Fukuda: serious PM or silly web meme?

Yasuo Fukuda's heading out the prime ministerial door, but before he did, he accidentally became a web meme. Pink Tentacle reports:

At the end of the press conference following Fukuda’s resignation, a Chugoku Shimbun reporter told the Prime Minister that many people thought he often seemed detached when he spoke, almost as if the problems facing Japan were none of his business. The reporter suggested that Fukuda also sounded distant in his resignation announcement and asked what impact he thought his sudden resignation (which comes just one year after previous Prime Minister Abe suddenly resigned) would have on the country. Seemingly perturbed, Fukuda fired back at the reporter: “You said I sounded detached, but I am able to see myself objectively. I’m different from you.”

Fukuda’s jarringly out-of-character words came as an awkward exclamation point to his resignation and threw some people for an extra loop. The phrase has been percolating for days on 2-channel, where dozens of popular threads with the words “anata to wa chigau n desu” (あなたとは違うんです) in the title have been posted, many containing Fukuda-inspired ASCII art.

Somebody even made this MC Fukuda remix. Silly, silly.

Comments

[NelC]

A new PM already? I was in Japan when the last one resigned, and that was almost exactly a year ago. Prime Minister of Japan most be an incredibly demanding job, to use them up so fast.

[Jeshii]

'tis the season!