In what may turn out to be the year’s most ironic hoax, dozens of newspapers are running with The Sun’s story Ewe’ve been conned ladies - you know, the one where the Japanese women though that sheep were poodles:
Entire flocks were imported to Japan from the UK and Australia then sold by the internet company as the latest must have pet.
The bizarre scam was rumbled when Japanese movie star Maiko Kawakami [Ed: topless pics, NSFW] complained on a talk show that her new poodle refused to bark or eat dog food.
News.com.au ran with the story on their front page (and the delightful tag line “Japs tricked into buying lambs they thought were poodles”), but later backed off (though the original story has not been updated). Meanwhile Fairfax is hedging its bets by referring to how ‘the story goes’, a revealing abstraction.
The facts, according to Cerebral Soup, are much more mundane. Kawakami apparently recounted the story, as a joke, on TV - a far cry from having to be told that her dog was a lamb.
So why has this rolled into such a big story? It’s certainly ridiculous enough to warrant the coverage if it was true. I think the reality is that the western world tends to think of Japan as a strange and somewhat unreal place, divorced from nature and obsessed with technology. “Surely,” one might say, “it’s not that far-fetched that somebody as boneheaded as an actress could be taken in by such a scam.”
As with all assumptions, this one reveals more about those who made it (the editors who ran this story on the front page of their websites) than about those featured in it. A little bit of prejudice goes a long way - in this case, a lot further than the fact-checker did.
I fell for it as an idiot link on Screen Hub. It is not so much that we fall for it - though the MSN which retells the story rather than linking to it should know better - it is just that it contains some wonderful moments which are funny to think about.
It is after all very similar to a certain blonde joke involving a dog and a sheep…
In another part of our minds we know it is pretty unlikely. Or at least only works because it is restricted to a very small section of the population - airheads who have never seen a sheep. And we as outsiders have this notion of Japan as intensely urbanised.
After all, when I was involved in a London City Farm which was all of five hundred metres south of the Thames, we took teenagers on an excursion to the country. Many of them had never been north of the river, and had never seen a real farm animal. Except Adolf our turkey who got stolen at Xmas, and a very noisy donkey.