METI taps Hatsune Miku for recycling campaign

6:00 PM on 01.23.2010   |   Karen Leslie

Now, I thought that the devious plan to send Hatsune Miku to Venus was the crème de la crème of weird Miku news, but that just goes to show what I know. METI (Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry) has teamed up with Crypton and other artists to create a Miku music video dedicated to the topic of cell phone recycling. The song has been out for a few weeks, but the video- which you can check out after the jump- just premiered.

Thanks to the inimitable Ko, I have a rough translation of "Let's gather cell phones sitting in our drawers!" in all it's, err, glory:

Let's gather cell phones sitting in our drawers / You probably have one in your house, too / There's a lot of valuable resources in the cell phone you don't need any more / Let's all gather up our unused cell phones and recycle them / We will protect your secrets / So let's gather cell phones sitting in our drawers

Miku's involvement aside, METI is seriously committed to encouraging cell phone recycling. People who recycle their old phone upon buying a new one are eligible for a cash prize; I imagine that the grand prize of 50,000 yen would be enough to get some otherwise apathetic folks interested in recycling. Apparently the phone does have to be worth more than 2,500 yen to qualify for the program, but to tell you the truth, I question how many cell phones even exist in Japan that cost less than that. Anyway, participants can receive a handy 1,000 yen for just recycling an old phone. 

I wonder though- what ARE they using those old phones for? Are they gutting the electronics and using them for new devices, or perhaps using them all to make a keitai supercomputer? Or maybe, do I dare hope, they're putting them all together to make some sort of giant Hatsune Miku robot? Maybe Miku's involvement in this runs deeper than we know.

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