“Aka-San”- Mr. Baby

I found an article that sort of relates to what we were discussing two weeks ago- how nothing you post on the internet is sacred. Everyone all over the world will see it. This was the case with Allen S. Rout, who posted a picture of his 5-month-old son back in 2000 on his own personal website. The picture was captioned “We’re really blessed; Stephen is an amazingly happy baby.” After 10 years, Rout had forgotten about the picture, but one day decided to do a Google search of himself, where to his surprise, he happened to find the picture of his baby he had posted 10 years ago, except it wasn’t exactly the same photo.

The photo had been edited where he was surrounded by cartoonish word bubbles filled with Japanese writing: “Don’t call me baby! Call me Mr. Baby!” (in Japanese). This was not the only transformation. Others showed the baby with a head full of snakes: or the baby’s face pasted onto Kurt Cobain’s head one where his face was carved into Mount Rushmore and tattooed onto David Beckham’s torso.

Somehow, Stephen’s smiling face had leaked into Japanese visual culture. According to the article, it showed up on Japanese television game shows, and the baby’s face was also used to blot out images of genitalia in pornography. According to the article, for a time, if you did a Google Image search for “happy baby,” the original photo of Stephen was the first result that would appear, which is called an internet meme- “an idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes viral, mutating via amateur remixes into unexpected forms. Often, memes revolve around an inside joke — say, a screen capture from an obscure video game- but just as often they make jokes of the source material” (Andrew Gross).

What I thought was interesting is that there is an actual site: KnowYourMeme.com that compiles different internet memes and creates funny videos that explain how certain memes were created and where they came from. KnowYourMeme started working on the meme of Stephen Rout’s baby and created a page for what they called “Aka-San” (which means“Mr. Baby” in Japanese).With help of its multilingual readers and Google Insights (a tool that tracks Web searches by time and location), KnowYourMeme was able to figure out that this particular meme started in 2004, on 2chan.net, which is an imageboard in Japan that allows users to post images anonymously. A user then superimposed the baby’s face over an image from a comic book, added words to it and from then on more and more people in Japan were continuing to transform this baby’s photo. It became so popular in Japan that someone even made a plastic figure (or toy) out of the image:

It is interesting how Stephen Rout’s baby became a hit in visual culture in Japan, without knowing anything about it for 10 years. I do not know how I would feel if, for example, my child’s face was being used in a different country to censor private parts in pornography. It is weird to think that any picture I post can be found in a Google search- and who knows what people will do to the image.

Sources:
www.2chan.net
www.KnowYourMeme.com
New York Times article- A Baby Photo Becomes an Internet Meme by Andrew Gross Sept.15th 2010