2017 for me (so, close to the end of their initial run; Tina would've been about 5 or 6). I was looking up Japanese children's nursery rhymes to practice my listening skills (I'm studying the language) and stumbled across their viral video of Ena teaching Remi how to play Frog Song on the xylophone. I then watched a few more videos which sent me down a rabbit hole. I'd never seen anything like it. An archive of over 3,000 videos posted practically every single day over a span of 10 years! The Japanese don't normally publicly post their home videos on the internet, so even being a Japanophile for close to 20 years now, I still had little insight to how they live their daily lives. This was exactly the kind of content I was looking for. But what started as an exercise in listening became something else. I was proud of the girls for every new achievement, whether learning to cook something new or cheering them silently as they tried to learn to ride a bike. I cried during the kindergarten graduation videos. And when they released their "final video" it put a dark cloud over that entire day. I was overjoyed when they went back to posting more! I wish this had a bigger following in the English-speaking world so there'd be a discussion board or something, and maybe an effort to translate some of the more popular videos. At least until RU-vid's auto-translate gets to a watchable level 😁. My favorite video is the 家政婦の稚奈 (Housekeeper Tina) video. It very cute (of course) but the Japanese is overly formal and terse enough that I understand more of it than almost any other video. I've thought about sitting down and seriously translating it. Maybe someday...
