Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?
Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.
I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.
> Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba
Do you have some source for this being the origin? Could you cite some examples from prior to 2018 which is earliest date of other Japanese demon core memes cited by https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core ?
Oldest mention to Demon Core as local favorite I could find was timestamped 2016/12/05 23:51, but they don't keep formal logs and they really don't like things "brought outside", so I'm not going to link it.
Maybe there could be mht files in someone's basement somewhere, but I have no data to present at this instant, mostly just oral history. Sorry for that.
edit: oldest post tagged Demon Core on Pixiv dates back to 2016/01/17, so kym is verifiably off by years.
edit: there's a KanColle themed image post in Nico nico seiga dated 2017/06/18 featuring a "borrowed" Demon Core-chan 3D model, which meams the design existeed for some time.
It's just too much work for me, and there aren't a lot of logs on the WWW, let alone in the English bubble where this meme only exist as filler repost materials.
The situation might change in 5-10 years, but as Prof. Oak said, "this isn't the time to do that"; I think it doesn't quite going to just work.
Futaba Channel is a Japanese imageboard website originally born as a mirror backup for the textboard website 2ch (now 5ch). You may be aware of 4chan, which was directly based on Futaba and from which it took much of its culture.
Nico Nico Douga is a video hosting website that was created soon after YouTube's boom. It's famous for having user comments scrolling across videos and for being one of Japan's biggest meme factory from 2007 to 2012. Forcing users to login to watch videos, the push for premium accounts, and a rough transition from FLASH to HTML5 are considered some of main reasons of its decline.
The Crossroad trio was ~2015 addition to the game so it doesn't quite date back to 2013, but I doubt others enjoy inevitable wall of text for complete context at this time. I suspect it will take few more years until enough with Anglosphere background gains enough Japanese literacy to document this. For now I'd leave just pointers here.
> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
I also disagree with the author. They don't consider the relationship between the meme makers/viewers and the demon core incident. And while it was horrific to those involved, most people have experienced maybe 0.1% of that terror – and that is good. They can and should make light of it.
Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has.
People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
Most comedy is tragic.[1] And laughing is an inherently selfish act, as Mel Brooks observed when he said, "comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die."[2]
It doesn't sound like you really do disagree with the author at all. I never had the sense that he was trying to shame anyone. In fact he almost exactly echoes your 2nd paragraph:
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]
Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.
You have to admit that the setup of this experiment makes riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, with a .1% BAC, look like more responsible behavior.
The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?
I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.
Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.
In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:
> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,
Yeah I’ve always thought the juxtaposition of 1) these high level experts with 2) one of the most dangerous objects we’ve ever created against the ways 2 was treated by 1 is part of the entertainment. Like its own unique and wildly unexpected category of the Darwin awards.
Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
Yep. It's like someone chain-smoking cigarettes while working with gasoline. There's a "yo, WTF?" humor to how reckless it is.
Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
American propaganda likes to paint the nuclear scientists as heroes, but I think the younger generation likely views them much more as "evil scientists who worked to create apocalyptic weapons" and feel comfortable with a lack of empathy for them harming themselves in the process.
I can't help but feel like this (completely overlooked) facet played a part in the humor for its original audience. From a certain point of view, he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.
More important is that physically dangerous workplaces have mostly been written out of popular culture over the past half-century.
Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.
I wonder how much of that is all the WWII vets being gone and not being able to hear their thankfulness at not having to invade Japan the hard way (after what happened on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).
If one wants to ignore that German scientists were working on the bomb as well, and the American scientists just had more resources to pull it off first.
The terrible consequences are definitely an implied part of the meme, otherwise it's just someone messing about with some pieces of metal and screwdriver and isn't funny at all.
I feel like some conclusions of the intent here are born from being very well versed in the actual outcomes, including what I can only assume was a very painful end to someone's life.
But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.
We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.
It's a master-tier Darwin Award win. That's why it's funny. Same reason should-have-known-better accidents often get a laugh even when the consequences were pretty grave.
"I'm a highly-trained scientist who helped develop the bombs that leveled two cities and usher in the nuclear era... yeah, lemme just fuck around with this bomb core and a screwdriver such that I'm one muscle-twitch from killing everyone around me, that seems fine."
Despite it being so famous, and the memes, I still don't understand what Slotin was doing.
So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?
Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.
> It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core's neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements.
In your head yes, in early nuclear science it seems protocols weren't that important as long as it went boom in the end. As with many industries, regulations are written in blood
I've read about this in a few different mediums before and no it's not just that protocols weren't that important.
The guy doing this experiment was *notorious* for it and multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it. But he had the kind of bravado and personality that he kept doing it.
So to be clear: all of the other people whose risk tolerance levels already had them handling weapons-grade plutonium as a career ALSO thought this guy was insane for doing this.
Regardless of the outcome, this still looks like a poor demonstration: what's the point of showing how it is done, if you're not following the protocol anyway? My understanding is that those in the room where nuclear experts, so they didn't need a demonstration to know that, the closer the two cores where, the higher the radiation.
I've read that and it doesn't really answer those questions. How can you measure the core's neutron multiplication rate if you're not exactly controlling the distance? Isn't the measurement going to be all over the place?
Another thing I've always wondered - what would have happen if everyone in the room freaked out and just ran away, leaving the two reflector halves completed closed?
Would it have actually gone bang like a bomb, or more like just get insanely hot and give off an insane amount of radiation, but over the span of many seconds?
My understanding is that he was demonstrating a technique for how to bring the system to near supercriticality, without causing it. I.e. the objective was to look at the measurement devices they had and monitor them, and build an understanding of what the data was showing. This would then (in principle) be repeated by others with more specific objectives later.
Obviously they should've built a rig for that (at least), but I guess there was a "ain't nobody got time for that" attitude.
Right, but shouldn't distance be a critical part of such a measurement?
Like if we measure the amount of noise a device makes, we do it in a quiet room and at a standard distance. Without precision there's no useful data being generated.
So that's the part that I don't get. Shouldn't there be a screw being turned precise amounts, precisely made shims, or at least calipers be involved?
The problem with this image of science is that in order to properly collect things we have to properly understand things we could be collecting. We can certainly do our best, but sometimes unexpected things happen. Take x-rays and their incidental discovery via the effect of x-rays on nearby photo-film. Totally accidental data collection from work at the bleeding edge, which was work that has transformed society as we know it. Another point is that in order for things like the lab equipment to be sleek and well built, we need to understand needs. This means that any research that meets your criteria is quite likely not at the cutting edge of anything. Most cutting edge labs I know look more like someone raided the hardware/electronics store to build some abomination than the Hollywood sleek and shiny labs you might be picturing. The sleek well built shiny labs you are picturing tend to be corporate labs and the like, doing work on safe and predictable things with well defined scopes. Translating existing knowledge into marketable products is a lot easier than discovering genuinely new knowledge.
This was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a secret, government lab staffed by the utmost experts.
It wasn't the "oh look, something funny happens if I do this!" stage of experimentation. This was after they understood what they were dealing with well enough to build and successfully use two bombs. And Slotin was supposedly about to move elsewhere and was working on passing on knowledge.
Nothing. Richad Feynman said they were "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon". The only goal of these experiments was to see how close they could flirt with criticality.
Put a half-sphere reflective shield around a nuclear substance which will make the substance more reactive due to neutron reflections. Due to a slip-up with the screwdriver that was supposed to hold it up, accidentally fully drop down the shield, causing the too large radioactive reaction
I think with his reaction afterwards to remove it again, he saved the others in the room, but not himself
After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.
Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident
which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"
Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.
> Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production
If you go through the Fukushima disaster handling, that doesn't seem to have happened at all. In fact, people seemed to be super inflexible and actions seemed to have a long authorization chain.
The Toyota Production System wasn't actually that free, it expected people to report the changes before they happen and had plenty of opportunities for a manager to step in and stop it. Anyway, I'm not sure how widely it was adopted in Japan, the system famously came from there, but the country isn't famous for applying it.
IMO the demon core incident resonates with people as kind of the ultimate case of "playing with fire". Humans have always played with fire, so we see the attraction, but also the dangers of it. It's a primitive behavior that's put us at risk, but also been the origin of most of our technology. The juxtaposition of a top nuclear weapons scientist taking such a "caveman" approach, playing with a new kind of "fire" that's millions of times more powerful, is poignant in the way it's absurd, but also relatable, sad & darkly funny.
The author mentions 2019. That was the year that the "Demon Core Kun" videos were put on YouTube[0]. There's no mention of them in the article, which is a bit odd. I don't know if that was the first to "memeify" the demon core, but it certainly is one of the most popular memeifications, with each of the eight videos having somewhere between three to six million views.
This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.
EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.
Which is the equivalent of ~4,000,000 gallons of gas, or 10,700,000,000 Tesla powerwalls.
Bear in mind, however, that some napkin math suggests that this is gross overkill, 2,250365100 = 82,135,000, suggesting that even a fairly long lived person only needs a mere 2,650 gallons of gas, or ~7,070 Tesla powerwalls, and that the demon-core can easily supply enough lifetime calories for a solid large city of ~1,500,000.
Readit News
Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.
I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.
Do you have some source for this being the origin? Could you cite some examples from prior to 2018 which is earliest date of other Japanese demon core memes cited by https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core ?
Maybe there could be mht files in someone's basement somewhere, but I have no data to present at this instant, mostly just oral history. Sorry for that.
edit: oldest post tagged Demon Core on Pixiv dates back to 2016/01/17, so kym is verifiably off by years.
edit: there's a KanColle themed image post in Nico nico seiga dated 2017/06/18 featuring a "borrowed" Demon Core-chan 3D model, which meams the design existeed for some time.
edit: this blog post dated 2014/09/30 links to a deleted Touhou video with Demon Core in title: https://1ni.co/2014/09/30/project20140930_6/
Why not contribute your knowledge there, instead of (or in addition to) here, where it will surely be forgotten about?
The situation might change in 5-10 years, but as Prof. Oak said, "this isn't the time to do that"; I think it doesn't quite going to just work.
The Demon Core meme, for instance is getting pretty lamestream, no longer some shared affinity.
It's nice even mommyTok is doing it I guess, but we are one step away from a CNN story, then it's definitely over.
So for a brief moment make the most of the fact your smarter than "knowyourmeme"
Dead Comment
Nico Nico Douga is a video hosting website that was created soon after YouTube's boom. It's famous for having user comments scrolling across videos and for being one of Japan's biggest meme factory from 2007 to 2012. Forcing users to login to watch videos, the push for premium accounts, and a rough transition from FLASH to HTML5 are considered some of main reasons of its decline.
Deleted Comment
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has.
People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-exc...
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
That "something else" to me is the absolute ease of the act. I think we normally expect the scale of the consequences to match the setup difficulty.
Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
So there's also the wizardry component of it. It tickles our love of fantasy stories and arcane power, and the irresponsible handling thereof.
Elsewhere someone mentions lighting cigarettes at a gas station. That situation has similar aspects, but lacks the magical flair.
There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_deathThe other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?
I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.
Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.
In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:
> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,
Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
Hell, when the accident happened, he said, "Well, that does it."
Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
Deleted Comment
Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.
We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.
"I'm a highly-trained scientist who helped develop the bombs that leveled two cities and usher in the nuclear era... yeah, lemme just fuck around with this bomb core and a screwdriver such that I'm one muscle-twitch from killing everyone around me, that seems fine."
So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?
Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.
> It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core's neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements.
In your head yes, in early nuclear science it seems protocols weren't that important as long as it went boom in the end. As with many industries, regulations are written in blood
The guy doing this experiment was *notorious* for it and multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it. But he had the kind of bravado and personality that he kept doing it.
So to be clear: all of the other people whose risk tolerance levels already had them handling weapons-grade plutonium as a career ALSO thought this guy was insane for doing this.
Would it have actually gone bang like a bomb, or more like just get insanely hot and give off an insane amount of radiation, but over the span of many seconds?
Obviously they should've built a rig for that (at least), but I guess there was a "ain't nobody got time for that" attitude.
Like if we measure the amount of noise a device makes, we do it in a quiet room and at a standard distance. Without precision there's no useful data being generated.
So that's the part that I don't get. Shouldn't there be a screw being turned precise amounts, precisely made shims, or at least calipers be involved?
It wasn't the "oh look, something funny happens if I do this!" stage of experimentation. This was after they understood what they were dealing with well enough to build and successfully use two bombs. And Slotin was supposedly about to move elsewhere and was working on passing on knowledge.
That's why it's so weird to me.
Deleted Comment
I think with his reaction afterwards to remove it again, he saved the others in the room, but not himself
Between that accident and the year 2000 there were about 60 criticality accidents causing about 20 fatalities
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf
After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.
Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
as well as the comedy of errors at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"
Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.
If you go through the Fukushima disaster handling, that doesn't seem to have happened at all. In fact, people seemed to be super inflexible and actions seemed to have a long authorization chain.
The Toyota Production System wasn't actually that free, it expected people to report the changes before they happen and had plenty of opportunities for a manager to step in and stop it. Anyway, I'm not sure how widely it was adopted in Japan, the system famously came from there, but the country isn't famous for applying it.
In disasters, you want to follow the established procedure, to minimize risk in an already confusing and unusual situation.
This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.
EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjjzx95hXRLvbVeHuE8fT...
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core
Bear in mind, however, that some napkin math suggests that this is gross overkill, 2,250365100 = 82,135,000, suggesting that even a fairly long lived person only needs a mere 2,650 gallons of gas, or ~7,070 Tesla powerwalls, and that the demon-core can easily supply enough lifetime calories for a solid large city of ~1,500,000.