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The story
A video showing a health-and-PE teacher pulling someone out of a burning car with his bare hands went viral on 5ch’s “Nanidemo Jikkyo” board (a general live-discussion/news board). While many praised him for pushing through the heat to save the person, some questioned why the driver couldn’t get out on their own. One post about the thread’s own title also drew attention — noting that engagement jumped once the headline was changed from a mocking tone to a more factual one.
What people said
Might wanna update that brain of yours, grandpa.
Nah, he's in the car that was recording it — the dashcam car.
What kind of accident was it, anyway?
Wonder if he gets a bonus out of it.
That door was hot enough to burn your skin, man.
Most people who wanted to help would still be too scared to get near a burning car — this guy is legitimately cool.
Just the thought of touching a burning car is nuts on its own.
And he actually got the guy out. Genuinely badass.
Which do you think gets you more force — pushing while sitting down, or standing up and throwing your full body weight into it?
Lucky the fire hadn't spread over the whole car yet.
Still, it's dangerous — ideally you'd want gloves or a helmet, but I doubt many people keep those in their car.
Even if it's too hot bare-handed, he probably could've stripped off his shirt and used it to grip and pull.
A fire extinguisher would've been the ideal thing to have on hand.
Lol, the guy inside is coughing his lungs out.
Even with the guy inside coughing that bad, is dousing the fire one second faster with an extinguisher actually the right call?
Put my full 120kg into it and it just caved right in. Mom was in tears of joy over how strong I am.
This tweet is way too funny.
Contrarian takes just kill the mood.
The guy did something genuinely admirable here.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s dashcams (“drive recorders”) are now standard equipment in a majority of private cars, largely because of a wave of viral road-rage and hit-and-run cases in the late 2010s that made insurers and drivers alike want independent footage of crashes — which is why the rescue here was caught on video at all, filmed from the car behind rather than by any official source. The debate over the car’s build also needs context: “kei cars,” Japan’s tax-advantaged compact class (engine capacity capped at 660cc, thinner body panels to save weight), make up roughly a third to nearly forty percent of new car sales, and are popularly assumed to be flimsier than standard-size vehicles.
The thread’s actual fault line was less about the rescue itself and more about that kei-car assumption: one poster credited the car’s thin doors for making the rescue possible, and was immediately shot down as out of date, since kei cars have been reinforced substantially since safety-standard revisions over the past two decades. A second, smaller disagreement was whether the driver was trapped or simply too panicked or injured to push the door open himself.
What nobody in the thread addressed is the mechanical detail that actually matters: a door “bent open” after a collision is very likely already sprung or misaligned from the crash impact itself, which requires far less force than prying open an intact, undamaged door — a distinction that would deflate a lot of the “superhuman strength” framing while still leaving the teacher’s willingness to grab a burning door with bare hands as the genuinely notable part.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanidemo Jikkyo board) thread “[Video] PE Teacher Rescues Person Bare-Handed from a Burning Car 🚙🔥wwwwwwwwww” (the trailing “www” is Japanese internet shorthand for laughter, like “lol” repeated).
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