By Takashi Mochizuki
- Miho Inada/The Wall Street Journal
- A shopping bag featuring a scene in “Castle in the Sky,” in which the hero and the heroine eat bread topped with a fried egg.
Japanese anime fans are gearing up enthusiastically for this Friday evening, when they may tweet their way once again to a record, using their favorite magic word.
That word is “balus,” a made-up word roughly translated as “destruction.” It’s featured in the 1986 movie “Castle in the Sky,” from famed animation house Studio Ghibli, which is slated to air again on Friday night, on Nippon Television Network.
The creative genius behind Studio Ghibli is legendary director Hayao Miyazaki, who’s put out a string of blockbusters. His most well-known films internationally include “My Neighbor Totoro,” where a giant, raccoon-like creature befriends two little girls, and “Spirited Away,” in which the heroine gets trapped in a supernatural bath house.
But “Castle in the Sky,” known as Laputa in Japan — and “balus” — have such a devoted fan base they’ve taken on a life of their own.
The word “balus” appears toward the end of the movie, where its invocation triggers the collapse and destruction of the flying fortress that’s at the heart of the film. At some point during the 13 times the movie has aired since 1988, Laputa fans began intoning the word at the exact same time it’s uttered in the film, which according to devotees is 115 minutes and five seconds after the movie’s start.
In the Internet era, those fans began posting the word to online bulletin boards at the magic moment. In past years, that’s caused servers at some sites frequented by fans to crash.
By the time the movie was last aired, in 2011, the action had moved to Twitter, which also worried whether its servers could take the strain. Despite Twitter’s pleas through staff accounts for restraint, at the magic moment Japanese netizens recorded 25,088 “balus” tweets per second, a record which was only beaten in Japan by this year’s stroke-of-midnight New Year’s greetings, with 33,388 tweets. Some fans videotaped the moment and posted it online.
This year, Twitter says “balus” tweets are welcomed. Twitter told JRT it has beefed up its servers in the past few years, so “we think we will have no problems supporting that… We are not planning to take any actions or send any messages asking users to hold off.”
Japan’s online community is ready. Internet video sharing site Nico Nico Douga even created a special Web site with a simple, automated button for fans so that they don’t even need to type the word but can just “balus” with one click. Calling it a “balus festival,” the organizers even invited Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzui and NTV producer Seiji Okuda to participate in a live show that will be aired simultaneously with the broadcast of “Castle in the Sky.”