Japan's Jimi 'Mundane' Halloween Costumes of 2026 | Hacker News Reader

Japan's Jimi 'Mundane' Halloween Costumes of 2026

spoon-tamago.com

257 pointszdw36 comments

The last one refilling detergent is a parody of The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer; everyone has seen it on textbooks and it has become a meme template on Japanese Twitter in recent years.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)

Thank you, I was confused by what simply appeared to be a picture of someone doing laundry.

I heartily recommend "Tim's Vermeer": https://youtube.com/watch?v=94pCNUu6qFY

I mean, that's a tough idea. That's literally just a picture of someone pouring detergent, not an actual costume. Would have to say this one is pretty lame...

Just have to ask, how do you know this???

This will be one of those things where if you are very familiar with Vemeer, you’ll understand the reference.

I was watching the new Street Fighter movie and I was wondering who is Joe? But actually a funny reference.

It's in Japanese school textbooks. I don't remember if it was in art or world history class, but a lot of people have seen it and/or had to be able to fill it in the blanks from multiple choices. It's also a memorable work of art, so it's famous to those Japanese and terminally online. I agree that this can be a bit more obvious, though.

I found this discussion (French but with subtitles) of the painting interesting, since it highlights an often-missed aspect of the painting.

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/092036-004-A/look-but-don-t-to...

Some of these are very humorous because of the cultural disconnect (as an American, I have never experienced somebody asking to put their seat back).

"An expert on a very niche subject" made me laugh out loud the hardest, because it's the one that's most "just a guy", and yet it's also exactly how it's described.

More about the expression, but the glasses are pulling their weight here too. Modern masterpiece.

The airplane seat was the only one that needed no explanation for me. I could tell he was about to ask specifically to put his seat back.

I am reasonably confident that's a train seat, not an airplane - though obviously the wonderful cultural norm of politely enquiring / advising the person behind you work in both realms, it's a very common action on the trains.

I similarly enjoyed "an expert on a very niche subject" because it was so ridiculous. Seeing your comment explaining it is even funnier still.

These are masterpieces in my opinion. It’s difficult to get the vibe exactly right when you’re working with so little.

Yes, a thousand times yes you can put your seat back you gentle soul.

The Japanese seem particularly adept at the concept of "vibe".

> Yes, a thousand times yes you can put your seat back you gentle soul.

Overjoyed that I understand this, allow me to explain it to those who don't.

Seats on the Shinkansen [0] are bolt-upright by default. You basically have to recline them a little bit to be even vaguely comfortable.

Every person, every time, asks the person in the seat behind them whether it's okay to recline their seat by 5°.

The seat pitch on the Shinkansen is approximately 1 metre. There's a lot of room.

[0]: My line, anyway – the E5 series cars that run the Hayabausa service.

The Shinkansen leg room is really big. I think this has become a norm because people carry all their luggage with them and reclining your seat will inconvenient the person you are taking a space from.

*Shinkansen have big luggage storage but it is very far from your seat and Shinkansen stops are like F1 pitstops, so it is much more convenient you have the luggage with you.

They are more like "situational haikus", or the transposition to practical humor of the concept of haiku.

Love these. Visual comedy. I could say "Person trying to persuade bus driver to let them on at a traffic stop" but without the specific instance that captures it for ppl, there's no joke being communicated.

Maybe this is a different type of mundane costume, but I like costumes that just look like guys. When the anime initial D was popular, I would wear a white T, blue jeans, part my hair down the middle and say I'm cosplaying as Takumi Fujiwara...

What you're doing wrong is not ordering a premade suit from amazon, then chucking it in the bin or a charity shop at the end of the day. /s

well of course, because what you're actually supposed to do is return it for free and cut into the trillion dollar corpo's profit margins

no, i'm not responsible for global warming. please don't even try to shift the blame from corporations to me for doing this.

This year I went as "person who forgot it was halloween".

I think it's just a sign that you're getting older.

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/30/children-and-helic...

> Many yearly traditions gradually get stale. You’ve done them many times. You’re not sure if you should put in the effort this year. Your jack-o-lanterns become fewer, and then vanish.

I had a last-minute invitation to a Halloween party some years ago and sewed a Raspberry Pi to my t-shirt and went as "a computer". It didn't really work as a costume because the weight of the board kinda pulled on the shirt and folded the material around it, obscuring it.

Well, that and the fact that I'd just sewed a Raspberry Pi to my t-shirt and went as "a computer".

Glad to see that the world has finally discovered Daily Portal Z.

Mine would be "dude who vibed a to-do app with Claude and thought he'd be rich then realised 20,000 other dudes had done exactly the same thing".

Source: these dudes email me at a rate of about 5/week asking me to spruik their app to my audience.

As someone who gets these also - it's not the author emailing you.

So who is it? Claude? Or someone they've farmed out their marketing to?

Either way they're pretty transparently mass generated. "Hi Johnny, we've been watching your {{latest YouTube video}} with interest and are impressed by how you {{summary of your latest blog post}}."

This might be one of my favorite posts in years.

And I WISH folks actually cared to see how I was doing after they reclined their seat in front of me.

Love how long each consume caption is. It could just be called Halloween costumes that take many words to explain.

These are great. First 3 are brilliant. The second one is golden, I wish I had thought of that.

I saw video of a costume contest this year where one participant was wearing an Amazon delivery driver vest, flung a cardboard box across the stage and then took a picture of it (all to wild applause).

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