“The pattern on the mackerel’s back…” — the rest of the sentence
What Yoichi Ochiai said in a 2018 TV debate, the 17 characters that disappeared from the quote, and the browser game Saba no Hanashi desu. (“It’s About Mackerel.”)
The sentence that was cut
On 13 June 2018, on a TV debate show, Ochiai was asked to explain “What is Digital Nature?” in five minutes. He walked through the two-sentence definition from his book (out two days later), drawing on a whiteboard. Midway he said:
イテレーションによって出てきた結果、例えばサバの背中の模様を作るのに相当時間がかかってるわけですけど
“As the result of iteration — for example, it took a very long time to make the pattern on the mackerel’s back…”
That December, a blog post quoted it as:
イテレーションによって出てきた結果、例えば、サバの背中の模様を作るのに相当時間がかかってるわけですけど……
“As the result of iteration — for example, the pattern on the mackerel’s back…”
The 17 characters that vanished carried the predicate. Without it, the sentence becomes “an incomprehensible story”; the post called it exactly that, called the show a “comedy sketch,” and titled itself “It was about mackerel?” Elsewhere the post describes its own move as “making fun of people talking seriously.”
It really was about mackerel
A mackerel is dark on the back and pale on the belly — countershading, which cancels the shadow cast by light from above (proposed by Thayer in 1896 and confirmed in field experiments a century later). And the maze-like stripes? The paper’s question is whether they are drawn by the fish’s own continuous mathematics — reaction–diffusion, which Alan Turing showed in 1952 makes patterns arise by themselves — and read by the retinas and optic nerves of birds above and fish below, with only one link between the two: whether the fish was eaten or missed. Discrete code (DNA) sets the coefficients, continuous math draws the stripes, a discrete receiver (neurons) reads them, and selection feeds back to the code. In fish, genes setting the coefficients and stripes arising from them have been confirmed; for mackerel, nobody has measured it yet.
Read that way, “the result of iteration” is this loop repeated over generations, and “it took a very long time to make the pattern on the mackerel’s back” means the loop took ages to make the stripes. Why does camouflage aimed at the optic nerve emerge from the discrete computation of genes? That is the Digital Nature question Ochiai has entrusted to the mackerel. See section 8 of the paper.
Clipping is the attention economy at work
The post uses the word “コント” (comedy sketch) 20 times and “Turing” zero times. Drop the predicate, make the confusion the punchline, swap what gets counted: none of these moves adds understanding; all of them add attention — and attention is counted as impressions and turned into money. Posts on X containing the blog post’s URL number 1,018 between 28 Dec 2018 and 5 Oct 2026, appearing in 82 of 95 months. Not one mentions “Turing” or “reaction–diffusion.” Circulating for eight years unread is not a failure in this system; it is a well-made product.
The game calls those who ride this machine “slaves of the attention economy, mackerel,” and the number that rises with every squeeze is labelled “IMPS (the substance did not increase).”
Two days of circulation
The game launched on the night of 4 Oct 2026. From the start of anonymous play logging (early 5 Oct) to the morning of 6 Oct:
The two counts are not measured identically: the blog figure is all posts containing its URL over the full period; the game figure is posts we collected containing the game URL or title, including Ochiai’s own.
References
- Yoichi Ochiai, “What Was Written on the Mackerel’s Back” (reveal paper, 8 languages). https://saba-no-hanashi.vercel.app/paper.en.html
- Ken Horimoto, “【サバの話だったの？】WEEKLY OCHIAIというコント、あるいは地獄について。” blog Kocchi wa asobi de yatten da yo!, 28 Dec 2018. https://ken-horimoto.com/20181228115315/ (accessed 4 and 6 Oct 2026)
- A. M. Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 237 (1952).
Figures as of the morning of 6 Oct 2026 (JST). Play logs are anonymous counts only.