About
ISIS Crappy Collage Grand Prix (Japanese: ISISクソコラグランプリ) refers to the hashtag for photoshopping craze on Twitter that mock at Islamic State (IS), better known as their previous name ISIS in Japan. On January 2015, some silly Japanese Twitter users joined onto this controversial fad with no firm beliefs or concerns about victims.
Origin
On January 20th, 2015, Islamic State released a new video on YouTube that a masked member says the two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto Jogo and Haruna Yukawa, will be killed within 72 hours unless Japan pays $200 million in ransom.[1]
In response to this video, Japanese Twitter users began posting parodying photoshopping images mocking at IS around that day’s evening. One of the earliest instances made by @AKID_0831 had retweeted 7,700 times and got over 5,000 favorites within first 7 hours.[2]
Background: Japan’s “self-responsibility” thought
Unlike Euro-American people, Japanese people tend to lack a sense of reality to Middle East issues since this non-christianity country doesn’t have considerable Muslim or Islamic immigrants issues and both Japan and Japan’s Self Defence Force in UN’s peacekeeping operations haven’t come under Islamic terrorism attack.
Additinally, one of the several reasons why Japanese people gave a cold response to those hostages was their “self-responsibility” thought cultivated throughout 2000s by several hostage crisis happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of these incidents victims were not journalists, but radical peace/political activists or young thoughtless travelers, and hence they had no supportable causes to go to Middle East with ignoring the government’s adjurations. On the web, heavy criticisms to blame them as irresponsible idiots under the slogan “self-responsibility”, and even dead victims had few sympathetic responses.
Therefore, the sympathy toward to these two hostages which IS would expect didn’t grow among Japanese people, especially internet users keeping anonymity on the web, so much.
Spread
Just few hours after the photoshopping fad started, the hashtag “#ISISCrappyCollageGrandPrix” (#ISISクソコラグランプリ) was spontaneously born.[3] As well as previous Crappy Collage fads, many young thoughtless twitter users joined onto this bandwagon just for fun. Some of them provoked IS by sending those photos to Twitter accounts assumed to be IS members one, and drew these responses.
This crazy online storm was quickly covered even in English news media[4][5] and English Al Jazeera[6] in the following day.
Various Examples
Twitter Feed
Editor’s note: This Twitter Feed may include explicit contents.
Search Interest
[Not Available]
External References
[1]NYTimes.com – Japan Weighs Ransom in Islamic State Threat to Kill Hostages / 01-20-2015
[2]Twitter – あきお: 一 転 攻 勢 / 01-20-2015 (Deleted)
[3]Twitter – Search results for the hashtag #ISISクソコラグランプリ
[4]The Japan Times – Islamic State's social media tactics mocked by Japanese Twitter users / 01-21-2015
[5]Kotaku – Japanese Twitter Users Stand Up to ISIS with…a Photoshop Meme / 01-21-2015
[6]Al Jazeera – Japanese Tweeters mock ISIL hostage video 01-21-2015