Tonight one of my favorite films is going to be shown on Japanese TV: Hayao Miyazaki’s classic Castle in the Sky Laputa, usually known in the West without the final word since la puta has an unflattering meaning in Spanish. My son and I will be watching, and will join the rest of Japan in tweeting the Spell of Destruction spoken by Sheeta and Pazu at the end of the film — “Barus!” — which set a record of 25,088 tweets sent in the space of one second when the film was shown two years ago. As a result, today has been named the Barus Matsuri or Festival of Barus, the day Japan’s otakus band together and crash Twitter. Unfortunately for those who play in the stock market, the film’s broadcast might just trigger another kind of crash. In a bizarre effect known as The Ghibli Principle, the broadcasting of any film by Studio Ghibli in Japan is supposedly followed by instability in the New York Stock Exchange which often continues for 1-2 weeks. It’s nothing more than an urban legend, of course, helped along by the fact that Ghibli films are always shown at 9 pm on Fridays, which happens to correspond to the Friday opening of the market in New York. Fridays, of course, are when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank announces employment and other statistics about the economy, so it’s not unreasonable that the market will tend to be more active around this time, up or down. Of course you should not take investment advice from anime phenomenon ^_^
If you’re a fan of Laputa, we’ve got the film on Blu-ray with full subtitles/dubbed tracks, plus other great products. See the products here.
Laputa is one of the best animated films from Japan.
