock I’ve ever felt.
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So the world’s busiest intersection doesn’t have Police permanently stationed there? But oh my god when they did come, they came in force. I approve.
You sure about that?
He’s lucky that he didn’t cause a crowd surge. Which might have been his goal.
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One tiny detail. It was Nijisanji that was the first big agency and the more popular one overall in the Japanese market. Although Cover is more popular outside of the japanese and mainland chinese market partly due to Anycolor’s weird branching structure choices they had made (trying to launch into the english market first with the Nijisanji India branch wtf were they thinking with that one, the korean and indonesian branches being held together in such a weird way that they ended up being folded into the main japanese branch). But in the western market I do give credit to Niji for bringing out the male focused Luxiem & Noctyx branches before Cover had gotten Holostar English out (although Cover is much more picky about who they bring in and I seem to prefer their lineup. what? i like that old fart bike otaku lmao.)
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