ISIS Crappy Collage Grand Prix

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About

ISIS Crappy Collage Grand Prix (Japanese: ISISクソコラグランプリ) is a Japanese photoshop meme and hashtag campaign featuring edited screen captures from an Islamic State (IS) video featuring two Japanese hostages.

Origin

On January 20th, 2015, Islamic State released a new video on YouTube in which a masked member threatens to kill Japanese hostages Kenji Goto Jogo and Haruna Yukawa within 72 hours unless Japan pays $200 million in ransom.^[1]

In response, some Japanese Twitter users didn't call on the government or express anger at the terrorist acts, but began posting parody images mocking the IS video around that day's evening. One of the earliest instances made by @AKID_0831 had retweeted 7,700 times and got over 5,000 favorites within first 7 hours.^[2]

Background: Japan's "self-responsibility" thought

Unlike Euro-American countries, this non-christianity country doesn't have considerable Muslim or Islamic immigrants issues and both Japan and Japan's Self Defense Force in UN's peacekeeping operations haven't come under Islamic terrorism attack. Because of this, Japanese people tend to lack a sense of reality to the Middle East issues and risk of terrorism. Half of their optimistic behavior in this online craze comes from this social background.

Other half is their "self-responsibility" thought cultivated by several hostage crisis happened in Iraq or Afghanistan in 2000s. Some of Japanese victims in these incidents were not journalists, but peace/political activists or young travelers who didn't have any supportable causes to go to the Middle East with ignoring the government's adjurations. On the web, heavy criticisms blaming their faults under the slogan "self-responsibility" (自己責任, Jiko Sekinin) happened^[3]^[4], and even dead victims had a few of severe responses.^[5]

Therefore, hostages like Haruna Yukawa in this case tend to be hard to raise sympathy amongst people, especially anonymous internet users, and instead they're forced to become a subject of online mockery.

Spread

Just a few hours after the photoshop meme was launched, Twitter users began posting the accompanying hashtag "#ISISCrappyCollageGrandPrix" (#ISISクソコラグランプリ).^[6] Some of Twitter users provoked IS by sending those photos to Twitter accounts assumed to be IS members one, and drew these responses.^[7]

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the hashtag campaign, including Kotaku,^[8] Sun News,^[9] ChinaSmack,^[10] Washington Post,^[11] and Al Jazeera.^[12]