Japanese netizens spent the days following U.S. President Donald Trump's first visit to Japan trying to figure out who came out of the trip looking the best. A week later, a consensus was seemingly reached.
"Pikotaro gets the MVP!" one 2chan poster wrote on Nov. 8, a sentiment that echoed across the internet and beyond. The brains behind last year's "PPAP" song appeared at the state dinner held for Trump, a decision initially generating derision from all sides. Yet as reports from the event came out, it became clear the cheetah-print fanatic transformed a snoozer of political networking into something stupidly fun, with one Foreign Ministry employee telling the Sankei Shimbun they'd never seen a state dinner like that before. The web ate it up.
It's a fitting snapshot of how Japanese users online tended to view Trump's visit to Tokyo as a whole. While a fair amount of users on social media sites took sides during his two-day stop in the capital, the majority of people treated it as a joke, creating memes and approaching every detail with detached interest. It dominated online conversation — until Trump went to his next destination, wherein netizens shifted discussion to the Zama serial killer.