Today I'm going to tell you about some little America sports that have flung off from this country, gone into other ones, propagated, and flourished in surprising ways, just like the mold in the salsa container I've bound in my fridge earlier. In other words, I'm going to tell you about some American things that have a strangely strong following in other countries. We're going to skip over some of the more commonly known ones, like craftmack and cheese in Canada, spam anywhere the American militaries had a big presence, or rathion in Israel. Let's move on to our first topic, which is a little bit trashy. One night I was at home, I was watching an American in a Welshman harass a Japanese vending machine, and I saw something that caught my eye. See they pulled out this little trinket that looked like a raccoon, and at the top it said rascal. When I saw that I thought that was a very specific piece of English that they've used on this Japanese product. I wonder if this has anything to do with the book I was forced to read in 4th grade. It turns out that it has everything to do with that book. The book I'm referencing is Rascal, a memoir of a better era by Stirling North, which came out in 1963 originally. A quick synopsis of this book is about the author growing up in Wisconsin in nearly 1900s, specifically during World War I, and at some point he finds a baby raccoon and tries to keep it as a pet, which doesn't go well. Anyway, be sitting there thinking, what does this have to do with Japan? Well, I'm getting to that calm down. In 1977, this book was turned into an anime, and it did very well and turned Rascal into a beloved character there. It was a somewhat common thing in this time period for anime to be made out of western books. Another western book with a weird amount of popularity in Japan is Anifgring Gables, which got an anime a few years after Rascal. We don't actually care about that today though, because Anifgring Gables is Canadian, and they won't share their tidbits with me. There's a big downside to Rascal's popularity in Japan though. The issue is that people in Japan watch this story about how awful of an idea it is to have a pet raccoon, and then imported raccoons to be their pets. Be inedible, then happened, which is that raccoons got out because they have hands. The raccoons then proceeded to damage the local environment, including the wildlife, including out competing, the Tanuki, also known as the raccoon dog, because it's like a raccoon with no hands. I also want you to take a moment to consider what it would be like for the first Tanuki to see a raccoon. Imagine you're a Tanuki walking around the Japanese woods, and you see another Tanuki, but it's a little weird, and then it stands up and it's holding things in its hands. It kind of be like the first scene in Men in Black where the guy comes in out of the field, but the aliens inside of him. It starts like moving weird, but for a Tanuki. Much to the relief of this panic, the Japanese government is trying to exterminate the raccoons. The only issue is they're having about as much success as Australia's had with their wars, with the emus, the rabbits, and the cane totes. Japanese enthusiasm for rascal has been waning of late, as largely just confined to like knick knacks and stickers and that kind of thing. So it's kind of like the Japanese version of Garfield at this point. The real difference being it's a bit less problematic to have a fat orange cat in your house than to have a raccoon running around your countryside destroying it. Next up we're going to talk about your grandma's car. What if you really want to have a seat with you? Buick is a car brand that many people are surprised is still alive. It feels like Buick should have shuffled off its mortal coil back in the 2000s, with Pontiac, Saturn, Oldspaper Beale, but it didn't, and let me tell you why. While Buick only sold about 103,000 cars in the US in 2022. It sold 677,000 cars in China. That same year the entire Ford F-Series of pickups, ranging from the electric Ford lightning, all the way up to the big F650 which is used for like box trucks and stuff, it only sold 653,000 units in the US. Not only is China buying up Buick's hotcakes, they have models we don't get here in the US. See Buick doesn't even make cars in the US anymore. They just have three slightly different crossovers, including one that I've never seen before called the Envista, which kind of looks like they're trying to make a knockoff of the Lamborghini Urus, kinda like Ford used to make the fusion look like a knockoff of the Aspen Martins from the time. But if we go ahead and hop on over to the Chinese site for Buick, we see that they still make sedans, like the LaCross and the Regal. They also make minivans, including this one, which is called the Century, which used to be kind of a shitty car. But over there, it's the swaggiest ass minivan I've ever seen. It has the Rolls Royce roof with the stars in it. After hearing all this, you may be thinking, why? In China, Buick has this perception of being the car that you're in if you're important. And a big part of this is actually why they're your grandma's car in the US. A lot of Chinese government officials wrote around in Buick's, and a big part of this is their big comfy cars, but they're not as flashy as like a Mercedes or a Rolls or a Cadillac. However, the trend of Chinese officials riding around in Buick's is starting to wane. The quality of Chinese cars has improved drastically, which leads to Chinese officials wanting to ride in them because that looks good because they're supporting a local company, which is fair for them to do anyways. The politicians in major car producing countries are usually only seen in domestic cars. Having said that, I did get a really funny image in my head of Joe Biden driving up to the White House in an R34. Here's my artistic representation of it. With that said, let's move on to something with even crunchier skin than Joe Biden. You're probably sitting there thinking that I'm going to tell you about KFC in Japan and about how they buy it on Christmas and everything. But I'm not. I'm not going to talk about that for two reasons. First of all, old Japan YouTubers have already beat that dead horse into Tesco, lasagna, and two, I don't want this to be too Japan heavy. Instead what we're talking about is some KFC sales numbers that I found interesting. About 25% of KFC sales comes from China, which is not surprising to me. Fried chickens also think in China, they're about a six of the world's population, and I had previously heard that the Chinese KFC did a collab with Genshin Impact. They are also not our focus. After that, about 15% of their sales comes from the US, which is also not surprising, it's from here. The thing I have an issue with is the next two countries on the list. What on Earth is wrong with you? United Kingdom and Australia? How are you each responsible for 7% of their sales? Australia, you have a smaller population than Texas, and somehow you're eating almost half as much chicken as the entire United States and UK people. How can you be out here talking up your Nando's, your fish and chips, your wonderful Indian food, and then you're gobbling the kernels mate with this veracity? You two need to get it together. Work on yourselves. What's the next topic? Specifically one kind of Disney product. Since the year 1941, 210 million Captain America comics have been sold. In the year 2005, Disney sold 114 million Disney comics. The European viewers watching this are thinking, well that's slightly surprising. The American viewers are thinking, what the fuck is a Disney comic? You see, although they are basically non-existent in the United States, comic books starring Disney characters like Donald and Mickey are extremely popular in Europe. This started out because in the 50s, Disney sold off the rights to a lot of their characters to be used in comics in Europe because they didn't really care about the market and it was an easy way to make more money. Donald Duck is very popular in the strange grouping of all the Nordic countries plus Italy. Mickey Mouse comics are very popular in Germany, confirming my suspicion that Mickey Mouse is in fact the David Hasselhoff of Rodents. The German Mickey Mouse comic book has sold over a billion copies since 1951. A few years ago, IDW tried publishing some of these European made comic books in the US with English translations. And they stopped shortly after because no one bought them. This one kind of stands out from the others in this video. The others, it's kind of like, why is this so popular somewhere else that's on America? This one is, why is this not popular in America? After all, America is the home of Disney. There's tons of Disney adults. It's permeated our culture to the point that it almost got away with putting a theme part next to one of the major civil war battlegrounds. And yet they cannot sell a single comic book here. Next up is probably the most unexpected entry on this list. I told you it's unexpected. You see there are communities made up of the descendants of Confederate sympathizers? In Brazil, during the reconstruction period after the Civil War, there were a lot of disgruntled southerners. And a lot of those disgruntled southerners knew how to run cash crop plantations. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil saw this as an opportunity and said, come to Brazil, I'll give you some cheap land to farm on. It also helped the Brazil still have legal slavery. About 20,000 southerners immigrated and most of them settled in the state of São Paulo. A lot of them focused around the modern day cities of Santa Barbara, Dio Estet and Americana. Santa Barbara, Dio Estet is actually believed to have the first posts in Cemetery in church built in Brazil because of these immigrants. In 1972, the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalind Carter visited Santa Barbara, Dio Estet. They visited the cemetery on the strip because Rosalind Carter went and laid flowers at her great uncle's grave, who was one of the original Confederados. I want to be clear here, it's not like if you go to the state of São Paulo and take a wrong turn, you end up in the candy land plantation from Django and Chained. The descendants of the Confederados have largely assimilated into Brazilian culture. They just have some of the traditions that they've kept alive. For instance, some southern crops are grown in the area like pecans and watermelons. Some people make southern food down there, like southern-style fried chicken, or even chest pie. For those of you who do not know what chest pie is, it is pecan pie, hold the pecans. I would argue that chest pie is a low-tier pie, below even just chocolate pudding pie, and nowhere near higher-tier pie, like pumpkin, pecan fudge, key lime, or cheesecake, which is a pie because it is filling in a crust in not a glutinous structure. Also every year they hold an event called Fest to Confederada. This is like a little festival where some of the men will dress up like civil war soldiers, some of the women will dress up like Scarlo dohera, and they eat American food and all the proceeds go to preserving historic buildings. The Confederado descendants have even helped raise money to build a museum of immigration in Santa Barbara, D'Aesda, which is all about how great immigration has been for Brazil. That's all I got for you today. I hope you had fun, and I hope you have a great day, and I hope you had some good food.