[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]
Japanese history version of the Domino Effect meme with 10 black dominoes from 2009’s “World record for the largest domino toppled in a chain”.
On the lower right is a hunched over male about to tip over the smallest domino (1st domino). On the upper left is the largest domino (10th domino), which is 8.8 times taller than the smallest.
Starting from the male and ending with the largest domino are individual sentences indicating specific moments in history.
Male: “USA giving Japan an offer it can’t refuse (1858).”
1st domino: “Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868).”
2nd domino: “First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).”
3rd domino: “Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).”
4th domino: “Australia gets the League of Nations to stay racist (1919).”
5th domino: “Japan & Germany becoming bros (1930’s).”
6th domino: “Japan committing ‘the Asian Holocaust’ (1937-1945).”
7th domino: “Germany, Italy, and Japan start a gang (1940).”
8th domino: “Japan attacks USA’s Pearl Harbor (1941).”
9th domino: “USA firebombs & atomic bombs Japan (1942, 1944-1945).”
10th domino: “Japanese girls rebelling by writing cutely (1970’s).”
10th domino image: On the 10th domino stands an image with 2.7% opacity of the 1974 creation Hello Kitty.
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Context:
Bonsai Pop’s The Rurouni Kenshin Controversy video dropped yesterday and its timeline of Japan inspired a dominoes meme in me. Hours of my life wasted and here we are. 🤷🏿‍♂️
tl;dr about the Rurouni Kenshin controversy: Nobuhiro Watsuki (the mangaka) was convicted of and fined 200,000 yen for possessing “multiple DVDs with videos of nude girls in their early teens and other materials.”

A more legitimate source for the 10th domino can be found on page 3 of 35 (Cute Handwriting and Slang) in the pdf scan of Chapter 6: Cuties in Japan by Sharon Kinsella in 1995’s Women, Media and Consumption in Japan book.