On January 5th, Japanese social media was pretty quiet about Hayao Miyazaki's 75th birthay. It seemed like folks were keeping their powder dry for what was coming on. On January 15th, Nippon Television Network marked 30th anniversary of Studio Ghibli's first movie with a broadcast of the movie Castle in the Sky (August 2, 1986), followed by the studio's fourth, Kiki's Delivery Service (July 29, 1989) the next week. This meant it was time for another Balse festival.

2011 and 2013 broadcasts of the movie were marked by "Balse" or "BALS" Festivals, in which fans broke Twitter's Tweets-per-second records (33,388, then 143,199) by joining leads Sheeta and Pazu as they cast the pivotal spell. Studio Ghibli co-founder/producer Toshio Suzuki recently revealed that Miyazaki wasn't aware of the phenomenon.

This time, there wa's a BALS Button online.

This year's managed an impressive, but not record breaking 345,000 Tweets a minutes, with 55,000 Tweets a second at its spell-casting peak.





There's a superstition that when a Ghibli movie is broadcast the same day as the US government releases its job numbers, the labor report will be weak. However, fortunately, US numbers come up a week ahead of the double billing.

via @itm_nlab

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.