A recent Ameba news article makes note of the powerful influence of Chinese fans on AKB’s Elections.  Last year, Watanabe Mayu’s #1 position was said to be heavily influenced by Chinese fans. So what did they have to say about Sasshi taking #1 in 2015?

The article seems to glean over fan reactions from Weibo, a popular Chinese social network service (perhaps likened to Twitter).  It would seem that the enormous 30,000 vote gap between #1 and #2 in 2015’s AKB Sousenkyo Election garnered various opinions.  Some of the opinions provided were:

“Sashihara Rino is amazing!  The Sashi I love, she has this mighty power! Worshipping such a strong person was the right thing to do!” (指原莉乃はやっぱりスゴイ! 愛する指原莉乃のこの強大なパワー! 強者を崇拝するのは正しい! )

“Aaaaaaa! But Sashihara! I’m gonna cry! I’m so surprised! I expected this, but I thought it was going to be Paruru or Takamina. Sasshi is so amazing!” (ああああ! 僕の指原莉乃! 泣ける! 驚きだ! 予想はしてたけど、でも島崎遥香か高橋みなみだと思ってた。指原莉乃すごい!)

It would also seem that some Chinese fans add the Chinese character for “god” (神, kami) after Sasshi’s name.

Sasshi… the god?!  The Deity Sasshi?  Interesting.

Another interesting tidbit from this article was that Chinese fans seem to have quite a few more nicknames for Sasshi.  Whereas in Japanese, “Sashiko” and “Sasshi” are pretty much the most common nicknames, Chinese fans have the following nicknames.  I am not sure if I can translate these, as they seem to play off the various pronunciations of Chinese character which I’m not familiar with, and some of which aren’t even used in modern Japanese.

• 「sashi」(literally, in Roman characters).
• 「小指」(Literal meaning: pinky finger)
• 「宅姐」(Literal meaning: house, older sister)
• 「廃柴」(I think this means, fire starter?)
• 「異次元wota之神」(Extra dimenion wota god?)
• 「大分潮人」(Oita Tide Bringer)
• 「34ko」(Using Japanese pronunciation of “3” and “4”, pronounced like “sa-shi-ko”)

Unfortunately, voting statistics for the election aren’t publicly made, so we’ll never really know how many foreigners vote in the AKB Elections.  But it certainly looks like, surprisingly, a lot of foreign influence is at work here!

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Source: http://news.ameba.jp/20150607-392/

Header Image: AKB48 20090704 Japan Expo 18, (c) Georges Seguin, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike