ｱｰｳ

[00:00:00]Today's Japanese slang term is how why is that in half with katakana?

[00:00:04]Is there some like special way I'm supposed to pronounce it? Can you can you give me an example?

[00:00:08]>> [sighs] >> Is that right?

[00:00:12]I don't know. Anyway, today's Japanese slang term is Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, so okay. This thing is one that I encountered because Model Press a intame and the lifestyle news societal >> Is the Japanese language being conquered by English loan words?

[00:00:28]>> released a list of the top buzzwords for the first half of this year and there it is.

[00:00:32]This thing comes from a series of McDonald's advertisements which were done with Sakaki Maika an idol from the band equals love. And these basically follow the format of most advertisements and then an attractive person enjoys the product but also in this case there's some rock music and before enjoying product attractive PERSON SAYS OW.

[00:00:56]LONG STORY SHORT HERE THEN IS POPULAR person says thing in mass media and therefore it goes viral with the first of these advertisements coming out in April 30th of 2026 which is why if you look at Google Trends you can see a spike of interest in from January of 2026. That's odd. Let's not think about that for now and just keep going because unquestionably soon after these advertisements a lot of people started using online as clearly inspired by these advertisements. For instance, this person here uses it to refer to the burger that is being advertised and they're going viral too with 38,000 likes. And here's another person that also went viral with 33,000 likes quote treating that first person to note that the burger in the first image is actually incorrect. Wait.

[00:01:39]That's the same person. Anyway, no but this is definitely authentic and real virality. Let's look at another example of a viral tweet with 15,000 likes quoting the Model Press site to note you know their happiness about becoming [laughter] a thing. Oh, that's the same person again.

[00:01:55]I should look up who that person is.

[00:01:59]Okay, so Sashihara Rino, the producer of = Love as well as a number of other popular bands and formal idol member. Okay, um so she's excited about then because she's in charge of the person that's doing the advertisement, and that's also why she's saying Watashi with exclamation mark and a question mark, which Modelpress also included on their list because that's from the song Kyun Kawajinsei by the band Not Me, which has a not equal sign in front of it, which is another band that Sashihara also produces.

[00:02:32]So, yeah, the only real viral discussion of online is from the person who is financially invested in the success of the model saying But, I am being a little facetious here in that there are other people using this online to some extent. Oddly enough, to refer to the hamburger being advertised. For instance, this person here is going through a McDonald's drive-thru, and they note how their lunch is going to be and that is a burger. And this person is even verbing it, whereas I guess is the verb for having this burger, and they're going to humbly receive the ability to do that if we overly translate the keigo. And look, there's a few people out there that are using this phrase specifically in reference to stuff that Sasaki did because they're a Sasaki fan, and that makes sense, I guess. But, honestly, if you look at the top hits for this phrase in half with katakana on Twitter at any time this year, except for the ones by Sashihara, they all relate to something else, and that brings us back to that Google Trends chart. That's what we call foreshadowing in the writing industry because the vast majority of discussion of this term, including viral tweets with tens of thousands of likes and small tweets that no one besides me has really ever seen, brings us to our good friend Speaky.

[00:03:42]Welcome back. So, if you missed my video on Choayo, which I spent way more time on than almost any video I've ever spent time on, but it didn't do that well overall, but I'm not bitter about it or anything. It's definitely not stuck in my craw and frustrating me on a day-to-day basis. Speaky is a character from a game called Trickle Go, which has gone viral in especially Japan and Korea, but on the internet more broadly.

[00:04:01]And initially it was just a drawing of a character in that game, but has been kind of reimagined by the internet as its own character. And one of the features of this character is that it has a very, very limited vocabulary, of which "Ow" not presented with the gasp though, but well, you you do it. You're better at it than I am.

[00:04:18]>> [screaming] >> Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

[00:04:20]You can You can go now.

[00:04:22]I'm not bullying you. You're just just just You can come back later. So, as a result, the use of "Ow" online has mainly been in the Speaky fandom. To the extent that if you look at the quote tweets on the Model Press tweet I showed earlier, the vast majority of them are just saying, "This is a Speaky thing.

[00:04:38]Why are you attributing it to the idol?"

[00:04:44]>> [screaming] >> In fact, when a post like this argues that if you look for organic use of "Ow" on Twitter, you're going to be finding people talking about Speaky, not people talking about McDonald's or idols or anything like that. From what I can tell, they're kind of right. Like, I did show you some examples, but to get those I had to really work at like manipulating the date range and stuff like that to make them right around the time the advertisement was coming out.

[00:05:12]At the time I'm making this video in July, it was nearly impossible to find any useful data that was hamburger related or idol related except for again, the producers tweets. And so, if we bring that post back, it makes sense to me that this person is quite suspicious about the inclusion of "Ow" as specifically a buzzword on this chart. As most uses of "Ow" online right now are Speaky fans talking to other Speaky fans about being fans of Speaky.

[00:05:35]But this isn't even the start of "Ow" either. Like, back in 2024, you can see people using it to respectively refer to the cry a cat makes or the cry a baby makes. And the oldest use I can find, yes, oldest in half-width katakana, this is a professional enterprise here. We're not accepting full-width katakana, we're being very specific, dates back to this post from 2012 where somebody uses it to imitate the sound that their mom makes when that person fails in some kind of video game-related activity. So, all of these kind of owls besides McDonald's one are very different in that generally speaking the Japanese internet seems to view owl as like a scream of some kind of sadness or misery or at least stressed emotionality. Whereas the hamburger is more breathy and that seems to be new. And so, honestly, in looking at all this data, while I'm not having any trouble believing that equals love is popular and that maybe even these McDonald's advertisements are well received, the idea that this phrase is going viral among the youth is is not one that I'm really able to buy into.

[00:06:35]And so, if you're like, "Well, what's your point then? That major Japanese producers, major companies like McDonald's, and a website that's existence is devoted on some kind of ability to connect with the people that they're reporting on are in cahoots and as a result even something like a list of terms that are buzzing off is not an objective reality, but something which is invested with sociopolitical implications and produced with intent, further evidencing that there's no such thing as an objective presentation of reality?" Yeah, that Yeah, basically that's the point of this.

[00:07:04]>> Ah!