I was recently recommended a YouTube video by a channel called “水ラーメン” which translates to “water ramen.” The video was of some Japanese guy buying a package of supermarket prawn and rescuing them (since they were still kinda alive). It was a good recommendation, because the video was so strange and interesting that I ended up watching a few more of his videos after that.

I’m not exactly sure why I got this recommendation, but my best guess is that I watched a few videos from some other guy who rescued a supermarket lobster (named Leon).

These videos are all so overstimulating and fast paced, and the YouTuber (who I’ll just call Water Ramen, I guess), seems extremely passionate about all of this stuff. The funny part of the channel is that he’ll try to rescue these sea creatures, but if they die he’s fine with cooking and eating them. Which seems a bit psycopathic to me but maybe it’s normal if you live on an island like Japan. He’s often talking about how cute his sea pets are, which adds another layer of weirdness to the fact that he’ll probably eat them when they die.

I think the video that really hooked me was the one where he buys a sunfish (popular on the internet for being giant and inedible) and butchers it up and eats it. I’m a vegetarian and I never liked fish, even when I ate meat, so it’s sort of weird that I enjoy watching someone cut up a fish as much as I do.

My only complaint (and this is on YouTube, not the channel itself) is that the captions are often translated really badly or not at all, maybe because of how fast the guy is talking. I watched a video where Water Ramen caught a bunch of abandoned pet goldfish from some ponds and turned them into sushi and could barely follow it since the captions were all over the place. You’d think with AI that YouTube could do a better job of translating. I could probably make a workflow myself, since I’ll probably want to watch more of these unhinged videos. Anyway, check it out if you like weird YouTube channels!