Golden Bikini Week

Overview

Golden Bikini Week is an annual event among online artists to share illustrations of characters wearing gold bikini swimsuits (Japanese: 金色ビキニ or 金ビキニ) during Japan's Golden Week (ゴールデンウィーク),^[1] a week-long holiday season between the end of April and early May. It started among a small number of participants in 2021, and then internet users came to hold this event widely in and outside Japan in 2023.

Background

Since the movie industry began using the Japanese-English word "Golden Week" in its promotional campaigns in the 1950s, it's been a usual sight in Japanese pop culture and commercial media that the spring holidays get associated with something gold. For example, smartphone app games offer gold items in limited-time events during this period. Japanese Twitter users have made trending wordplay hashtags in this period, like "Post Pictures of The Blondes for Golden Week" (#ゴールデンウィークなので金髪の画像を貼る)^[2] and "Post Something Green for Greenery Day^[3]"(#みどりの日なので緑色の画像を貼る),^[4] since the late 2010s.

Developments

According to searches on Twitter and Pixiv, illustrators hadn't participated in drawing gold bikini illustrations during this period until 2020. In 2021, @ebihurya332 (えびふりゃ), a participant in the one-hour drawing game for Kantai Collection, posted fleet girls wearing gold bikinis on April 30th^[5] and May 5th^[6] (shown below, left and center) Also, hentai artist @x1_noship (Y-o) posted his original character wearing the bikini with a comment "Golden Bikini Week" (金ビキニウィーク) on May 9th.^[7] These were one of the very earliest instances drawing the attention of internet users to "Gold Bikinis for Golden Week." Following year, 2022, a few more illustrators,^{[8][9][10][11]} including popular illustrator/mangaka Yomu (shown below, right),^[12] participated in the drawings.

2023

In May of 2023, the trend began as usual, attracting even more artists to draw their own version, but gaining a notable amount of foreign artists, oblivious to the origin of the trend but still interested in it. On May 5th, Twitter user BearTranslation^[13] offered some context to outsiders who may be confused by the trend, writing, "it's currently Golden Week in Japan (a series of concurrent holidays from April 29th to May 5th) and Japanese artists just kind of… Collectively decided to draw characters in golden bikinis to celebrate." The tweet gained over 100 retweets and 800 likes in three days (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not Available

External References