About

Drainage Canal So Clean refers to a series of popular joke posts on Reddit which sarcastically claim the drainage canals in certain countries are so clean they have animals or some other surprising object in them.

Origin

On March 1st, 2017, Filipino Facebook page Tambayan ni Berto Worldwide^[1] posted several images of koi fish swimming in a Japanese drainage canal with the caption, "Wow! Wow! This is the gutter in Japan, beautiful and can make more fishponds.. share if you like this in the Philippines" (translated from Filipino).

Spread

The story spread on low-level news sites^[2] over the next couple days until March 4th, when Sumit316^[3] posted the pictures to Reddit's /r/BeAmazed, where it gained over 8,700 points. There, a commenter pointed out that the image was of Shimabara City, in Nagasaki, and that the waters are not drainage canals, but streams of natural spring water. The picture was also posted to /r/pics^[4] on the same day, where it gained over 21,000 points. The following day, a joke variation on the post featuring a picture of a dog was posted to /r/pics^[5] by NewUploader1 where it gained over 53,000 points (shown below).

Following the success of that post, several other variations were posted, with a few making the front page of Reddit. The success of the variations led to two threads investigating the trend on /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[6][7]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References