A modern-day tale of international baby-snatching

They say be careful what you put online. Back in 1999, an American uploaded a photo of his new-born baby, and forgot about it. Years later, Googling his own name online after following advice about checking up on what is online about yourself, he discovered a page with Japanese text. And further discovered that his baby (now 10 years old) had become a meme. Not only was the picture everwhere after a Japanese site was established where you could automatically add text to the picture (entitled "The foreign way", and which seems to accept Japanese text only), but the baby had become a character.

Luckily, father and son are casual about it ("no big deal"): the response page is here. (I'd have a harder time being casually happy about it. But, these things happen.) The Japanese site for adding text is here.

Original photo and sculpted character

via watashi to tokyo