＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
Hiroshi got his breakthrough in the 2000s with his dark, low-tension self-deprecating monologue, “My name is Hiroshi….
Recently, however, I have not seen him on TV at all, and I thought he had retired from show business.
1. slowly gaining popularity on YouTube
A little curious, I looked him up online and found that he is currently mainly active on YouTube.
The YouTube channel “Hiroshi Channel,” which he started in 2015, has become a popular channel with about 480,000 registered users as of September 2019.
<Addition on 9/26/2020> “Hiroshi Chan Channel” has again made a big breakthrough with over 930,000 registrations.
While more and more people are feeling inconvenienced and lonely in not being able to meet others due to the Corona disaster, “solo camping,” which is a way of enjoying camping alone in the content of the delivery, may be attracting sympathy for the “Hiroshi way” of saying “it is not wrong to do what you want alone.
Originally, he wanted to be a comic comedian, but it didn’t work out, and after working in a host club and other hardships, he became a pin-up comedian and took the world by storm with his “I’m Hiroshi”.
However, the boom did not last long, and his TV appearances gradually declined, and he is rarely seen on TV these days.
Hiroshi, who was born in 1972, says that he “finally found a job that feels good” after discovering YouTube, and in addition to YouTube, he has developed a wide range of businesses, including writing and managing offices and stores.
His work theory is “Do only what you like in the negative. His work theory is developed in his books such as “Working Style 1.9: You Can Live Only by Doing What You Love” and “Living Negatively. Hiroshi’s Self-Defeating Theory of Happiness,” his work theory is developed in his books such as ”Hiroshi’s Self-Defeating Theory of Happiness.
2. “Solo Camping Video
A few years ago, Shuzo Matsuoka’s daily calendar “Mainichi, Shuzo! became popular, and Hiroshi also imitated Shuzo Matsuoka’s daily calendar and released “Mainichi, Negative – You Don’t Need to Be Positive to Live” which became a hot topic.
I had a “negative image” of Hiroshi, so I was surprised to hear that he had made an outdoorsy “camping video”. However, “solo camping videos” is what is typical of him.
He says, “My friends are all busy with work, so I had to go camping alone.
In another interview, he said, “Solo camping suits my nature because I don’t have to adjust to other people. I don’t want to get involved with other people, so I want to get away from the city and heal myself by reexamining myself in nature.
Then, when he told his acquaintances that “solo camping is his hobby,” he found that there were many people around him with the same hobby, so he started uploading videos.
As a side note, there are people who go “solo” in mountain climbing as well. Buntaro Kato, the model for Jiro Nitta’s novel “The Lonely Man,” is one such person. He liked to “go it alone” and shunned group mountaineering, but a mountaineer begged him to climb a mountain with him and he died in distress.
By the way, Hiroshi has loved camping since he was a child, so it is not a “fake hobby” for YouTube.
It is because he is such a “serious” person that his “solo camping videos” have become so popular.
3. YouTube by celebrities
While there are many YouTube videos created by celebrities who have struggled to increase the number of subscribers, such as George Tokoro, Hiroshi, who did not have a very spectacular TV career, is doing very well on YouTube, which is very poignant. It is very poignant, as if Takeshi Sakiyama, an unknown professional, has started to win a lot of championships on the senior tour.
Celebrities are entering YouTube one after another, but only a handful of them are successful. The reason for this is that people enter YouTube with an arrogant attitude, saying, “If I, a well-known celebrity, do this, I can become popular right away, right?
A few examples of successes, besides Hiroshi’s, include King Kong Yuta Kajiwara’s “KAJISAC KAJISAC,” Oriental Radio Atsuhiko Nakata’s “Atsuhiko Nakata’s YouTube University,” Tsubasa Honda’s “Hondanobakuiku,” Nicole Fujita’s “Nicole Fujita’s YouTube Channel,” etc. are available.
All of them post videos about what they like to do and what they are good at, and the common point seems to be that the content is of interest to the general YouTube audience and contains useful and interesting information.
4. iwatani corporation’s cassette stove strategy is “outdoor” and “one person
Iwatani Corporation’s “Cassette Stove Fu” will have been on the market for 50 years in December 2019.
Sales overseas seem to be going well, but the company is currently adopting a strategy that emphasizes “outdoors” and “one person”. This is because “people who were taken camping by their fathers during the outdoor boom of the 1990s are leading the second outdoor boom.
The “one person” strategy may have been influenced by Hiroshi’s “solo camping videos.