Just wanted to clarify a few things about this video: There is A LOT of things about the Hitogata search not mentioned in the video. This was just here to have my current thoughts on the topic to be out there. This is more of an informative video rather than a search video. Hitogata is the second "On the Hunt" search by the Lost Media Wiki. There are tons and tons of dedicated hunters looking for this piece of media, and it would take me quite a bit to do all the research for the search, rather than the media. If you're interested in the hunt, I recommend joining the Lost Media Wiki's forums and discord server. Also wanted to add that this video (to me at least) felt more like a rambling rather than information, so if you leave uninformed of the topic, that's my bad lol. I threw together this video and idea a bit last minute due to another video (which I'm unsure I'll even make) has been in production hell. I PROMISE YOU that the real searchers involved in this media hunt have A LOT more information about the topic than this video can contain, so if you're even more interested, I recommend doing some research on the topic on your own. Anyways, thanks for being patient guys, hope you enjoy.
I feel like it's real but the OP remembered it to be scarier than it really is, much like with Western examples such as Clockman and the Carb Solutions demon lady commercial. As kids we tend to find things that would be mildly unsettling to an adult terrifying, so if OP was on the younger side when Hitogata first aired then I can definitely see why they remember it as scary.
There has been some legitmately creepy commercials/PSA's that have aired though like that infamous UK anti-speeding one where a car runs over a bunch of kids in a park. I could see one trying to enforce safety to be legitmately creepy so you remember it.
If it was a railroad saftey PSA isnt it more likely that it was made for children than railroad workers? Railroad workers would obviously know the dangers of being on a railroad but kids dont. We used to see those types of PSAs in school too warning us not to play on the traintracks. I guess that doesnt explain it being shown late at night tho.......
I never really considered it being a PSA made for kids, considering how it’s under the category of “eerie and creepy” but it definitely makes sense. The OP also claims to have seen it when they were a kid so that also adds to it. Smart observation!
@@SewerReviewer i agree with it being a PSA for kids - in the UK we had (at least when I was a kid) a lot of quite creepy road safety PSAs that would involve showing kids getting run over, them dying at the side of the road etc. something creepy like this definitely would have the potential to stick in kids minds, as those did for kids in the UK.
@@killersquad670 and most of those ended up getting pulled afterwards for how disturbing they were if I remember right. Maybe something similar happened with the Hitogata psa but broadcasters were required to air it, so maybe it got shoved into a timeslot it likely wouldn't be watched.
Potentially less for kids and maybe more for teenagers as a reminder to stay safe? After all, it's a stereotype that teens just want to break every rule imaginable
suidcide by jumping in front of train (human accident 人身事故) is a common issue in japan so it could have been about that. i don’t think it may necessarily have been for children but in the case that it was broadcasted late at night, people who are up at that time that may be dealing with intrusive or suicidal thoughts may have been the target(???)
i feel like it might be a psa for remembering to take care of your loved ones, to be honest. Japan has a high elderly population and the possibility of this being shown in schools makes me think they were trying to make children remember to be grateful. the only way i can think to explain the train thing though is that maybe they were trying to use something familiar to create an association or evoke a possitive feeling. but that might just be me. it was the first thing that popped in my head tho
That would make sense since it is indeed true that in Japan, they do have a pretty high elderly population(if not one of the highest countries that have a high elderly population) so if it’s referring to taking care of loved ones like an elderly person in their families (or if they know an elderly person) then yeah that makes complete sense 🤔
@@hi_dom it sounds a lot like one of those anti-smoking “Truth” commercials I remember seeing years ago late at night on TV during Adult Swim on Cartoon Network or something, or perhaps another channel. I COULD be mistaken, but it reminded me a lot of one of those commercials. Those commercials always used to come on TV and they'd annoy me (I smoke lol). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_(anti-tobacco_campaign)
My guess its multiple commercials, either -Suicide PSA -Smoking PSA -Train safety PSA -A horror movie advert (That probably got cancelled) -Mabey an art piece of some kind?
My thought is maybe op was awake late and watching television, dozed off and dreamed it from a mix of stuff he’d seen, and woke up thinking he had seen it for real. I used to watch NHK Tokyo late at night in Arkansas back then with the satellite box and sometimes you’d get weird stuff lol.
Yeah I dozed off watching OG Japanese sub Iron Chef as a kid once and fully dreamed an episode of them cooking "soylent green" (I hadn't seen the movie but was familiar with the idea from references in other media) which I imagined as like green tofu.
y'know, Hitogata sorta has familiar vibes even though I've 100% never seen it because I'm American. It's probably because I used to hear alot of Radio PSAs saying things like "You can Slow down, Trains can't". Also on a semi-unrelated note, I remember getting an Anti-Vaping PSA and an ad for vapes back to back on the radio lmao
Some thoughts. 1. Probably not a railroad safety P.S.A 2. Probably some kind of PSA 3. Probably shown both in schools and on TV. Here in the US PSA's sometimes air in commercial blocks. (Anyone remember those "Foundation for a Better Life" PSA's that aired on Cartoon Network?) 4. Probably different from what exactly is being described. (ala Clockman and The Evil Farming Game)
In Japan you have those audible pedestrian signs,look up in RUclips.The clinging noises and humanoids figures are there.I believe thats a clue that could leave us to hitogata
i hope this is real this would be sick as hell also here to remind u that dumb ways to die was also a railroad safety psa, so keep that in mind that railroad safety psas do exist and are normally directed towards kids
"Who was this made for?" some PSAs are made for a general audience; i recall a railroad safety PSA from my childhood that was seemingly aimed at the public in general
Goodness, this was fantastic. I never thought about it being a mix of two different media's or a misremembering of the type of PSA/AD. Also get some rest now! You deserve it, thanks for bringing the video to us!
It sounds like an anti-suicide PSA to me. Suicide by train is relatively common in Japan unfortunately, so I can imagine 'every two seconds a man dies on Earth - don't make it three (?)' or something along those lines.
Some thoughts: ~ there might be confusion over what's meant by a commercial in the original post. Technically speaking, yes, the point of a commercial is to sell a product. However - most PSAs are shown *during* commercial breaks. They are still PSAs, but they share screen time with actual commercials. ~ If this was a PSA, it doesn't have to be targeted at a specific audience other than the public. Look at child abuse / molestation PSAs, ones that talk about the signs of abuse or offer statistics. These aren't "stranger danger" PSAs meant for kids, because young children may not be able to comprehend what abuse, rape, or molestation are. So what adults are they targeted towards? Maybe teachers or care-givers - but frankly, the message is meant for ANYONE who suspects a child may be in danger. As for Hitogata - if meant as a railroad safety PSA, it could be targeted to anyone who lives or works near railroads, especially commuters. It's not uncommon for students and adults to take the train to school / work in Japan. I'd think it would be important to stress railroad safety in a community like that. Why late at night? (shrug) Maybe it aired earlier in the evening too. Also, sometimes TV stations need whatever they can find to fill airspace at night when most people are asleep, so a PSA might be good filler material. ~ I doubt the PSA was meant for railroad workers. This is what they do for a living. They might learn about safety regulations at work, either from pamphlets / films or just on-the-job training, but at the very least they should know enough to do the job effectively. Why make a *public* PSA meant only for a tiny percentage of the country's population? Especially if they can get that information through more convenient means? Lastly, not all railroad workers have day shifts. Commuter trains maybe, but the people who work on the actual tracks or other services need to work when it's less busy. ... I'm not saying it's definitely real (or definitely a railroad PSA), but it's not as hard to believe as you might think.
8:32 Hey I came up with that...I think, I know I was the first to bring it up in the channel, but, oh well. I call it the "Dale Hands" theory because of an obscure MST3K running joke, "I thought you were Dale", where the writers got an Ivory Soap and Grape Nuts commercial mixed up in their heads, so hey, it happened before and it can happen again
I think it might have been some kind of suicide prevention PSA but people misremember it being creepy, because usually suicide prevention PSAs are a bit more cheerful and try to make people feel comfortable, that's just my take though
I remember a really creepy PSA from around 2010 to 2013. I think it was Stranger Danger related. It probably only aired in Australia. I know it is kinda unrelated, but this video reminded me of it.
Honestly, from the original description it sounds more like a piece of surreal video art than anything else. Doesn't seem impossible that a kid happened to see an art film on late-night TV, didn't understand what it was, and then later misremembered some of the details.
Re: 'Commercials say what they're advertising' - Not always. When the FOX series "Fringe" was on the way but not officially revealed/announced yet, FOX started airing some vague, somewhat creepy commercials that didn't really have any sign what they were about. A month or two down the line, a similar commercial aired (obviously also on FOX), which followed the same structure of the vague unexplained commercials, but ending with a title card indicating that it was for a show called "Fringe" (as mentioned above) and giving a premiere date. So commercials don't always say what they're for.
I realized I have my own personal version of this. I saw this commercial once when I was maybe 12, and it was an anti-drug ad, maybe for a hotline? I can't remember exactly. The commercial featured a middle aged man coming home from work. He's wearing a three piece suit. He pulls out a straw, a piece of foil, some white powder, and a lighter. He proceeds to freebase this white powder as he begins to cry. Wait, was he crying, or was he just agitated? I'll call it visibly distressed. That's the commercial. A visibly distressed guy in a suit, freebasing something, on primetime television. Then there was a voice over about how there's help, but my little twelve year old brain was just like "holy hell, I guess that's how you smoke heroin."
If it was shown late at night, it was probably simply aired to fill out a commercial break that actual advertisers didn't want to fill. I'm not sure if its a common practice in Japan but it certainly was here in Britain
I think its real but it isn't what we think it is; I think is that Hitogata is actually 2 (or more) commercials that seem similar. My first guess is that its a psa about train safety that was most likely pulled quickly, my other guess is it being a vague advert for a horror movie. (Like the "have you seen this man" viral advertisement for a cancelled movie.) There seems to be a lot of people who have similar memories so obviously at one point in time there was something like this, but just like "that evil farming game" it is probably a bunch of memories morphed into one. ( 5:58 If its an advert for a Horror movie chances that it mimicked a PSA )
If you're talking about the "This Man" that I think you are, that wasn't an ad for a movie, rather it was a social experiment that got so big and well-known that they were going to make a movie based on it.
Also, Evil Farming Game has been found - it was a half-remembered riff from a Vinesauce Joel livestream, where he talked about a friend of his telling him about a game called Body Harvest (nothing to do with farming, just a proto-Earth Defense Force humans-against-giant-bugs game), and that since he (Joel) had never heard of the game but was a fan of Harvest Moon he imagined it as being a farming game with a corpse involved. The guy who posted about it thinking it was a real game had actually been watching that stream while half-asleep, and his tired brain missed the context and fabricated a memory of actually playing the game. The only thing that hasn't been found about it is where some of the later people who claimed to remember it had gotten the fishing minigame part from.
i remember a local PSA about watching where you're walking and it depicted a guy walking onto a railroad, not realizing, and then showed a train coming and his shocked face. basically, yeah, i buy that there's a real PSA trying to scare ppl abt railroad safety by literally spelling out that you will die. i am curious as to where this idea of Hitogata being specifically a railroad safety PSA came from though, since it wasn't mentioned in either of the original posts. what if it's a PSA but for something else, like smoking, drunk driving, etc.?
Re: "where the idea that it was a railroad safety PSA came from', some of the commenters in the threads mentioned that they remembered a railroad crossing sign in the ad/psa. The guy that made this video mentioned that.
If it's a mystery involving Japan and japanese media, you should absolutely Collab with Nick Robinson. He'll go there himself and probably stumble onto the answer. 😆
It wouldn't be for railroad workers as much as kids who like to play around the tracks I think, so it would make sense that poster would have seen it as a kid after school maybe?
I guess one thing to do would be to trace where it exactly got the statistic it mentioned from, the whole every 2 seconds thing from the PSA. There’s a chance if you can figure where that’s from, then figure out anywhere else that it’s mentioned or where it’s been cited. It’s a whole different rabbit whole but one I haven’t heard mentioned
really a dumb point to think a railroad PSA would only be for railroad workers or school kids. i rekon this PSA would be something like Project Lifesaver in the US warning drivers on the road about the dangers of trying to rush the crossing gates at a crossing or about how you should never walker on train tracks or run across the tracks to beat the train when walking down a street with a level crossing. the two people blinking with a ding sound representing a level crossing light and bell
Might be a hoax, since it seems to have just enough compelling detail to stick in the imagination and make someone think "Wait, *maybe* I remember something like that." If it is real, I doubt it's really as creepypasta fodder freaky as some have implied. These sorts of things usually aren't, judging by Clock Man, etc.
This may be a dumb theory, but what if it was a PSA that was targeted towards kids (if it aired late at night, possibly what you’d consider a ‘bad’ kid) that don’t fully realize what their family and or the people around them do for them. And they purposely chose a more unnerving style so it would stick in the kids heads, and they would remember to love the people who love them because you never know when they could be taken from you.
I don't see why it couldn't be for railroad safety. There are a lot of PSAs aimed at trying to stop kids from doing very dangerous things. If anything, I think they might be misremembering the wording, or maybe mistranslating it, but more likely misremembering it. That's much more common than misremembering images. I think this likely was aimed at kids, likely a cartoon of some kind, and the wording was likely a statistic about how many children die playing by railways. Or, as some have already pointed out...it could be a suicide prevention thing.
This sounds like a PSA against self-deleting (don't know if I can say the actual word on here). I feel like this might be the case because of it mentioning a death rate while showing ppl flashing on a train track. It was also mentioned that it may have aired late at night and I can only assume the insomnia that people facing this issue might have. Then again it could just be a "look both ways before crossing" PSA as the flashing ppl could represent the lights on a train sign, idk.
I don't see why the ad would be specifically aimed at anybody, it would be like "Wear Your Seatbelt" or "Don't Do Meth" PSA's in the US, those are aimed at everybody. Also unlike the US, trains are a very common mode of transportation in Japan so it makes sense that they would push ads like that for the general public to see.
i think that this was aired at late at night or at school, not both, its honestly really hard to make an explanation for it both being aired late at night and at school. i personally think that it was either a railroad psa shown in schools or a japanese adult swim bumper
I think Hitogata could’ve been a PSA against suicide by train track. That cause of death isn’t too uncommon in Japan. Another theory is that it could just be a bunch of people misremembering multiple different commercials & PSAs as one thing, but i personally hope that it’s an actual PSA.
Maybe is a psa for people who commit suicide. I'm not 100 percent but maybe just maybe those were the people they were trying to reach. Especially now a days suicide rates are going higher
I personally believe that Hitogata was a railway safety PSA because I've seen plenty of railway safety adverts/PSA's when I was young & they scared me with no doubt.
I'm from the PSA community, specifically PSAArchive's community, and I have a little info. There is one Japanese PSA with two figures made of sand on a beach, and one disintegrates. It does in fact have a ringing bell in the background that you could sort of describe as "pon pon" or "gan gan". That's an ad about global warming and the loss of land as seawaters rise. It's possible this Japanese OP just misremembered that ad as something else and thus Hitogata was born. I think it's likely though, that Hitogata was some sort of Japanese railway safety PSA, with the implied claim that every two seconds someone on earth is killed by a train (which seems dubious to me, but ok). As for translating the Japanese, you stated you can't, but I know one horror RUclips who might be able to: Look into LazyMasquerade, he currently lives in Japan and most likely, if anyone would know how to translate Japanese it would be someone who currently lives there. Best of luck on this.
Lazy can't actually speak fluent Japanese as far as i remember, but his wife is a native speaker. He gets her to translate Japanese things, so definitely talk to him!
wait i think i found something similar to the PSA you were describing i looked up japanese PSA about global warming i didn't get quite get the thing that you said BUT i saw something verrrrrry similar it was a humanoid and dog made out of sand but they were standing up on the sand and was made by AC japan one of the companies people believe made hitogata but when i clicked on it it said sorry this video is no longer available soo yeah i found something similar to what you were describing and it didn't work 😭
I highly doubt it was a Creepypasta. If it was made up just to freak people out, you'd think they would've made it a lot more extreme. The way Hitogata's described makes it sound eerie, but not terrifying. It would be extremely tame for a Creepypasta or anything akin to it. Whether the PSA actually existed is another thing, but I believe the OP genuinely thinks it did and they saw it.
Every time I hear about this one I have the vaguest inkling that I've SEEN it. Or something like it. ... I'm British btw. So I don't know how. Unless it was one of those weird "odd commercials" shows I sometimes caught late night as a teenager. The ones I was half-asleep for and thus don't remember that well...
I wonder if it could be a suicide prevention PSA? That's what the phrasing 'every two seconds a man dies' makes me think of. I vaguely remember similar campaigns being run in the UK when I was a kid.
Another thing to consider is that whatever company made this might not have it anymore. Japanese companies were rather infamous about archiving stuff back then, I know Square Enix lost the source code to FF8 and I heard many other Japanese video game companies back then weren't saving stuff like that either (Nintendo is an anomaly here as they archived well) Dragonball had it's original audio tapes wiped as well. I'm sure something more disposable like a PSA/commercial would have been thrown out by a company without a 2nd thought once it was considered outdated. That would explain why the companies people have attempted to contact about this don't know anything. It's possible that it still exists on some VHS tape someone recorded with though.
If I can make a guess, I think if it is a psa for Japan, instead of railroad workers (since I assume they would have more knowledge on trains and tracks) but I think it’s highly possible it’s meant to be targeted to kids for all ages (like elementary to high school) cause here in the states we would have something similar for drugs, alcohol, bullying, and web safety so I would assume in Japan (keep in mind I don’t currently live in Japan nor do I know how schooling works over there so I’m just speculating) they would have something similar for safety in their country like railroad tracks since in Japan they have trains (I pretty sure they have trains where people can ride like public transportation kinda like in New York City with public trains)
I feel like the railway safety idea is believable. While I don't think we have many PSAs like this specifically here in the US, the UK made a lot of railway safety PSAs and PIFs between the 1970s and the 1990s, with Killing Time coming out in 1992 or so. There were also a lot of weird, dramatic, and artistic types of stuff like this out around the time; such as the workplace safety films that came out here in the late 90s. This sounds fascinating and it would be a shame if it's just a case of the telephone game or one giant fever dream.
I have a personal "Hitogata" and it was about a man saying something about toys being bad for children or something and with a gray background that is probably a few shelfs or bricks I forgot if a table was shown or not though That is all i could remember besides the body shape of the man in said ad who is Obese and i never saw it again. I also like saw it in 2010-2012 on youtube and Little me also called the man "mr. badguy" due to obvious reasons
I remember in school we had a psa shown to us about cross walk and train track safety, but it wasnt like this buuttt it probably was a psa or something like that
My husband and brother in law (Japanese) claimed hitogata is true, pretry much what the 2chan comments are. That crossed in our random talks as the 3 of us are suckers for lost media and mystery stuff. Idk if this is relevant but they lived in Hyogo prefecture in the 90s when they were still elementary school kids. They both seen it late at night and it seemed like a fever dream as they were almost sleepy. I guess it's a PSA either for railroad safety, anti-suicide campaign, or both. My crazy theory is it is like the Adult Swim title card The Dawn is Your Enemy.
I think OP misremberd hittoga In 1999-2004 there's were a lot of commerciales that had elements of Hittogata in Japan and so there is a high chance that OP mixed these elements of his childhood commercials and misremberd it
I believe Hitogata is real but not about railroads,but about those audible pedestrian signs you'll see in Japan.The humanoid figures and clinging noises are there
Since it’s streamed live on LSuperSonicQ’s RUclips, we upload those archive streams to a different channel. Also sorry if this is formatted weird, doing this on mobile lol. ruclips.net/channel/UC3w9xa5-uuM4S9RCenCaLbQ
You know those commercials they show that try to convince you to donate to third-world countries? The "every two seconds someone dies" definitely reminds me of one of those. Like it could be something to get people to donate to a charity.
I assume that it is real, but it is going to be immensely hard to find. I would say creepypasta but those 1999 references prevent me from calling it fake. I would assume that OP did misremember a few things, hence why a few things didn't line up
i think it could definitely be real but my only thing is, if it was shown for kids, why would it be so upfront about death? maybe it’s just me but would a psa shown to children really say “2 people die every second”. what would kids need to do with that information?
I still dont get it as to why people dont think its a PSA? Its Japan. Their mode of transport is trains. Theres 7 year old kids using them on their own. I think its refering railways in general. Rail ways that can be on a rural area where a few houses are and kids play, or subways. Lots of adults commit suicide with trains there too. I just think lots of things got lost in translation and maybe the OP only remembered a few things and just posted what he remembered.
They've already got a translator (natively Japanese too) who has translated absolutely everything and is basically constantly online to answer questions
@@Lugiamasterbrony It's only real because the game was created FOR the creepypasta. And the dead girl in the files is from a movie. So no, it isn't real in the sense that it existed before the creepypasta.
The thing that irks me is that at least 3 babies must be born every 2 seconds in order for population growth if this is true. We are currently over populated...huh..
i think it was a psa for people who wanted to kill themself (i think that becose the poeple who want to kill them self is hier then everywhere on earth like they also have a forest calde the suaside forrest)
I put the post through Deepl, it seems like it's the japanese onomatopoeia of "boom boom" I don't speak Japanese myself but deepl is generally more reliable than google translate
someone on the lost media subreddit found it. check it out. It is actually a dance groups video and they think a little part of it was played on tv as a promo. it's been found i think finally
Just wanted to clarify a few things about this video:
There is A LOT of things about the Hitogata search not mentioned in the video. This was just here to have my current thoughts on the topic to be out there. This is more of an informative video rather than a search video. Hitogata is the second "On the Hunt" search by the Lost Media Wiki. There are tons and tons of dedicated hunters looking for this piece of media, and it would take me quite a bit to do all the research for the search, rather than the media. If you're interested in the hunt, I recommend joining the Lost Media Wiki's forums and discord server.
Also wanted to add that this video (to me at least) felt more like a rambling rather than information, so if you leave uninformed of the topic, that's my bad lol. I threw together this video and idea a bit last minute due to another video (which I'm unsure I'll even make) has been in production hell. I PROMISE YOU that the real searchers involved in this media hunt have A LOT more information about the topic than this video can contain, so if you're even more interested, I recommend doing some research on the topic on your own.
Anyways, thanks for being patient guys, hope you enjoy.
Awesome video, bud!
But Existence Unconfirmed
I feel like it's real but the OP remembered it to be scarier than it really is, much like with Western examples such as Clockman and the Carb Solutions demon lady commercial. As kids we tend to find things that would be mildly unsettling to an adult terrifying, so if OP was on the younger side when Hitogata first aired then I can definitely see why they remember it as scary.
carb soluion was mostly seen by adults lol
There has been some legitmately creepy commercials/PSA's that have aired though like that infamous UK anti-speeding one where a car runs over a bunch of kids in a park. I could see one trying to enforce safety to be legitmately creepy so you remember it.
@@mattwolf7698 the speeding psa was fucking hilarious tho
@@mattwolf7698
*playing with cars*
*dies to voodoo car*
Or it can just be another evil farming game
If it was a railroad saftey PSA isnt it more likely that it was made for children than railroad workers? Railroad workers would obviously know the dangers of being on a railroad but kids dont. We used to see those types of PSAs in school too warning us not to play on the traintracks. I guess that doesnt explain it being shown late at night tho.......
I never really considered it being a PSA made for kids, considering how it’s under the category of “eerie and creepy” but it definitely makes sense. The OP also claims to have seen it when they were a kid so that also adds to it. Smart observation!
@@SewerReviewer i agree with it being a PSA for kids - in the UK we had (at least when I was a kid) a lot of quite creepy road safety PSAs that would involve showing kids getting run over, them dying at the side of the road etc. something creepy like this definitely would have the potential to stick in kids minds, as those did for kids in the UK.
@@killersquad670 and most of those ended up getting pulled afterwards for how disturbing they were if I remember right.
Maybe something similar happened with the Hitogata psa but broadcasters were required to air it, so maybe it got shoved into a timeslot it likely wouldn't be watched.
Potentially less for kids and maybe more for teenagers as a reminder to stay safe? After all, it's a stereotype that teens just want to break every rule imaginable
suidcide by jumping in front of train (human accident 人身事故) is a common issue in japan so it could have been about that. i don’t think it may necessarily have been for children but in the case that it was broadcasted late at night, people who are up at that time that may be dealing with intrusive or suicidal thoughts may have been the target(???)
Aren't train suicides frequent in Japan? Maybe it was in regards to that?
YES! I literally just made a comment on that point before i saw yours.
i feel like it might be a psa for remembering to take care of your loved ones, to be honest. Japan has a high elderly population and the possibility of this being shown in schools makes me think they were trying to make children remember to be grateful. the only way i can think to explain the train thing though is that maybe they were trying to use something familiar to create an association or evoke a possitive feeling.
but that might just be me. it was the first thing that popped in my head tho
That would make sense since it is indeed true that in Japan, they do have a pretty high elderly population(if not one of the highest countries that have a high elderly population) so if it’s referring to taking care of loved ones like an elderly person in their families (or if they know an elderly person) then yeah that makes complete sense 🤔
It makes sense
Personally I think it’s for life insurance. It feels like something for life insurance. Question is which life insurance company commissioned it?
I feel like it’s real but it’s just something else that we aren’t thinking about
the story were exaggerated perhaps
Yea, or maybe it's two ads, like the origin of "I thought you were dale"
It honestly sounds exactly like an old anti-smoking commercial I remember from the early '00s.
@@hi_dom it sounds a lot like one of those anti-smoking “Truth” commercials I remember seeing years ago late at night on TV during Adult Swim on Cartoon Network or something, or perhaps another channel. I COULD be mistaken, but it reminded me a lot of one of those commercials. Those commercials always used to come on TV and they'd annoy me (I smoke lol).
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_(anti-tobacco_campaign)
My guess its multiple commercials, either
-Suicide PSA
-Smoking PSA
-Train safety PSA
-A horror movie advert (That probably got cancelled)
-Mabey an art piece of some kind?
The "every 2 seconds, a man dies" feels like something I've heard before. My mind immediately went to it being a heart disease or suicide PSA.
you feel like you've heard it before because you have heard it before, its such a vague phrase that everyone in their life at some point has heard it.
i think its anti suicide psa cuz i havent seen a person with a heart disease dying on train tracks.
Every sixty seconds in Africa a minute passes. Together we can stop it
My thought is maybe op was awake late and watching television, dozed off and dreamed it from a mix of stuff he’d seen, and woke up thinking he had seen it for real. I used to watch NHK Tokyo late at night in Arkansas back then with the satellite box and sometimes you’d get weird stuff lol.
Not related to the topic but I love both your username and icon.
Kinda like the Evil Farming Game
@@seasaltlover7409 Same. I love TWEWY and especially my boy Joshua
@@Spyrotastic141 yes, best boy!!! (Hard to love, hard to hate if you know what I mean ;) )
Yeah I dozed off watching OG Japanese sub Iron Chef as a kid once and fully dreamed an episode of them cooking "soylent green" (I hadn't seen the movie but was familiar with the idea from references in other media) which I imagined as like green tofu.
What if it was something like our adult swim bumpers? Something from their airways to scare children from watching tv at night or something?
Good point might be
I doubt it.
@@ZeepAtomic it is kinda creepy so i might just might be
y'know, Hitogata sorta has familiar vibes even though I've 100% never seen it because I'm American. It's probably because I used to hear alot of Radio PSAs saying things like "You can Slow down, Trains can't". Also on a semi-unrelated note, I remember getting an Anti-Vaping PSA and an ad for vapes back to back on the radio lmao
Some thoughts.
1. Probably not a railroad safety P.S.A
2. Probably some kind of PSA
3. Probably shown both in schools and on TV. Here in the US PSA's sometimes air in commercial blocks. (Anyone remember those "Foundation for a Better Life" PSA's that aired on Cartoon Network?)
4. Probably different from what exactly is being described. (ala Clockman and The Evil Farming Game)
In Japan you have those audible pedestrian signs,look up in RUclips.The clinging noises and humanoids figures are there.I believe thats a clue that could leave us to hitogata
It could be a PSA about suicide. Suicide rates in Japan are pretty high.
i hope this is real this would be sick as hell
also here to remind u that dumb ways to die was also a railroad safety psa, so keep that in mind that railroad safety psas do exist and are normally directed towards kids
a railroad safety psa and a mobile game so cool 😎
"Who was this made for?"
some PSAs are made for a general audience; i recall a railroad safety PSA from my childhood that was seemingly aimed at the public in general
Goodness, this was fantastic. I never thought about it being a mix of two different media's or a misremembering of the type of PSA/AD.
Also get some rest now! You deserve it, thanks for bringing the video to us!
It sounds like an anti-suicide PSA to me. Suicide by train is relatively common in Japan unfortunately, so I can imagine 'every two seconds a man dies on Earth - don't make it three (?)' or something along those lines.
Some thoughts:
~ there might be confusion over what's meant by a commercial in the original post.
Technically speaking, yes, the point of a commercial is to sell a product.
However - most PSAs are shown *during* commercial breaks. They are still PSAs, but they share screen time with actual commercials.
~ If this was a PSA, it doesn't have to be targeted at a specific audience other than the public.
Look at child abuse / molestation PSAs, ones that talk about the signs of abuse or offer statistics. These aren't "stranger danger" PSAs meant for kids, because young children may not be able to comprehend what abuse, rape, or molestation are. So what adults are they targeted towards? Maybe teachers or care-givers - but frankly, the message is meant for ANYONE who suspects a child may be in danger.
As for Hitogata - if meant as a railroad safety PSA, it could be targeted to anyone who lives or works near railroads, especially commuters. It's not uncommon for students and adults to take the train to school / work in Japan. I'd think it would be important to stress railroad safety in a community like that.
Why late at night? (shrug) Maybe it aired earlier in the evening too. Also, sometimes TV stations need whatever they can find to fill airspace at night when most people are asleep, so a PSA might be good filler material.
~ I doubt the PSA was meant for railroad workers.
This is what they do for a living. They might learn about safety regulations at work, either from pamphlets / films or just on-the-job training, but at the very least they should know enough to do the job effectively.
Why make a *public* PSA meant only for a tiny percentage of the country's population? Especially if they can get that information through more convenient means?
Lastly, not all railroad workers have day shifts. Commuter trains maybe, but the people who work on the actual tracks or other services need to work when it's less busy.
...
I'm not saying it's definitely real (or definitely a railroad PSA), but it's not as hard to believe as you might think.
I honestly think it's Japan's own saki sanobashi (an urban legend blown out of proportions)
hell they even have a similar origin story
My favorite lost episode creepypasta is an obscure one called "Thomas the Tank Engine Early Reel".
8:32 Hey I came up with that...I think, I know I was the first to bring it up in the channel, but, oh well. I call it the "Dale Hands" theory because of an obscure MST3K running joke, "I thought you were Dale", where the writers got an Ivory Soap and Grape Nuts commercial mixed up in their heads, so hey, it happened before and it can happen again
Can't believe you stayed up all night to crank this out, man. Love the dedication. Another fantastic video as always.
I think it might have been some kind of suicide prevention PSA but people misremember it being creepy, because usually suicide prevention PSAs are a bit more cheerful and try to make people feel comfortable, that's just my take though
I remember a really creepy PSA from around 2010 to 2013. I think it was Stranger Danger related. It probably only aired in Australia.
I know it is kinda unrelated, but this video reminded me of it.
Honestly, from the original description it sounds more like a piece of surreal video art than anything else. Doesn't seem impossible that a kid happened to see an art film on late-night TV, didn't understand what it was, and then later misremembered some of the details.
Re: 'Commercials say what they're advertising' - Not always. When the FOX series "Fringe" was on the way but not officially revealed/announced yet, FOX started airing some vague, somewhat creepy commercials that didn't really have any sign what they were about. A month or two down the line, a similar commercial aired (obviously also on FOX), which followed the same structure of the vague unexplained commercials, but ending with a title card indicating that it was for a show called "Fringe" (as mentioned above) and giving a premiere date. So commercials don't always say what they're for.
Imagine if Hitogata was just a mass hallucination
I realized I have my own personal version of this. I saw this commercial once when I was maybe 12, and it was an anti-drug ad, maybe for a hotline? I can't remember exactly. The commercial featured a middle aged man coming home from work. He's wearing a three piece suit. He pulls out a straw, a piece of foil, some white powder, and a lighter. He proceeds to freebase this white powder as he begins to cry. Wait, was he crying, or was he just agitated? I'll call it visibly distressed. That's the commercial. A visibly distressed guy in a suit, freebasing something, on primetime television. Then there was a voice over about how there's help, but my little twelve year old brain was just like "holy hell, I guess that's how you smoke heroin."
If it was shown late at night, it was probably simply aired to fill out a commercial break that actual advertisers didn't want to fill. I'm not sure if its a common practice in Japan but it certainly was here in Britain
I think its real but it isn't what we think it is;
I think is that Hitogata is actually 2 (or more) commercials that seem similar.
My first guess is that its a psa about train safety that was most likely pulled quickly, my other guess is it being a vague advert for a horror movie. (Like the "have you seen this man" viral advertisement for a cancelled movie.)
There seems to be a lot of people who have similar memories so obviously at one point in time there was something like this, but just like "that evil farming game" it is probably a bunch of memories morphed into one.
( 5:58 If its an advert for a Horror movie chances that it mimicked a PSA )
If you're talking about the "This Man" that I think you are, that wasn't an ad for a movie, rather it was a social experiment that got so big and well-known that they were going to make a movie based on it.
Also, Evil Farming Game has been found - it was a half-remembered riff from a Vinesauce Joel livestream, where he talked about a friend of his telling him about a game called Body Harvest (nothing to do with farming, just a proto-Earth Defense Force humans-against-giant-bugs game), and that since he (Joel) had never heard of the game but was a fan of Harvest Moon he imagined it as being a farming game with a corpse involved. The guy who posted about it thinking it was a real game had actually been watching that stream while half-asleep, and his tired brain missed the context and fabricated a memory of actually playing the game. The only thing that hasn't been found about it is where some of the later people who claimed to remember it had gotten the fishing minigame part from.
6:05 "I passed this through google translate lol"
i remember a local PSA about watching where you're walking and it depicted a guy walking onto a railroad, not realizing, and then showed a train coming and his shocked face. basically, yeah, i buy that there's a real PSA trying to scare ppl abt railroad safety by literally spelling out that you will die. i am curious as to where this idea of Hitogata being specifically a railroad safety PSA came from though, since it wasn't mentioned in either of the original posts. what if it's a PSA but for something else, like smoking, drunk driving, etc.?
Re: "where the idea that it was a railroad safety PSA came from', some of the commenters in the threads mentioned that they remembered a railroad crossing sign in the ad/psa. The guy that made this video mentioned that.
If it's a mystery involving Japan and japanese media, you should absolutely Collab with Nick Robinson. He'll go there himself and probably stumble onto the answer. 😆
After the evil farming game was "found", I get the feeling that this is gonna be the Japanese version of that
Why???
It wouldn't be for railroad workers as much as kids who like to play around the tracks I think, so it would make sense that poster would have seen it as a kid after school maybe?
I guess one thing to do would be to trace where it exactly got the statistic it mentioned from, the whole every 2 seconds thing from the PSA. There’s a chance if you can figure where that’s from, then figure out anywhere else that it’s mentioned or where it’s been cited. It’s a whole different rabbit whole but one I haven’t heard mentioned
really a dumb point to think a railroad PSA would only be for railroad workers or school kids. i rekon this PSA would be something like Project Lifesaver in the US warning drivers on the road about the dangers of trying to rush the crossing gates at a crossing or about how you should never walker on train tracks or run across the tracks to beat the train when walking down a street with a level crossing. the two people blinking with a ding sound representing a level crossing light and bell
Might be a hoax, since it seems to have just enough compelling detail to stick in the imagination and make someone think "Wait, *maybe* I remember something like that."
If it is real, I doubt it's really as creepypasta fodder freaky as some have implied. These sorts of things usually aren't, judging by Clock Man, etc.
This may be a dumb theory, but what if it was a PSA that was targeted towards kids (if it aired late at night, possibly what you’d consider a ‘bad’ kid) that don’t fully realize what their family and or the people around them do for them. And they purposely chose a more unnerving style so it would stick in the kids heads, and they would remember to love the people who love them because you never know when they could be taken from you.
I don't see why it couldn't be for railroad safety. There are a lot of PSAs aimed at trying to stop kids from doing very dangerous things. If anything, I think they might be misremembering the wording, or maybe mistranslating it, but more likely misremembering it. That's much more common than misremembering images. I think this likely was aimed at kids, likely a cartoon of some kind, and the wording was likely a statistic about how many children die playing by railways.
Or, as some have already pointed out...it could be a suicide prevention thing.
This sounds like a PSA against self-deleting (don't know if I can say the actual word on here). I feel like this might be the case because of it mentioning a death rate while showing ppl flashing on a train track. It was also mentioned that it may have aired late at night and I can only assume the insomnia that people facing this issue might have. Then again it could just be a "look both ways before crossing" PSA as the flashing ppl could represent the lights on a train sign, idk.
I don't see why the ad would be specifically aimed at anybody, it would be like "Wear Your Seatbelt" or "Don't Do Meth" PSA's in the US, those are aimed at everybody. Also unlike the US, trains are a very common mode of transportation in Japan so it makes sense that they would push ads like that for the general public to see.
i think that this was aired at late at night or at school, not both, its honestly really hard to make an explanation for it both being aired late at night and at school. i personally think that it was either a railroad psa shown in schools or a japanese adult swim bumper
I think Hitogata could’ve been a PSA against suicide by train track. That cause of death isn’t too uncommon in Japan. Another theory is that it could just be a bunch of people misremembering multiple different commercials & PSAs as one thing, but i personally hope that it’s an actual PSA.
Maybe is a psa for people who commit suicide. I'm not 100 percent but maybe just maybe those were the people they were trying to reach.
Especially now a days suicide rates are going higher
I personally believe that Hitogata was a railway safety PSA because I've seen plenty of railway safety adverts/PSA's when I was young & they scared me with no doubt.
I'm from the PSA community, specifically PSAArchive's community, and I have a little info. There is one Japanese PSA with two figures made of sand on a beach, and one disintegrates. It does in fact have a ringing bell in the background that you could sort of describe as "pon pon" or "gan gan". That's an ad about global warming and the loss of land as seawaters rise. It's possible this Japanese OP just misremembered that ad as something else and thus Hitogata was born.
I think it's likely though, that Hitogata was some sort of Japanese railway safety PSA, with the implied claim that every two seconds someone on earth is killed by a train (which seems dubious to me, but ok). As for translating the Japanese, you stated you can't, but I know one horror RUclips who might be able to: Look into LazyMasquerade, he currently lives in Japan and most likely, if anyone would know how to translate Japanese it would be someone who currently lives there. Best of luck on this.
Lazy can't actually speak fluent Japanese as far as i remember, but his wife is a native speaker. He gets her to translate Japanese things, so definitely talk to him!
@@redlikeroses3705 thanks for clarification.
Do you have a link to the beach PSA video or would you be able to upload it?
that's interesting! maybe op mixed up that and the JUNGLE bumper hence the black background
wait i think i found something similar to the PSA you were describing i looked up japanese PSA about global warming i didn't get quite get the thing that you said BUT i saw something verrrrrry similar it was a humanoid and dog made out of sand but they were standing up on the sand and was made by AC japan one of the companies people believe made hitogata but when i clicked on it it said sorry this video is no longer available soo yeah i found something similar to what you were describing and it didn't work 😭
I highly doubt it was a Creepypasta. If it was made up just to freak people out, you'd think they would've made it a lot more extreme. The way Hitogata's described makes it sound eerie, but not terrifying. It would be extremely tame for a Creepypasta or anything akin to it. Whether the PSA actually existed is another thing, but I believe the OP genuinely thinks it did and they saw it.
Hey what if it wasn’t a railroad, but rather a wear your seatbelt in the car Psa.. And the gong sound, would be the seatbelt alarm
Every time I hear about this one I have the vaguest inkling that I've SEEN it. Or something like it.
... I'm British btw. So I don't know how.
Unless it was one of those weird "odd commercials" shows I sometimes caught late night as a teenager. The ones I was half-asleep for and thus don't remember that well...
I wonder if it could be a suicide prevention PSA? That's what the phrasing 'every two seconds a man dies' makes me think of. I vaguely remember similar campaigns being run in the UK when I was a kid.
Another thing to consider is that whatever company made this might not have it anymore. Japanese companies were rather infamous about archiving stuff back then, I know Square Enix lost the source code to FF8 and I heard many other Japanese video game companies back then weren't saving stuff like that either (Nintendo is an anomaly here as they archived well) Dragonball had it's original audio tapes wiped as well.
I'm sure something more disposable like a PSA/commercial would have been thrown out by a company without a 2nd thought once it was considered outdated. That would explain why the companies people have attempted to contact about this don't know anything. It's possible that it still exists on some VHS tape someone recorded with though.
If I can make a guess,
I think if it is a psa for Japan, instead of railroad workers (since I assume they would have more knowledge on trains and tracks) but I think it’s highly possible it’s meant to be targeted to kids for all ages (like elementary to high school) cause here in the states we would have something similar for drugs, alcohol, bullying, and web safety so I would assume in Japan (keep in mind I don’t currently live in Japan nor do I know how schooling works over there so I’m just speculating) they would have something similar for safety in their country like railroad tracks since in Japan they have trains (I pretty sure they have trains where people can ride like public transportation kinda like in New York City with public trains)
I feel like the railway safety idea is believable. While I don't think we have many PSAs like this specifically here in the US, the UK made a lot of railway safety PSAs and PIFs between the 1970s and the 1990s, with Killing Time coming out in 1992 or so. There were also a lot of weird, dramatic, and artistic types of stuff like this out around the time; such as the workplace safety films that came out here in the late 90s. This sounds fascinating and it would be a shame if it's just a case of the telephone game or one giant fever dream.
Sewer starts doing math
Me: Math!? I didn't study!
8:30 its kinda like the tinkerbelle thing where many mix up the disney fast play with the actual disney logo
I have a personal "Hitogata" and it was about a man saying something about toys being bad for children or something and with a gray background that is probably a few shelfs or bricks I forgot if a table was shown or not though That is all i could remember besides the body shape of the man in said ad who is Obese and i never saw it again. I also like saw it in 2010-2012 on youtube and Little me also called the man "mr. badguy" due to obvious reasons
kinda weird that almost every recreation of hitogata is in black and white seeing as it supposedly aired in the late 90s-2000s
I'd never heard of this, it's super cool
its so specific it seems very real
I remember in school we had a psa shown to us about cross walk and train track safety, but it wasnt like this buuttt it probably was a psa or something like that
My husband and brother in law (Japanese) claimed hitogata is true, pretry much what the 2chan comments are. That crossed in our random talks as the 3 of us are suckers for lost media and mystery stuff. Idk if this is relevant but they lived in Hyogo prefecture in the 90s when they were still elementary school kids. They both seen it late at night and it seemed like a fever dream as they were almost sleepy.
I guess it's a PSA either for railroad safety, anti-suicide campaign, or both. My crazy theory is it is like the Adult Swim title card The Dawn is Your Enemy.
A firefly came into my blanket fort while I watched this
I think OP misremberd hittoga
In 1999-2004 there's were a lot of commerciales that had elements of
Hittogata in Japan and so there is a high chance that OP mixed these elements of his childhood commercials and misremberd it
I believe Hitogata is real but not about railroads,but about those audible pedestrian signs you'll see in Japan.The humanoid figures and clinging noises are there
Where can I listen to your podcast?
Since it’s streamed live on LSuperSonicQ’s RUclips, we upload those archive streams to a different channel. Also sorry if this is formatted weird, doing this on mobile lol.
ruclips.net/channel/UC3w9xa5-uuM4S9RCenCaLbQ
@@SewerReviewer thank you!
You know those commercials they show that try to convince you to donate to third-world countries? The "every two seconds someone dies" definitely reminds me of one of those. Like it could be something to get people to donate to a charity.
I hope this is real. I love creepy & weird Japanese stuff & I’d really like to see it someday…
I assume that it is real, but it is going to be immensely hard to find.
I would say creepypasta but those 1999 references prevent me from calling it fake.
I would assume that OP did misremember a few things, hence why a few things didn't line up
i think it could definitely be real but my only thing is, if it was shown for kids, why would it be so upfront about death? maybe it’s just me but would a psa shown to children really say “2 people die every second”. what would kids need to do with that information?
I still dont get it as to why people dont think its a PSA? Its Japan. Their mode of transport is trains. Theres 7 year old kids using them on their own. I think its refering railways in general. Rail ways that can be on a rural area where a few houses are and kids play, or subways. Lots of adults commit suicide with trains there too. I just think lots of things got lost in translation and maybe the OP only remembered a few things and just posted what he remembered.
Hmm...I do know a bit of Japanese so I could maybe try translating some stuff
Good idea.
They've already got a translator (natively Japanese too) who has translated absolutely everything and is basically constantly online to answer questions
@@livly_garden Who is this translator?
@@piepivotmonitor5986 i think their name is wil on the discord
@@livly_garden Excellent. You wouldn't mind getting them to translate hitogata stuff that hasn't been translated yet, would you?
very nice video
Nice video!
are people still looking for this? we need some new leads
oh hey i recognize those kevin macloed pieces
I mean some creepypastas are real. Most aren't but some are.
THAT'S WHAT I SAID BUT PEOPLE ARE LIKE "nO aLl CrEePyPaStAs ArE fAkE".
@@alexiskuwata Ooh, I'm interested, which ones are real?
Where are the real ones then?
@@UnforgetableLuncheon There's a creepypasta called MARIO and that's a real one. Mullet Mike did a video on it.
@@Lugiamasterbrony It's only real because the game was created FOR the creepypasta. And the dead girl in the files is from a movie. So no, it isn't real in the sense that it existed before the creepypasta.
Umm here is the thing
I believe it isn't real
Reasons are simple.If you check Yearbooks for the CMs,you won't find anything about Hitogata
The thing that irks me is that at least 3 babies must be born every 2 seconds in order for population growth if this is true. We are currently over populated...huh..
yea it is
How do you know?! Did you actually watch the original ad?! :o
Lol
@@alexiskuwata You don't watch the ad, the ad watches you.
@@alexiskuwata I do not know whether or not the ad is real sorry
This is the most early i got(i think). 9 minutes
i think it was a psa for people who wanted to kill themself (i think that becose the poeple who want to kill them self is hier then everywhere on earth like they also have a forest calde the suaside forrest)
(insert creepy saying)
They sell pupets
plz cover NasrUdin Nezt Plz favori4e piz of lost medium
collective false memory
1:33 is that even true?
Is there a difference in Japanese between "gan gan" and "pon pon?"
I put the post through Deepl, it seems like it's the japanese onomatopoeia of "boom boom"
I don't speak Japanese myself but deepl is generally more reliable than google translate
I disagree. I think it doesn't exist.
someone on the lost media subreddit found it. check it out. It is actually a dance groups video and they think a little part of it was played on tv as a promo. it's been found i think finally
So many dumb ways to die...
O
Really trying to hit that 10 min mark huh.
hell, look at the evil farming game. it was literally just a vinesauce video being misremembered as a real game.
No that was found
@@mattzr1550 no, it wasn't. It wasn't a real game at all, just a vinesauce stream