And it started with a party…

What a party! 12 hours after I, Goetz, have arrived from London, I find myself in Shinjuku in the middle of 70 crazy “Nico chuus” (=“Nico junkies", devoted Nico Nico Douga fans). These fans are here to spend a whole night of Karaoke. But this is not any Karaoke: They spend the night to sing along self-made music videos that have emerged on Nico Nico Douga.

A lot of music is based on anime, sometimes combined with new words, and often produced with Vocaloid Software. Many videos show dancing vocaloids, game characters or anime icons. But there is also all sorts of other visuals: from Ascii art to reedited McDonald ads, from footage of Adolf Hitler to a funny Tennis musical, made after a famous tennis manga and anime. All this is sometimes produced and most of the times reedited and remixed by the fans, and then uploaded on Nico Nico Douga.

Below you can watch one of the many, many videos I saw this night for the first time: The three characters are called "Abe-dancers". They are named after a popular gay manga. In this famous video they dance along the singing of "PV Isayi", another Nico Nico Douga star:

A Bararika video on Nico Nico Douga

So imagine this: A group of around 50 boys and 25 girls, some of them cross-dressing Cosplayers, but most of them not, sing along the Nico Nico Douga tunes, and dance with their favorite avatars. They were mostly dancing synchronously and directly towards the screen, indeed with the screen. Everyone was singing and clapping until the next morning.

I meet some great people: Computer engineers, nuclear physicists, nurses, print designers, fashion school students, waitresses. The majority are in their early 20ties, and there were quite a few university students around. Most of them never met each other, and they know each other only by their Mixi names (Mixi is the Japanese facebook).

During the course of this long night and in the early morning hours I started to learn some of the complicated quotes and jokes: from the notorious “Ran ran Ruu” to “Nice boat”, from “Juyou nanode 2kai Iimashitayo” (=“It´s important, so I say it twice”) to “Koumei no wana” (=“trap of Koumei”), from “sweet” to “Ie, Kefir desu” (=“No, it is Kefir”).

One story might serve as an example: Some months ago, Niwango (the company behind Nico Nico Douga) deleted the much anticipated last episode of the violent anime series “School Days”, due to copyright infringement. Instead they put up an image of a cruise ship. Someone - probably a gaijin - wrote on the video in English “nice boat”. This was taken up by the community, and soon ´nice boat´ was written on videos all over the place.

Such stories create the highly complex web of internal references of Nico Nico Douga. And they also generate a whole lot of fun.