The Revolution Will Be Televised
by Andrew Bayley
Toyama Koichi is a 36 year old street musician, who in his spare time heads the Kyushu Fascist Party. Much of it can be put down to his rather controversial, albeit compelling political speech, aired on television, and rapidly uploaded to YouTube. Containing such riveting lines as “If I get elected, they will be terrified. I myself will be terrified.” It's no surprise that it took off the way it did. In a move that could only have helped his popularity, Tokyo’s election commission asked for the video to be removed from YouTube. He subsequently became something of a Japanese interweb phenomenon, 2nd in popularity only to anime character, “Haruhi Suzumiya.” In the ensuing fray, the video was co-opted, edited and remixed, spawning, amongst others, a Star Wars version, a JPop version, and my favourite, a 1930’s styled vintage version. The story ends rather dully, with Shintaro Ishihara, the incumbent Liberal Democrat winning convincingly, with 2 811 486 votes. UPDATE: Apparently the embedding on the video has been "disabled by request". There are a couple of other versions but if you want to watch the one with English subtitles do so here.
He has recently served 2 years in jail for sedition, and comes across, on a good day, as totally unhinged. So how did he garner 15 000 votes in the Tokyo gubernatorial election?
Subscribe
RSS to Email
Get our latest blog posts delivered straight to your inbox.
eMarketing News
Subscribe to our fortnightly newsletter which is packed with interesting eMarketing news, views and other quirky titbits.
December
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
Archives
Categories
- General (586)
- PPC & Affiliates (30)
- Search Engine Marketing (94)
- WebPR (38)
- Online Reputation Management (38)
- Email Marketing (12)
- Design (18)
- Viral Marketing (192)
- Conversion Optimisation (14)
- Website Development (38)
- Industry Events (60)
- Quirky Stuff (115)
- Social Media (87)
- Work at Quirk (10)
- Friday Fact Box (24)
- Interviews (13)
- Guest Posts (4)
- Nice Finds of the Week (4)
Recent Posts
- A Day in the Life of Marketing
- Designing for the iPhone
- With Nandos We Can COPE
- Bike Hero
- Heineken Shows the Signs
Recent Comments
- gavich on Designing for the iPhone
- Janine on Designing for the iPhone
- Kelly on With Nandos We Can COPE
- Guy McLaren on With Nandos We Can COPE
- Tony Roocroft on Conversion Optimisation Tools
More photos of the QuirkStars At Play
Name:
Friends of Quirk
Websites:
www.quirk.biz
