Japanese memes are all about the physical comedy, whether it’s floating in the air, staging a Street Fighter hadoken, or putting school desks on the wall instead of the floor. The latest comedic stunt to captivate the Japanese internet is stepping onto a treadmill at 25 kilometers an hour. That’s nearly 16 mph, which is close to the fastest speed an average person can run. Needless to stay, trying to accelerate to 15 mph from a standing position is not a great idea.
https://twitter.com/LovesFutsal/status/973989602045321217
It went terribly for this man, and now his pants-stripping fall has been seen more than 3.5 million times. Imitators soon followed, although not very many of them.
https://twitter.com/ShingakiGen1202/status/974306407255126016
And they very much regretted trying this challenge in shorts:
https://twitter.com/kkenshiro1/status/974629834809724929
Others stood by on the sidelines, politely offering advice:
FF外から失礼します。
そのスピードでのランニングマシンは一般の人がやらないことをお勧めします。
時速25キロですと1500mの日本記録レベルのスピードになるのでいきなり乗ると大事故につながりかねないのでゆっくりやってください。
今回は大きな怪我に繋がらなくて良かったですが…— 🐦⚓チン×ネン (@sureisar) March 16, 2018
“Excuse me for replying to someone who doesn’t follow me, but it is recommended that the average person does not do the running machine at this speed. The speed of the record level of Japan 1500m is 25 kilometers an hour, so please do it slowly because it might lead to a big accident if you suddenly ride. I am glad that it did not lead to a big injury this time,” is Twitter’s machine English translation of the above tweet.
Solid advice, even if it was a little too late to save @LovesFutsal.
Others just laughed, calling the treadmill a “semi-automatic pants-lowering machine” and posting “grass” and “w,” the Japanese equivalents of “lol.”
This treadmill thing is still limited to one popular video, and despite getting plenty of coverage on Japanese news sites and social media, it hasn’t risen to the level of a “challenge.” The reason seems obvious: intentionally falling off a treadmill looks painful and stupid. But that hasn’t stopped American teens from imitating the hazardous things they see online—just look at the stats on intentional Tide Pod ingestion.
We could all take a lesson here in meme-ing responsibly and sticking to original content. That way, only one person has to lose his pants.