The feud between record label Avex and members of 2Channel, Japan’s most popular BBS, has escalated to the level of death threats. Avex has been cashing in on the wildly successful song “Koi no Maiahii” by East European group O-Zone. Part of the song’s huge success has been an amateur Flash animation featuring a cat singing along in Japanese to the song (except the lyrics are actually Rumanian!) which became an underground hit largely thanks to 2Channel. Board members named the cat Monaa and consider it to be their own mascot. They are furious that Avex is making money from it, selling merchandising and even trying to patent their slight variation of the cat character, which they named Noma-neko. Last week one 2Channel poster threatened online to kill Avex employees with a knife as they left work, while at the weekend, another threatened to set fire to the home of Avex president Matsuura Masato (41) and “barbeque” his family. The company is not taking the threats lightly and has brought in the police. Yesterday, several hundred “2Channel-ers” gathered near Shibuya and Harajuku stations and handed out thousands of leaflets to passers-by.
• “Hi! Hi! Puffy AmiYumi,” the US animation featuring the popular Japanese pop duo, is to be shown on TV Tokyo. The show was a surpise hit on the Cartoon Network, especially among pre-teen girls, and Puffy fans at home have been keen to get a look. It will feature as a twice-a-week, 7-minute segment, with a new Japanese voice-over, on the “OhaStar” early morning kids show starting from this Thursday.