> The Japanese government set up a task force at the crisis management center in the prime minister's office at 11:16 p.m. on Monday in response to the earthquake.
A thousand Naruto shadow-clones just got deployed. I'm not being cute, these guys are heroes and role-models to all.
It is a kid's show. The main characters' outfit is modelled after Japan's iconic recovery workers (stark orange and blue), a compliment of their heroics echoed in fiction.
This character can clone himself hundreds times to help others, with art often mirroring the thousands of recovery workers seen in actual event footage.
My comment intended to link back the image of childhood heroes as corporeal selfless adults
It's a technique to temporarily make one or more duplicates of your body which can move independently and have your memories/abilities. A strong enough hit will dispel them, or the user can do it manually, after which the memories of what the clones did return to the user.
The usage here by GP might just be because everyone looks/is-dressed the same and is working in unison, and since they're Japanese, anime comes to mind. In the show, Naruto often uses shadow clones to pull off more complex techniques, throwing himself, having them take turns punching/kicking, or in the case of the rasengan he divides the work of controlling the ball of chakra since he struggled to do it successfully by himself.
The reference is that the anime character "Naruto"[0] wears the same colors and roughly the same uniform as a Japanese recovery worker[1].
During disaster work, you see swarms of recovery workers and the joke/reference being made is that this looks like Naruto doing a "shadow clone" technique.
I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.
(Thanks for the link - we've since merged the threads to a submission of that one. I've included the other major links that people have been posting in the toptext.)
> The Japanese government set up a task force at the crisis management center in the prime minister's office at 11:16 p.m. on Monday in response to the earthquake.
A thousand Naruto shadow-clones just got deployed. I'm not being cute, these guys are heroes and role-models to all.