The 10 Words Japan Cared About Most in 2017 | Nihongo

More and more buzzwords now go viral on social media.

1. Insta-Worthy (insta-bae)

“Insta-worthy” was named Word of the Year for 2017 by Japan's best-known buzzword ranking, the New Words and Buzzwords Awards. “Insta” means Instagram, of course, but this is not the same as snapping any old photo and putting it on social media. An Insta-worthy shot has one requirement: it must look polished enough to pass for a magazine spread.

The craze has spawned a string of viral phenomena. Girls who can't swim go to night pools purely to take pictures, and the hotels have read them perfectly — the whole atmosphere of a night pool is built for posting. Once a restaurant becomes famous online, the Insta-worthy crowd will queue for an hour just to tick another photo spot off the list.

Take pancakes. Instagram holds nearly 2 million posts tagged #pancake. A good Instagram shot can now matter more than a good Tabelog rating (Tabelog is roughly Japan's Dianping), so plenty of Japanese restaurants design their menus around how a dish will look on the plate in a photo.

In July, Lawson launched a “springy jelly” dessert, a cousin of the traditional Japanese sweet shingen mochi. Lawson had expected to sell 300,000 in six weeks. Then it posted a video on Instagram of the jelly wobbling and bouncing, and sales hit 450,000.

Whether the pancakes and the jellies actually taste good hardly matters any more. They only have to photograph well and collect likes.

2. Sontaku

“Sontaku” was also voted one of Japan's buzzwords of 2017. It means guessing what someone in power wants and doing it without being asked. Quite a few Japanese people were unsure of the word's pronunciation or its meaning — and then the rolling coverage of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Moritomo Gakuen scandal turned it into one of the most-used words in the country's news.

A recap of that scandal: Yasunori Kagoike, the man at its center, was questioned in the Diet. Asked whether Abe had benefited from a land deal, he said, “He didn't benefit, but other people engaged in sontaku, assuming Abe was benefiting from his dealings with me.”

Some companies decided to have fun with this unflattering word. We wrote earlier about FamilyMart, which answered a fan poll by releasing a “Sontaku Bento” whose poster and dishes were stuffed with jokes about the Moritomo Gakuen bribery case (read more here).

Moritomo Gakuen is a school in Osaka, so in June an Osaka food company rode the wave with “Sontaku Manju,” a steamed bun. Sold only in the Kansai region, it was an instant hit: 10,000 sold in the first month. By October, cumulative sales had reached 80,000.

Demand ran so far ahead of supply that the company had to cap purchases. It issued a statement along these lines: “We apologize for the trouble this causes our many customers, but we ask you to sontaku a little and bear with us.” On a TV program, the company's president said sontaku was a heavy word, but he hoped that “through the humor in Sontaku Manju, we can put smiles on people's faces.”

3. Sleep Debt (suimin fusai)

“Sleep debt” is an academic idea, first put forward by Stanford professor William Dement: stay in sleep debt — chronically short of sleep — for long enough and your quality of life falls, and it can even trigger serious illness such as depression and cancer. Two straight weeks of fewer than 6 hours a night is the equivalent of two all-nighters.

Once Japanese people heard the phrase, they were alarmed.

In the health ministry's National Health and Nutrition Survey in 2007, 28.4% of Japanese people slept “fewer than 6 hours” a day. By 2015 that figure had climbed to 39.5%. The share sleeping “more than 7 hours” fell from 33.8% in 2007 to 26.5%.

A 2014 OECD survey of average sleep time across member countries put Japan second only to South Korea for the shortest sleep, at an average of 7.43 hours a night. (Chinese people averaged 9.2 hours, the second longest.)

Because their parents are in sleep debt, Japanese children under 3 sleep less than children anywhere else in the world. A survey by the Japanese Society of Child Health once found that more than 50% of Japanese 3-year-olds are still awake at 10 p.m., while 96% of Australian children the same age are already asleep.

The usual explanations for all this lost sleep: fathers get home late from work, mothers get up early to do the housework, and the whole family's body clock is thrown off. Smartphones have done the rest — Japanese people scroll in bed and cannot bring themselves to put the phone down and sleep.

4. 3.5 Billion (35 oku)

Comedians contribute new buzzwords every year, and 2017 was no exception. The comedian Blouson Chiemi said on a TV show: “Men are like chewing gum. Once the flavor's gone, you just take a new piece. How many men do you think there are on Earth? Three and a half billion, plus another 50 million.”

Her gestures and expressions while delivering the line were broad enough that other Japanese entertainers started imitating the “3.5 billion” bit, and Blouson Chiemi became one of the country's most popular comedians of 2017.

Her view of romance — don't settle when a relationship goes wrong — went down well with young Japanese women, and the bit came to be known as a “confident dating guide.” The actress Rei Kikukawa said, “I can't quite explain it, but the idea that it's fine to just be yourself gave me courage.”

The “3.5 billion” bit was nearly the “divide by 2” bit instead. Blouson Chiemi's original line was: “There are 7.1 billion people in the world. Divide by 2 and you get the number of men.” Incidentally, as of 2017 the world's male population was 3.791 billion — not 3.5 billion after all.

5. Hifumi

Two Japanese shogi players held the public's attention this year. One is Sota Fujii, the “super middle schooler” with a 29-game unbeaten streak we have written about before. The other is Hifumi Kato, who played professionally for 62 years and 10 months.

On June 20, the 77-year-old finally announced he was leaving the game. What drew the public to the old master in the first place was Sota Fujii: in December 2016, Kato, a 9-dan player born in 1940, faced Fujii, born in 2002 and freshly turned professional. A match between the 20th century and the 21st was hype enough on its own.

After he announced his retirement, stories about Hifumi Kato circulated widely. He loves cats to the point of obsession, for instance, and fed strays near his home until neighbors took him to court over the nuisance; he was ordered to pay them 2.04 million yen.

He is also currently the only Japanese player with the Meijin title who was born before the war. He was once called a genius, yet he has also lost more than 1,000 games in his career, and even at the bottom of his form he never chose to retire.

Besides playing, the old master often commentates on matches on Niconico in a full-throated, roaring style, and is widely acknowledged as “Niconico's oldest idol.”

He has one very large ambition: to go on contributing to the spread of shogi until he is 123.

6. ○○ First

Running for governor of Tokyo in 2016, Yuriko Koike campaigned on “Tomin First” — Tokyo residents first — and became the city's first female governor. People around the metropolitan government expected “Tomin First” to make that year's top-ten buzzword list. It didn't.

A year later, the phrase Koike set loose finally won a place in Japan's top ten buzzwords of the year, and this time she was unruffled. Asked how she felt about the award, she said: “The person who made the ○○ First formula popular is Mr. Trump.”

On July 2, 2017, Tokyo held its metropolitan assembly election, and Tomin First no Kai, the party Koike leads, took a majority of the seats. After that landslide, the “First” family spread across the country the way the Japan Restoration Party had before it: 46 parties and political groups with “First” in their names sprang up, among them “Hope First” and “Citizens First.”

Koike also says “athlete first” constantly, to signal that the Tokyo Olympics will be built around the athletes. The committee behind the New Words and Buzzwords Awards said it could feel “○○ First” moving out of political language and into ordinary Japanese life: hospitals must be “patient first,” the service industry “customer first.”

7. 72-Hour Honne TV

Japan's national idol group SMAP broke up in 2016, and in September 2017 three former members — Goro Inagaki, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi and Shingo Katori — announced they were formally leaving Johnny & Associates.

Anyone who follows Japanese show business knows how tightly Johnny & Associates controls its performers' image rights. You get absurd situations: a Johnny's talent stars in a drama, but he is missing from the press photos at the launch event, or a magazine runs only his silhouette. So for a Johnny's performer, a social media account? No reason for one to exist.

Once the three men left, that constraint was gone. They chose to give up the mystique and open personal Twitter accounts. Their first official public appearance after the breakup was, fittingly, a collaboration with the Japanese online video platform AbemaTV.

It was no small collaboration: 72 hours of unbroken livestream over three days, on the theme of “things we have never done before.” They talked without restraint, raising the year-end 2016 barbecue dinner that only Takuya Kimura skipped; they sat down with 132 different guests and groups, among them the kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa, the singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and the entrepreneur Takafumi Horie; and they sang 72 songs on air.

The biggest draw was their reunion, after 21 years, with Katsuyuki Mori, who left SMAP in 1996 to become a professional racing driver. “Mori-kun” became the number one trending topic on Twitter worldwide.

The three days drew a combined 74 million views, the most-watched livestream in AbemaTV's history. One advertising agency reckoned 74 million views was equivalent to a 10% TV rating — an excellent result by any measure. For the three men who had left Johnny's, the livestream confirmed that their audience was still there. For the TV networks, it was an unprecedented demonstration of what online variety can do, and it eased, at least somewhat, their reluctance to invite the three back on the air.

8. Kemono Friends

If you see someone on Japanese Twitter saying “Amazing!”, “Can't wait!” and “You're a ◯◯ Friend!” all day, don't wonder about it: they are a fanatical fan of Kemono Friends, the 2017 phenomenon anime that is said to melt your IQ.

Kemono Friends nominally has a science-fiction premise. In a vast combined zoo called Japari Park, some mysterious force has turned the animals into “Friends,” human in shape and animal in trait. One day a lost, bewildered child turns up in the park, and with the Friends along, the trip home becomes an adventure.

The animals may have become Friends one by one, but their IQ has stayed at animal level, so all they can say is “Amazing!”, “Can't wait!” and “You're a ◯◯ Friend!” And a human who finishes a single episode of Kemono Friends finds that their own IQ has melted too, leaving them able to repeat nothing but those three lines.

The show drew little attention when it first aired. As the story unfolded its popularity kept climbing, and its final episode alone collected 1.25 million bullet comments, making it the anime with the most bullet comments in Niconico's history.

The main reason Kemono Friends went viral is this: what looks like a soft, cuddly, IQ-melting cartoon is carrying a grand theme about the survival of the human species and humanity's search for itself.

The ending theme of every episode, for instance, shows an abandoned amusement park, and the “research squad” — fans devoted to digging up the show's details — found that every one of those parks exists in real life, and that every one of them, without exception, closed after a natural or man-made disaster. Think about that for a second and it really is chilling. Viewers happily lose themselves in this world of clue-hunting and trade theories with fellow Friends on social media.

One more thing: in the FamilyMart poll that pitted a “Sontaku Bento” against a “Kemono Friends Bento,” the Sontaku Bento won by a mile. But how could a Japanese convenience store that loves otaku culture pass up a tie-in with a hit anime? A whole wave of FamilyMart x Kemono Friends products is already on the shelves in Japan.

9. Feel Free to Use This (○○ ni tsukatte ii yo)

Koichi Yamadera, a famous voice actor, probably never imagined that a man with a voice like his would one day go viral on Twitter for his face.

It started with one of Yamadera's tweets. In the photo he glances back at the camera, entirely naturally. An ordinary picture, made viral by his caption: “Feel free to use this as a shot of you on a date with your boyfriend.” Celebrities, ordinary users, even mascots got hooked on posting their own pretend-date photos on Twitter.

This lonely selfie war peaked when the actress Kanna Hashimoto entered it. She posted a selfie on Twitter, probably taken on the day of her high school graduation ceremony, and wrote, without hesitation, “Feel free to use this as a shot of you on a date with your girlfriend.” In no time Japanese Twitter filled up with users imagining Kanna Hashimoto as their girlfriend.

Sharp, which never misses a trending topic, posted a photo captioned, “Feel free to use this as a shot of you on a date with a vacuum cleaner.” Users fired back one after another: I'm dating an iRobot, I'm dating a Dyson, I'm dating a Sharp (attached: a photo of a Dyson). Sharp replied, furiously, “Then I wish you and your Dyson every happiness (angry face)” — which was rather endearing.

Given how far Japanese users will take an idea, the “feel free to use this” tag naturally went off the rails: “Feel free to use this as the time you ran into Hentai Kamen on the street” (attached: a user cosplaying the masked pervert superhero), “Feel free to use this as the time a beautiful woman on the street turned to look back at you” (attached: a glance-back selfie by a man dressed as a woman).

10. Controversy ○○ (enjo ○○)

The most common use of this buzzword is enjo shoho, controversy marketing: getting attention by courting a fight.

In July, Miyagi Prefecture, one of the areas worst hit by the 2011 earthquake, put a tourism ad on YouTube in which the sultry actress Dan Mitsu delivers lines loaded with sexual innuendo. Several female members of the prefectural assembly promptly protested to the governor that the ad discriminated against women and demanded it be taken down. But Governor Yoshihiro Murai, noting that the ad's view count had shot past 2 million, called it turning misfortune into fortune.

People soon worked out that this not especially well-made ad had cost 23 million yen out of the disaster-recovery budget. Most users online were disgusted that a local government would use controversy marketing to buy itself attention.

An ad for a new Suntory beer was pulled under pressure over a dirty joke in it. In the 30-odd hours it was public, it still took more than 27,000 views on YouTube.

The insurance advisory firm Hoken Buffet ran a controversy-marketing ad too. The woman in it is seeing several men at once; the man, eyes brimming, asks her, “What am I to you, really?” She answers coldly: “Insurance.”

The ad looks like a story about a man being toyed with, but plenty of users felt it also objectified women. Having managed to annoy male and female viewers at once, it was reported and banned from further broadcast.

The other masters of controversy marketing are the hosts and variety-show regulars who work across the channels. Sharp tongues like Matsuko Deluxe and Hiroyuki Ariyoshi stay popular because they know exactly how far to go, while some variety regulars, faking candor to manufacture an uproar, end up topping polls of the most disliked variety personalities. Where you draw the line, in other words, is what controversy marketing lives or dies on.

Cover image via aumo