Parenting in the 21st Century: When Your Kid Is Big In Japan

Imagine posting pics of your infant son and then discovering, ten years later, that he’s become an internet sensation in Japan – as a meme!

That’s exactly what happened to Allen S. Rout, and he only found out when he decided to Google himself. After scrolling through 18 pages of results, he recognized his name in a jumble of Japanese characters. A few clicks later, he was staring at one of the pictures he’d posted a decade earlier, surrounded by cartoon thought bubbles filled with Japanese characters.

Allen did some more digging and eventually discovered that his son, Stephen, has been the subject of a popular a meme in Japan for the last ten years.

The more he looked, the weirder it got – Allen happened upon a generate your own Stephen saying something app and several different versions of his boy. As a sculpture:

The likeness is quite remarkable, isn't it?

As a…what is this? A zombie? An Elvis zombie?

In 8-bit…

And in the clink.

Miss, I haven't eaten in six days!

Think about it – how strange, in an oddly cool sort of way, would it be to discover that for the last decade, your son’s baby picture has been a widely-circulated meme in Japan?

Or is it disturbing? BAD MOMS WANT TO KNOW.

[source, via]