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Tokyo 2020: two athletes become Pokémon on TV

Bizarre things happen at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, such as the Pokémon transformation of two athletes of badminton during the last match on July 26th. On Japanese TVs, the Chew brothers of the US national team have become Pikachu, the famous yellow mouse Pokémon mascot, and its evolution Raichu. The reason is due to the on-screen graphics of a national TV that reported the names of the athletes in a very similar way to those of the two Pokémon.

The famous television station Fuji TV last July 26 was following the men’s doubles badminton match between USA and Japan during coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The contenders for the match were Keigo Sonoda and Takeshi Kamura for the Japanese team, and Philip Chew e Ryan Chew representing the North American nation.

When it comes to translating from a foreign language to Japanese, we resort to say, a syllabary of Chinese origin useful in reporting the phonemes of foreign languages ​​in Japanese. And this is the point: being the phoneme, the sound of the brothers “chew“, written Chu, is the same as the end of Pika’s nameNS and RaiNS, which are written in Japanese Pikachu e Raichu. To abbreviate in the television graphics, the Fuji TV broadcaster reported the first name of each athlete with the initial letter in Latin characters followed by a period. The result for the US team was therefore “P. Chu” e “R. Chu”.

The web, especially in Japan, has exploded into a series of Pokémon-themed comments watching the Tokyo 2020 match, unleashing the laughter and hilarity of many users and commentators of the match themselves. The competition ended with the Japan’s victory against Pikachu and Raichu. In short, these Olympics in the Japanese country seem increasingly linked to the world of video games: have you already heard the soundtracks of the opening ceremony? Don’t they look familiar to you? And have you seen The Witcher pendants worn by an athlete?

New Pokémon Snap updates on August 4th with new maps to explore and new creatures to photograph. You can order a copy of the game from Amazon by following this link.

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