Leekspin (Loituma Girl)

Origin: four seconds of Bleach

The animation comes from episode 2 of the anime Bleach, “A Shinigami’s Work,” which aired in 2004. In a throwaway gag, Orihime Inoue shows off her groceries to Ichigo Kurosaki and idly twirls a long green vegetable — a spring onion in the Japanese original, translated as a leek in the English dub. It is part of a running joke that Orihime’s cooking ideas are borderline inedible. The whole beat lasts a couple of seconds.

Someone noticed it looped perfectly. On April 23, 2006, a Russian LiveJournal user posting as g_r_e_e_n paired the looping animation with a fragment of “Ievan Polkka” and published it. The clip circulated inside Russian LiveJournal for about two weeks before an English-language single-serving website simply titled LEEKSPIN launched on May 6, 2006 and blew it open to the rest of the internet.

The song is older than the internet

The music is not a novelty track. “Ievan Polkka” is a Finnish polka whose lyrics — written in the Savonian dialect and commonly credited to Eino Kettunen around 1928 — are set to a much older traditional tune. The version everyone knows from the meme is a 1995 a cappella recording by the Finnish quartet Loituma, and specifically its middle section, which is not Finnish at all: it is improvised scat syllables, a nonsense vocal run. That is why the loop sounds like gibberish in an unidentifiable language. It is gibberish.

By July 2006, Loituma — a traditional folk group with no interest in internet culture — was reportedly receiving fan mail from around the world about a cartoon they had never seen.

How it spread

Leekspin behaved like a stress test for 2006-era web culture. It ran on anime forums, MySpace pages, LiveJournal, GeoCities holdouts and DeviantArt, and it became a standard 4chan bait-and-switch: post an innocuous-looking link, deliver an infinitely looping vegetable.

It also crossed back into Japan, spreading on Futaba Channel and 2channel and inspiring an IOSYS Touhou Project music video in December 2006. When Nico Nico Douga launched in March 2007, Leekspin was among its foundational content.

The Hatsune Miku connection

Leekspin’s strangest legacy is that it helped invent a pop star. In September 2007, shortly after Crypton Future Media released the Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software, a producer arranged “Ievan Polkka” in Miku’s voice. A fan animation followed of a squashed, chibi-proportioned Miku waving a spring onion in time — Hachune Miku. The leek stuck to the character permanently: it became Miku’s unofficial mascot object, turning up in official merchandise, fan art and games for years afterward, and the Miku-plus-leek pairing is now far better known than the Bleach scene that produced it.

Why it worked

Leekspin is a pure example of the early-web loop: no punchline, no escalation, no text. Its entire appeal is that it does not stop. Alongside Hampster Dance and Badger Badger Badger, it belongs to a short-lived genre that could only exist when a webpage was the unit of humor — a single tab you left open to annoy the person next to you, measured in how long you could stand it.