Every year, there’s a Japanese TV broadcast of the 1986 Studio Ghibli film Laputa: Castle in the Sky. And every year, thousands tune in and post on Twitter along with the film, setting world records for tweets per minute. The most-tweeted moment is typically the casting of the magic spell “balse,” but another scene became a meme during this year’s broadcast. Does egg toast mean anything to you? It’s about to…
In the film, the orphan Pazu shares his egg-on-toast breakfast with Sheeta, a girl who floated down from the sky. It looks delicious. Way more delicious than it is in real life. Everyone loves it, so much so that the combination of the egg and bread emojis have become a meme:
https://twitter.com/MomentsJapan/status/913583547956445184
In Japan, they call it “Laputa bread,” and dozens of people were talking about it (and eating it!) when the movie aired Friday night:
ラピュタ今日か。ラピュタ飯作ってスタンバりたい！🍞🍳
— たわし。 (@marupuniii) September 29, 2017
ラピュタ放映ささる。テレビ全く見ない人間なんだけどジブリは別。
写真はラピュタパン…ではないけど。ほんとのラピュタパンは目玉焼きが完熟で油と塩っ気がないの。これはベシャメルも敷いてるのでダイエッターバルスパンです。
近いうちライブ出来そうです( ˘ω˘ ) pic.twitter.com/QF8N2iukzc— ゆー (@juno5yuu) September 25, 2017
ラピュタ放映の朝はこれでしょw…半熟の目玉焼きがパンに合う！ パズーとシータも食べた「ラピュタパン」は簡単すぎるのに激ウマだった https://t.co/fPFfes7B93 pic.twitter.com/1oIbh6e0pL
— suizouさんと他2022人 (@suizou) September 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/Lqlit4/status/913789520272699392
As popular as 🍳🍞 may have been, it came nowhere near the volume of the 2017 “balse”-a-thon. No one has yet released stats on how rapidly the magic spell was tweeted this year, but this short video indicates that the balses were coming fast and furious:
こちらが今年のリアルタイムバルスになります。
#バルス
#バルス祭り2017 pic.twitter.com/mYUfAVO5ID— る⃣ ま⃣ (@Rossofantasllma) September 29, 2017
In 2013, “balse” set a record with 143,000 tweets per second. With Twitter’s growth in the country since then, it’s not far-fetched to believe that record is beatable.
It’s easy to think of Twitter as a garbage website whose sole purpose is to argue about Donald Trump, but that assumes Americans are only ones using it. And it ignores that, halfway around the world, it can be a website about eggs and toast and magic.