Students kept making their own additions to the statue of educator Hikoichi Orita, including face paint, clothing, props and just plain ol’ text and scribbles.

By 1994, the university was so fed up with all of the graffiti and vandalism that they put up a sign next to the statue. It said:

折田彦市先生は、第三高等学校の校長として京大の創設に尽力し、京大に自由の学風を築くために多大な功績を残した人です。 どうかこの像を汚さないで下さい。

総合人間学部

To paraphrase in English: Hikoichi Orita was a great man who contributed a lot to this school, so stop vandalizing his statue.

Unsurprisingly, the sign didn’t a damn thing to stop the vandalism. By 1997, the university decided to permanently remove the Orita-sensei statue; but even that didn’t stop people from messing with him.

Nowadays, instead of defacing the long-gone statue, people simply build their own, complete with pedestal and sign.

Every year, new, fake statues pops up on campus in place of the Orita-sensei statue around significant dates (like exams and such), featuring a different character in place of the seminal Kyoto University figure.

Gym leader Brock/Takeshi from Pokémon

Mr. Contac, the mascot for cold/flu medication Contac

Fujiya mascot Poko-chan

Twitter bot @nisehorn

Children’s TV show character Tendonman

A Kamen Rider character

Superman character from the manga Dr. Slump

Snack mascot Noppo Toppo

I feel kinda sorry for Hikoichi Orita; I’m sure he would have liked to be remembered as an educator and major figure in Kyoto University history, instead of an oft-defaced statue.

At the same time, the legacy of the Orita-sensei statue has made Hikoichi Orita much more notable than he might have otherwise been. After all, how else would I know about this minor 19^th century historical figure?

To the Kyodai students who carry on the tradition of pranking the Orita-sensei statue, even though it’s been gone for almost 20 years: I salute you.

I played around on this website for way too long. Thanks to Cscout, I came across the website kyokasho.net, which allows you to choose from several school subjects, and then doodle all over the pictures of historical figures. I remember those days. They weren’t all that long ago. I would ignore the teacher (maybe that’s why I became a Japanese Studies major?) and do all sorts of horrible things to my textbooks. One thing I remember doing was erasing numbers in my math books (those pen erasers were good for this) and rewrite the numbers in the same font so the poor sap who got my book the next year could be as confused as I was. When I wasn’t feeling like such a horrible person, I’d doodle on the faces of historical figures. This is exactly what this website allows you to do. Some folks get pretty ridiculously creative. It’s great.

When you go to kyokasho.net, you’ll see the most popular additions, as well as the most recent. If you scroll down to the very bottom, you’ll see different classroom subjects. If you click on one of these, you’ll get a gallery of pictures to choose from to do whatever you’d like with. When you finally choose an image, you’ll be able to use a graphite colored pen, a red pen, or an eraser. It’s amazing what some people do with such simple tools. It certainly beats my tie fighters flying in to knock around George Washington, or whoever.

Once you’re done, hit this button to save it. You’ll even be able to view a start-to-finish of how it was drawn. Really cool for some of the really complicated ones.

Sadly, all the text that make up the “textbooks” are from Wikipedia (which I suppose makes sense when it comes to copyright issues). Textbooks in Japan are pretty universal across the nation. Usually you’ll only see a few different textbooks in a particular subject, so the Japanese education experience is often shared in areas all over Japan. I was hoping for a little bit of that, but it wasn’t meant to be. Still, don’t let that stop you from having some fun. Here, I even made a Tofugu one.

And closer up…

Pretty lame. If anyone else wants to do one that has anything to do with Tofugu, I’ll stick it up in the fanart section of the site :)

If you’re not particularly interested in going to kyokasho.net, and want to stay here, I thought I’d collect some of my favorite images for you to view right here. There’s hundreds of thousands more on the actual website, though, so I suggest you go enjoy it yourself! Seriously, this website is one of those websites that would really only do this well in Japan.

I bet some of you are pretty creative. Feel free to link us your creations in the comments!

I recently had a discussion with my friend Max about the nuances of Japanese pronunciation (maybe not so recently; it was when I was back home in Hawaii). One of the more interesting things we talked about was the fact that, in Japanese, there’s no “f” sound. This is a result of the fact that Japanese people don’t fold/bite their bottom lip when pronouncing it; they shape their mouth almost as if they were blowing out a candle (go on, give it a try). So, in Japanese, the “f” in fu (ふ) is pronounced more like an “h”, and the sound becomes hu.

Consequently, Japanese words that have been incorporated into the American vocabulary (such as tofu, futon, or Mt. Fuji) are not really pronounced the way most people think they are. For example, it’s not “tofu”, it’s “tohu”. Of course, when the Japanese word for “bean curd” (とうふ or 豆腐) is romanized, it’s still written as “tofu” because… well, just because. It’s traditional, maybe.

So, why am I telling you this? Well, I had forgotten Max’s and my conversation until today, when I saw this video about college students vandalizing the huge sand dunes in Nagoya:

Some people might not understand why a little sand graffiti warranted news coverage in the first place. Well, Koichi tells me that, in Nagoya, these sand dunes are a pretty big deal (he lived there for a year), and my roommate, Atsuko, confirmed this; “It’s a world heritage thing!”

Personally, I didn’t find the “scandal” (the ominous-sounding Ministry of Environment has begun an investigation) as funny as the fact that the hooligans chose the word “HUCK” to scrape out into nearly 50m of sand. While I admit that they could have done this because of their love of classic American literature or especially-absorbent towels, I’m willing to bet that these boys meant to write something a little more… rebellious but, sadly, mistook the “f” for an “h”. Boo foo.

Source: Japan Probe and National Geographic

Edit: Well, shucks. I guess it was their love of classic American literature after all D: A better explanation than the one I provided is here (in Japanese) and here (in English).