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The story
A video mocking Fukushima University, posted by wakatte.tv, has snowballed into a full-blown controversy: the university issued an official protest statement, and even the mayor of Fukushima City felt compelled to comment on the matter urgently. The video appears to have since been taken down, and the poster has put out wording that reads like an apology. On 5ch, opinions split between defending and slamming the video’s intent, with heated debate over the background of the person behind it (a Kyoto University dropout) — and some users questioning why the whole thing blew up this big in the first place.
What people said
Fukushima University issues official protest statement
Fukushima mayor gives urgent comment
Get famous for the wrong reasons and you just trigger a mass-reporting spree that gets your monetization stripped.
Same thing's trending on Twitter/X lately too — people mass-reporting anyone they don't like to get them suspended.
Those are crimes that require the victim to press charges themselves, so everyone's basically thinking 'come on, university president, hurry up and act.'
Surely he's not talking trash from a lower rung, right?
He's a Kyoto University *dropout*, you know.
Just getting in only proves you were good at studying up through high school.
I mean, he's still a step above a high school grad, surely.
And he's been like this ever since that Reiwa no Tora blew up before too.
He acts like a reasonable guy some of the time, but then drops comments like this.
Maybe he just jumped on the bandwagon since it was already blowing up.
Takeda Juku's kind of iffy as an actual cram school, but as a money-making system it's genuinely groundbreaking.
He is smart, though.
He's got the brains to figure out and build a system that actually makes money.
Actually it was Hayashi who built that.
Apparently he didn't have the brains to actually *graduate*, though… lol
He's pulling in 60 million yen from YouTube alone, so yeah, the talent's real.
Because people don't like it.
What more reason do you need?
Just jealousy from the less-educated crowd.
This comment affects more than just regular people.
That's why the mayor got involved — the power company is reportedly furious too, so this could really be the end for him.
The type who can't get two words out without crying 'jealousy' lol
It's just the truth.
If you're making more money than these guys, I'll take it back.
But it is jealousy, though.
How can you even be jealous over education when he's talking down to high school grads?
That's just the kind of entertainment it is.
Isn't it getting bashed and having the video pulled precisely *because* it didn't land as entertainment?
That's just for this one video.
If he already dealt with it by deleting the video, what's left to criticize?
That's basically a surrender statement and an apology rolled into one, lol
What was he even going for with this…?
There's no point unless he explains what the original intent actually was.
I genuinely want to know what the original intent was lol
It's like how Hamada (of Downtown) politely greets people backstage and then smacks them around once the cameras roll.
The high-school-grad baker guy also gave filming permission ahead of time, for what it's worth.
Then why is he apologizing, lol?
Did he get permission from the university staff to insult their research, though?
https://imgur.com/OmMdJXs.jpeg
Background and Key Points of This Story
The backdrop here is a now well-established genre of YouTube content — epitomized by wakatte.tv — that mocks and ranks universities for entertainment. The spark this time was where to draw the line between provocation-as-entertainment and outright insult toward a real university and its researchers. Some in the thread called for action under Japan’s defamation or insult statutes, but these are offenses that require the victim to file a formal complaint before prosecution can even begin — a nuance the thread doesn’t dig into much. The educational background of the person behind the video (a Kyoto University dropout) also came up again and again, even though the fact that he dropped out is really a separate issue from whether the video’s content was appropriate — in effect, judgment of the video itself ended up getting swapped out for a debate over educational pedigree. And even though the video has already been taken down and language resembling an apology has surfaced, some are still asking “why does the backlash keep going?” — likely because no concrete explanation of the original intent behind the mockery has been offered yet.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Image] wakatte.tv’s Fukushima University mockery video turns into a huge mess wwwwwwwwww.”
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