Taiwanese YouTuber “Life Chubby Nerd x Zun,” who has more than 1 million subscribers, uploaded a video on Aug. 10 showing his trip to Japan to buy a first-edition VHS tied to the internet meme “Yaju Senpai.” The title said he spent JPY 1 million. But at the end of the video, Zun said the real amount paid was JPY 700,000, or about TWD 141,000.
More than a month after it went up, the video suddenly started making the rounds across the Japanese internet. On Sept. 22, Zun posted Japanese online reactions on Facebook. Some users called him “the Taiwanese person who owns a national treasure.” Others compared him to the monk Tripitaka heading west to fetch scriptures. One small catch: many posts cited JPY 1 million, but the report says that number was the store’s listed price, not the final transaction price.
The tape traces back to the 2001 release “A Midsummer Night's Lewd Dream”
The VHS came from the 2001 Japanese adult video “A Midsummer Night's Lewd Dream,” a release made up of four unrelated short segments. Internet users heavily edited and remixed lines and facial expressions from the film, and those edits spread online in Japan from the 2000s onward. That remix culture later gave rise to memes such as “Yaju Senpai” and “114514.” And yes, those spread to China and Taiwan too.
Fans use a Japanese sound-based pun involving 8 and 10 to treat Aug. 10 as “Yaju Day,” and Zun picked that date to post the video.
Listed at JPY 1 million, bought for JPY 700,000
Zun said in the video that he found first-edition stock at Surugaya, the Japanese secondhand goods chain. The site listed the tape at JPY 1 million, and a limited-time sale briefly cut that to JPY 630,000. He and his girlfriend, beauty YouTuber Luolun, went to a physical store themselves, but the in-store price was different from the website price. After checking with a supervisor, a staff member told him to place the order online instead, so he did not finish the purchase that day.
Zun later used a Japan-based proxy buyer introduced by a friend to take care of the purchase. Luolun’s brother, who lives in Japan, received the item and then passed it along to him. In the unboxing section at the end of the video, Zun said the final amount paid was JPY 700,000. By his telling in the video, the tape originally sold for JPY 14,000 25 years ago, which made this deal 50 times the original price. Luolun also joked in the video that the tape might not even play anymore.
The report adds that Surugaya also listed a first-edition tape in September 2024 for more than JPY 360,000, and that copy was bought the next day. Two years later, Zun’s transaction price was close to double that amount. The same store showed different website, sale, and in-store prices, and the article says there is no public benchmark for collectibles like this.
Japanese reposts pushed the story wider
Japanese X user @haretter reposted the video on Aug. 21 and described it as a video in which “a Republic of China YouTuber” bought the meme’s “original source” in Japan. The post said: “A Republic of China YouTuber bought the original source material of Inmu in Japan for 1 million yen, in a video where the first attempt to buy it failed and it was delivered to his home later. It is packed with repeated catchphrases and a pilgrimage to Shimokitazawa, and it feels extremely grimy and extremely filthy.”
Among the comments Zun later shared, some users treated the VHS as a “national treasure” that had ended up overseas and joked that Japanese buyers should hurry up and bring it back. In the article’s key points section, the reposted post is said to have reached 444,000 views.
Taipei also hosted a themed exhibition in August
The meme has an audience in Taiwan too. The report says a free “Yaju Senpai” themed exhibition was held in Taipei’s Guanghua market area from Aug. 15 to Aug. 30 this year. The event sold fan-made goods including badges and aluminum cards, and it also had a photo area. Japanese business outlet Urban Life Research Institute published a feature on the exhibition as well.
At the start of his video, Zun said plenty of people in Taiwan engage with the meme, but nobody owned the physical original tape, and that was why he made the trip to Japan. Later, he placed the VHS in his Hatsune Miku display cabinet and said it would show up again in videos on his second channel.
What the report says
According to the article, the “Yaju Senpai” meme came from the 2001 release ��A Midsummer Night's Lewd Dream,” whose lines and expressions were remixed into a string of internet memes. As for the purchase, Zun said in the video that he paid JPY 700,000, or about TWD 141,000. Surugaya had listed the item at JPY 1 million, he failed to complete the purchase in-store, and he later got the tape through a Japan proxy buying arrangement.