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The story
A casual thread on the Nandemo Jikkyo (NanG) board that started out swapping store-name abbreviations like “Famima” (FamilyMart), “Misudo” (Mister Donut), and “Donki” (Don Quijote) somehow snowballed into a full-blown Kanto-vs-Kansai showdown over “Mac” vs. “Makudo” — the two rival ways of shortening McDonald’s.
What began as a logical back-and-forth over whether “Mac” refers to the product or the store name soon heated up, spiraling into regional trash-talk with jabs like “Tokyo doesn’t even have a culture of its own.”
What people said
Kanto guy: "Guh?!"
Me: "Final technique… Misudo (Mister Donut)…!"
Kanto people are straight-up unhinged (shortening Mister Donut even further)
That's the product name, per the usual reminder
That's the product name, though? Nobody's saying "Makku Donaldo"
It's only the old geezers and grannies still going "Makudo, Makudo."
Honestly Kansai's gotten really obvious about this lately
The young kids genuinely sound like they're speaking half-Tokyo dialect
It's the middle-aged folks who still use real Kansai dialect
It's Don Quijote, though?
Does McDonald's official branding ever actually use the word "Makudo"?
(the obligatory image drop)
https://nova.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/livegalileo/1787403634/
Tokyoites really do love their rankings, huh
They're the only ones in Japan who seem into rankings like this
People from every other prefecture don't seem nearly as interested
Background and Key Points
McDonald’s has been in Japan since 1971, when its first store opened in Tokyo’s Ginza district, and the “Mac” versus “Makudo” divide is one of the most-cited examples in Japanese dialect studies of Kanto (Tokyo-centered) versus Kansai (Osaka-centered) speech patterns. Tokyo speakers clip words from the front (“Mac,” “Sutaba” for Starbucks), while Kansai speakers historically clipped differently, giving “Makudonarudo” as “Makudo.” NanG (Nandemo Jikkyo), the 5ch board this thread comes from, skews heavily toward Kansai-identified posters and baseball fandom, which is why Kanto-vs-Kansai flame wars are a recurring genre there rather than a one-off dispute. Don Quijote, referenced as the unanswerable finishing move, is unusual in that “Donki” isn’t a grassroots nickname at all — the company itself uses it in official branding and store signage, which is why no one in the thread could mount a counter-argument.
The actual fault line in the thread isn’t really Mac vs. Makudo as store names — nearly everyone agrees Kansai says Makudo for the restaurant. It’s whether that extends to product names, with posters splitting over whether “Big Mac” becomes “Big Makudo” in Kansai speech, and several arguing the product name stays “Mac” even for Kansai speakers who call the restaurant Makudo.
What the thread never establishes is any actual source for the claim that young Kansai speakers are abandoning “Makudo” for “Mac” — it’s asserted from post 25 onward and treated as settled, but no survey or citation is given, only anecdote about “geezers and grannies.”
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (NanG) thread “Kanto guy: “Makudo, lol, it’s Mac lol” / Me: mutters “Donki” / Kanto guy: “Wh—?!?!”“.
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