In January 2024, a video went viral on the RuNet, which allegedly showed how the presenters of a Japanese TV channel could not stop laughing during the broadcast. The fact is that instead of an arrested person, the program seemed to accidentally show a dog sitting in a police car. We checked whether this fragment of the report is real.
In the Russian-language segment of the Internet, the video began to be actively distributed on January 1, 2024, and by the time of writing this text, publications with it had received a total of several million views. Most often, the viral video was captioned like this: “Nothing unusual, just Japanese TV announcers reading out a crime report.” At the same time, the authors of some posts jokingly called the dog from the video is a “woolly intruder” and ironically writethat now “the city can sleep peacefully.”
The most popular video became on Telegram, where it was published by the channels “Ax 18+"(2 million views), 4ch (309,000), "Leonardo Divinchik"(297,000), "KB"(260,000), "Leprosy"(149,000), Voblya (145,000), "The goat screamed"(77,000), 4chan (63,000), "Load 200" (61,000), "Russia now"(49,000), "Black humor"(43,000), TG Team Russia (33,000), etc. Publications about the alleged error on Japanese television received hundreds of thousands of views on VKontakte (examples here, here, here, here, here And here), and are also found in TikTok And Instagram*, on Reddit And "Peekaboo" The video was distributed in the foreign segment of the Internet at the end of 2023. For example, in mid-November this video posted on the Chinese website Bilibili, where it received 422,000 views.
The viral video lasts just over a minute. The recording shows the presenter reading out information about the arrest of a man suspected of violating traffic rules, but instead of a photo of the man, the broadcast allegedly showed a photo of a dog. At the same time, the animal was first captured sitting in the driver's seat of a white pickup truck, and then in the back seat of a police car. In the video you can hear how at first the presenter does not understand why the photo of the dog is shown, and then begins to burst into laughter. The video distributed on the RuNet has Japanese, English and Russian subtitles.
An employee of a transport company was arrested on suspicion of violating the law. The detainee's name is Shigeru (laughter heard) Shimada, he is 42 years old. (Whispers.) Is this not a mistake? Is this the photo? (In full voice again.) While driving on the Shigeru Expressway, Shimada ignored all 32 traffic lights. (Laughs.) An eyewitness who witnessed this with his own eyes reported to the police, and Shimada was detained. According to the police report, Shimada (laughs) pleaded not guilty. (The announcer begins to laugh for a long time, and his co-anchor moves on to the next news.) A 29-year-old bus driver was arrested for dangerous driving in the Tsurumi-ku area of Yokohama.
None of the publications we found indicated the name of the Japanese TV channel where this broadcast allegedly took place. However, in the upper left corner of the video there is a noticeable watermark with the inscription BRH News. "Checked" found out that this is the logo of the Japanese YouTube-channel ブリッヒー!News Channel. The profile description states that all news stories and reports on this account are humorous in nature: “Announcers Tsubasa, Fukui, Sakura and Saito present various fake news.” It is separately noted that every day different incidents occur on the air of this channel. For example, a characteristic of the host Tsubasa is that he cannot control his laughter.
The full release with the “inopportunely” shown photo of the dog in the police car was posted on YouTube back on October 26, 2022 and received almost 260,000 views. Then the channel authors separately published shorts with a viral excerpt (145,000 views), but the joke became truly popular in TikTok-show account, where video received 5.3 million views.
Photo of a seized dog walks on the Internet since at least 2016. Photo posted user under the nickname Taka, by words which it was made two years earlier in the Japanese city of Nagoya. Author suggestedthat the police just caught lost animal to return it to its owner.
As for the photo with the dog driving a car, then, as evidenced by the analysis using the TinEye service, it appeared on the Internet no later than 2009.
Thus, many Internet users and administrators of large Telegram channels mistook the humorous sketch for a real news release, during the creation of which a funny mistake was made.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: screenshot of video @burihhiiiinewschannel (YouTube)
- Is it true that an American TV channel accidentally showed Zelensky’s speech instead of a funny video with a dog?
- Is it true that a pensioner got 65 cats and taught them to steal jewelry from their neighbors?
- Is Abby the dog from I Am Legend still alive?
- Is it true that the Tokyo subway launched a train in the shape of Kotobus from the anime “My Neighbor Totoro”?
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
