Hachimi

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Hachimi (哈基米) is an internet slang term in mainland China. It originates from the Japanese word 「はちみ」 (hachimi, meaning "honey"), which appears as a catchphrase in the anime adaptation of the Japanese multimedia franchise Uma Musume: Pretty Derby. Although the original phrase simply refers to "honey water" (a drink), it became widely known after being remixed into a quirky and catchy "manual-VOCALOID" song. The track went viral on Chinese video platforms like Bilibili, where it was commonly used as background music in videos featuring cats.

Due to the sound of the phrase and the association with cat videos, some netizens mistakenly believed—or jokingly claimed—that "Hachimi" was a cute way to refer to cats. Over time, it evolved into a meme representing cats and even expanded to terms like “Hachimi-wang” (哈基汪), where "汪" is the Chinese onomatopoeia for a dog bark, used to refer to dogs or other animals in a similar meme context.

From this term, a genre of so-called "Hachimi music" emerged online. These are remix-style tracks (often called 鬼畜调音 in Chinese, meaning "kuso/troll remixes") that mix various viral sound clips, including:

• "Hachimi" from Uma Musume,
• "Ding-dong chicken" (叮咚鸡) – a misheard phrase originating from Hainan, China, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It mimics the accented pronunciation of “听通知” ("tīng tōngzhī" – "listen to the announcement") used by community workers calling people to take COVID tests,
• "Electric Stick Otto" (电棍 Otto) – a Chinese internet personality known for absurd, abusive and meme-friendly speech clips. People often say that he has no mother - this is a serious personal attack in Chinese. When seeing the photo or text of "棍母/Gun Mu" - means his so-called "mother", people jokingly say "I can't see it" - subsequent discoveries showed that the photo was not of Otto's real mother, but a photo of an ordinary sanitation worker from an unknown source.

Some Hachimi music tracks are simply brain-melting meme sound collages for fun. Others, however, are interpreted as veiled satire or social commentary—particularly criticizing the overly strict lockdown and mass testing policies enforced in parts of mainland China during the pandemic.

The Hachimi phenomenon also gave rise to subcultural memes. For instance, an orange tabby cat known online as “Mao-die” (耄耋)—a term that literally means "very elderly", a homophonic of "cat dad"—went viral after attempting to scratch its rescuer. This cat was jokingly described as having "hakqi-ed" (哈气了)—a slang term for hissing in anger. The joke spread in pet-related debates online and was used to satirize people who overly pamper or anthropomorphize cats, e.g., treating them "like fathers."

These associated phrases and subcultural references frequently appear in online arguments about pet in general. These are also used to criticize a machine called "StreetCat" where people can watch the cats online and pay to feed them cat food. People think that they do not really care about stray cats, but want to make money from it, and have a negative impact on the stability of the biosphere.

References

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