You might think that the samurai no longer exist in Japan. That the samurai officially vanished when they were banned from carrying swords in the late 19th century. That might be true, but samurai still exist in Japan. Today, they just wield glowsticks instead.
This Cup Noodle ad is titled “Present-Day Samurai” (現代のサムライ or Gendai no Samurai) and features idol fans preforming otaku dance routines known as “wotagei” (ヲタ芸) or “otagei” (オタ芸). Below, you can see more otaku dancing:
Just imagine if these were swords!
カップヌードル「現代のサムライ」篇 30秒 [Cup Noodle]
Comments
3 responses to “A Look At Japan’s Modern Day Samurai”
The moment after clicking this link I felt robbed.
I came here for the comments…i am too early.
God I want to comment. Ive been staring at this for 5 minutes already but seriously what is there to be said………….?
Unfortunately outside of a very small handful of people who do it on their own time (ie the people in the video), nobody has actually done this sort of dancing at idol concerts in the past decade or so. Everyone stands on the spot and chants instead since this sort of dancing takes up so much space and annoys 90% of the people there trying to watch the show. Oh well.
Look, I hate Kotaku bashing and I normally don’t do it; but seriously, click-bait much? Call it what it is Brian: otaku kids with glow sticks. Samurai my arse
I think the original samurai would be embarrassed to be connected to that.
It’s started cropping up in random official music videos as well. The people in that last video were backup dancers for one of Pikarin’s videos, and even FLOW did wotagei in their new PV. http://www.jpopsuki.tv/video/FLOW—FROGS-~Keronpa-Teikoku-no-Gyakushuu~/2639e6fa6dcd92f085276054faa4563e