Epress.am News from Armenia
In an effort to deal with the physical and emotional toll of the massive earthquake and tsunami, a new video has been created depicting “Nuclear Boy” Fukushima, which has gotten hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, reports The Wall Street Journal on its Japan RealTime blog.
Much attention has been diverted from the tough situation of the hundreds of thousands left homeless, hungry, cold and ill in the northeast of the country to concentrate on the mounting fears for the Fukushima nuclear complex. But in a sign that people here are finding the best ways they can to cope with the ordeal, humor of Japan’s cute but often earthy nature is beginning to resurface on the Internet.
In this YouTube animated video (the original in Japanese), now seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers, the Fukushima plant is portrayed as a cartoon Genpatsu-kun, or “Nuclear Boy.”
The bathroom humor may not translate easily, but in a well-meaning, gentle attempt to explain the situation to a young child, “Nuclear Boy” is portrayed as having a very bad stomachache and passing gas but still trying to “hold it in.” All to a soundtrack of exclamations and banjo music.
With explanations of how the situation compared with cartoon versions of “Three-Mile Island Boy” and “Chernobyl” — “That was one giant accident…diarrhea…it went all over the place” — the cartoon also praises the heroics of Nuclear Boy’s “doctors,” meaning the emergency team trying to cool Fukushima’s reactors, as they try to give him “medicine” (seawater and boric acid).
The cartoon goes on to offer prayers that peace will return to the people of Fukushima prefecture soon: “That’s the least we can do for receiving Nuclear Boy’s energy for all these years.”