TORONTO -- A Japanese theme park's plea for its guests to ride its roller-coasters in silence in order to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus has been co-opted by many social media users as a perfectly fitting slogan for the year 2020.
Fuji-Q Highland, an amusement park located in Fujiyoshida, posted a video June 17 in which two well-dressed men ride one of the park's roller-coasters in complete silence while wearing face masks.
A Japanese-language message appears at the end of the video. Google's Translate app converts the message into English as "scream in my heart."
However, a July 8 report on the video in the Wall Street Journal had a different take, translating the message as "please scream inside your heart."
That translation caught the fancy of many on Twitter. CNN reporter Jake Tapper labelled it "the motto of 2020", while author Jeff Sharlet called it "a means of avoiding virus spray, and … a five-word summation of 2020."
"I scream inside my heart every day," filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt noted.
Another Twitter user described "please scream inside your heart" as "a very bad translation [but] a powerful sentence that enriches the English language."
Fuji-Q Highland is not alone in asking its visitors to replace their screams with silence to minimize the potential for COVID-19 to spread. A major Japanese theme park industry group issued guidelines in May for safe thrill-seeking during the coronavirus era, recommending that nobody shout or scream when riding a roller-coaster and everybody practice physical distancing in haunted houses, according to travel publication TimeOut.
