About

"Mitsu Desu" (Japanese: 密です, lit. "Dense!" OR "Too Close!") was a memorable quote by Yuriko Koike,^[1] Japanese politician who serves as the 20th governor of Tokyo during the COVID-19 outbreak. In April 2020, parodies and audio remixes inspired by her plea became popular on the Japanese web.

Origin

During the COVID-19 outbreak, Japanese TV viewers had frequently watched the press conferences of Yuriko Koike the Tokyo's governor as she was in a vital role to prevent the virus spread in the capital city in a state of emergency. Under that situation, on April 9th, TBS News (shown below)^[2] and other TV stations published a video in which the governor repeated the phrase "Mitsu Desu!", a plea to media reporters carelessly approaching to her at the metropolitan government building's entrance hall. In the Japanese language, the word "Mitsu" usually means of "Dense", "Crowded" or "(Too) Close", and under the situation of the outbreak, the phrases "Avoid the Mitsu" or "Don't be Mitsu" (密を避ける, Mitsu wo Sakeru) had been frequently used by the government in public awareness campaigns for preventing viral infection.

【速報】#新型コロナウイルス の緊急事態宣言をめぐり、#西村経済再生相 と会談した #小池都知事 が取材に応じました。 pic.twitter.com/UDmtR0Bo6v

— TBS NEWS (@tbs_news) April 9, 2020

The following day, April 10th, media reporters were receiving the governor at the same venue while keeping a distance to avoid the "Mitsu." She looked the reporters and softly said, "Social Distance" with spreading her arms at the beginning of interview. A Twitter user @jeveuxfumer posted a video of this scene taken by Fuji Television on that day (shown below)^[3] and mentioned that she was like in a comedy skit by Tomochika^[4], a Japanese female comedian famous for her one-person play to impersonate various kinds of working women. His tweet attracted much empathy from other users and had earned more than 25,000 retweets and 107,000 likes, and the video had been viewed more than 2.1M times within its first 2 weeks of posting.

小池百合子が押し寄せてきた大量の報道陣に「密！」と言いながら距離を取る動画は見つからなかったのですが、友近のネタっぽい感じの小池百合子は見つかりました pic.twitter.com/XaxohC8ofu

— nzɐʞnzɐʞ (@jeveuxfumer) April 10, 2020

Spread

This series of events between the governor Koike and mass media was humorous to people nervous about the pandemic, and her call for social distancing, "Mitsu Desu," inspired remixes. Among them, a tweet posted by (とるとる) on April 19th (shown below) earned 75.2K retweets and 262.1K likes in its first 4 days.^[5] This helped inspire EDM style parodies which were uploaded to Twitter^[6], YouTube, SoundCloud, and occasionally niconico Douga.

Translation:

Mitsu Desu x8
Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu Mitsu
Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi
mmmmmmmmm

" S o c i a l D i s t a n c e "

(Enthusiasm)

On April 20th, Gunjo Chikin (群青ちきん) released a 2D browser game "Mitsu Desu Game" (shown below, top).^[7] User Mouse (もうせ) published a demo movie of a sand-box style 3D game "Mitsu Desu 3D" on the same day (shown below, bottom) and released the first right version on the 22nd.^[8] Both of games became social hits and got covered by Japanese online news media^[9] as well as English news outlets.^[10][11]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References