Please scream inside your heart: Japan's new roller coaster rule becomes motto for 2020

In late June, Japanese theme park Fuji-Q Highland released a video showing two of its executives calmly riding the park’s famously terrifying Fujiyama roller coaster. The two sat solemnly throughout the entire ride, their faces inscrutable behind their masks, not making a single scream, cheer or even a cough.

The perplexing yet hilarious video was designed to demonstrate the park’s new rule banning screaming on rides, to limit the spread of Covid-19 coronavirus. Amazingly, it wasn’t the executives’ stolidly stoic approach to the ride which made the video go viral, but rather its final title, a request to the viewer to ‘please scream inside your heart’.

Although it’s almost certainly an overly literal translation, this unquestionably Japanese expression has been swiftly adopted by netizens as the motto for 2020. After all, in a year so far stricken with a global pandemic, widespread protests, natural disasters and more, ‘please scream inside your heart’ sounds like an appropriate advice. As one user tweeted, ‘On the one hand, "please scream inside your heart" is a very bad translation. On the other hand, it's a powerful sentence that enriches the English language.’

Here’s how the phrase is being adopted by the Internet:

As a motto for the year

As poetry

As health advice

 

As the world’s greatest album title

As a bestseller

As a motivational poster

As a cross-stitch pattern

The phrase has even made it onto face masks

Here’s hoping that in six months’ time – if not sooner – we’ll be on the lookout for a more upbeat slogan.

For information on how to go out safely in Tokyo, click here. 

 

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