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The story
Comedy duo Ogiyahagi’s Kaneyari Yahagi brought up, on his radio show, the conflict between Hiroshi and a camping-gear manufacturer over an original fire pit. Hiroshi claims he’d secured a promise that the product wouldn’t be sold, while the manufacturer says it kept selling to recoup the costs of prototyping and production. On 5ch, opinions are split over whether a contract existed and how the design concept should be treated.
Comedy duo Ogiyahagi (Kaneyari Yahagi and Hiroaki Ogi) appeared on TBS Radio’s “Thursday JUNK: Ogiyahagi’s Megane Biiki” (Thursdays at 1am), aired on the 20th. While discussing recent controversies involving fellow comedians, they touched on the dispute between Hiroshi and a manufacturer over an original camping fire pit.
Yahagi opened with, “I’ve kind of lost interest in these lately — divorces and all that. There’s been a bit of an incident with a comedian recently too. But if you say anything about an incident, people accuse you of defending them, right?” His comment highlighted how tricky it is to weigh in on celebrity controversies without being misread.
Hiroshi had revealed on his own X account the trouble that arose when he commissioned an original fire pit.
Source: news.livedoor.com / Original article here
What people said
No idea if it'd actually sell, but leaving it to the manufacturer is probably for the best.
The manufacturer's just selling it on their own. Apparently it sold out instantly.
You really don't understand anything, do you.
Fire pits aren't exactly the kind of thing that sells like crazy, and Hiroshi doesn't have that kind of draw or popularity anyway.
This type made from a cut-open oil can is a matter of taste, and there's a huge variety of fire pits out there.
It'll sell modestly at best.
Besides, if open fires are allowed you don't even need a fire pit like this,
and veteran campers just build their own anyway.
They're a manufacturer that specializes in fire pits — if they couldn't make anything similar ever again, they'd have nothing left to sell…
Can't really say without seeing how the exchange actually went, including how it started out.
What's being sold doesn't really look like the same thing though — they toned it down (made it "low-impact").
That's not a reason to void the contract. If they didn't like it, they should've just stopped it right then and there.
"Void the contract" — if there was no mutual agreement, there was no contract to begin with, was there?
Hiroshi's original design was held together with wire and would break almost instantly.
Waraz (the manufacturer, 笑's) came up with a never-before-seen mechanism using an 8mm metal rod instead.
This blew up because Hiroshi tried to claim it all as his own — the blueprints, the IP, everything.
Also, Hiroshi's original concept would have seriously damaged the ground underneath, so the manufacturer changed the position of the ash tray and the grate too. It's basically a different product at this point.
Makes you wonder whether sales were even discussed at the point the prototype was brought in.
Hiroshi says he was told it would be sold, said he'd refuse in that case, got a promise it wouldn't be sold — and then it got sold anyway. Says he's frustrated, frustrated, so frustrated (lol). The manufacturer hasn't been able to counter this point at all.
There's no real need for the manufacturer to defend itself over drawing up plans, producing, and selling a fire pit in the first place — I mean, a fire pit maker selling fire pits is just… normal, lol.
But the manufacturer is countering that they did tell him it would be sold.
Hiroshi surely never agreed to that.
He wrote that he asked them to stop a total of four times,
and that in the end he clearly got a promise it wouldn't be sold — Hiroshi states this outright.
On that specific point — whether such a promise was made — the manufacturer hasn't offered any real rebuttal.
The manufacturer's version of events isn't automatically all correct.
Wasn't it three times?
Then Hiroshi should've just drawn up the plans himself.
just a shoddy operation from a tiny, small-time company, in the end.
Hiroshi's the one at fault here — going silent and cutting off contact without hashing out the details.
This fire pit maker just made… a fire pit.
A perfectly ordinary one.
The fire pit maker drew up plans and produced it — that's all.
What exactly is the problem here, lol?
Hiroshi's the one who never brought up the contract.
Hiroshi's concept is baked into it though.
There's no such thing.
Are you talking about some mold shaped like the name "Hiroshi" or something, lol?
This manufacturer doesn't sell anything that embarrassing.
Please spell out that "concept" specifically.
So why did the manufacturer insist on selling it anyway?
The fact that they spent over three months developing the product together is probably exactly why they're insisting on selling it. If they didn't sell it, that three-plus months of effort would just go to waste.
They drew up the plans, built the prototype, and after Hiroshi signed the order form, they ordered stock as a result — so now they've got inventory sitting there.
No matter how lame the design might be, engineering it and turning it into an actual product costs money — so of course they'd sell it to recoup that.
A "concept" carries no legal rights whatsoever, you know.
Even calling it "legal," it's still a rip-off, and that alone tanks their image.
There wasn't even enough substance there to "rip off" in the first place.
If there were, he could just file a lawsuit.
He'd still lose, but sure, if it makes him feel better.
Speaking of image, honestly this whole thing seems to have won the manufacturer a lot of sympathy while Hiroshi's image has basically hit rock bottom…
if what the manufacturer sold to recoup costs actually uses Hiroshi's idea,
then even if it's legally fine, it's only fair that Hiroshi calls them out on it.
If it doesn't use Hiroshi's idea at all, then Hiroshi's the one in the wrong.
If it's legally fine, then it's fine.
It's the concept. The manufacturer handled everything from the design onward — Hiroshi didn't put in a single word.
They probably just saw the sample, took a liking to it, and wanted to sell it.
Background and Key Points
Hiroshi (real name Hiroshi Shinagawa) is not a niche figure here — he is one of Japan’s most recognizable comedians-turned-YouTubers, having rebuilt his career around solo bushcraft and camping videos that draw millions of views, which is why a beef with a small fire-pit manufacturer became national entertainment news rather than a private business dispute. The manufacturer, referred to in the thread as Waraz (笑’s), is a specialist outdoor-gear maker; Ogiyahagi’s Yahagi raised the story on TBS Radio’s “Thursday JUNK” program, a late-night slot where comedians riff on tabloid-style controversies, which is how it reached 5ch’s entertainment/sports board.
The thread’s actual fault line is not “who is the better person” but whether any binding agreement existed at all. One camp treats Hiroshi’s account — that he asked four times to stop the sale and was explicitly promised it wouldn’t happen — as decisive, since the manufacturer hasn’t directly rebutted that specific claim. The other camp notes nothing was ever formalized in writing, so there’s no “contract” to breach, only a disputed verbal understanding, and points out the finished product’s mechanism, ash-tray position, and grate differ substantially from Hiroshi’s rough prototype.
What the posters largely gloss over is a legal point some try to raise but never fully spell out: under Japanese law, an abstract “concept” or rough shape typically carries no enforceable design or copyright protection by itself — only a concrete, fixed design or registered element would. That gap is likely why the manufacturer feels safe selling despite the ill will, and why any lawsuit threat in the thread is treated as symbolic rather than realistic.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread 「Ogiyahagi’s Kaneyari Yahagi on the SNS firestorm over Hiroshi and the fire pit manufacturer’s dispute: “Who’s actually in the right here? I need at least one more back-and-forth to know.”」.
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