The video pairs Wurtz's deadpan speaking voice with sudden bursts of cheerful jingle-singing over fast infographic animation built from 80s color palettes, cartoon graphics and pastel gradients1. He packs geographic, sociopolitical and cultural history into short comic beats, cutting between chronological facts and absurd asides that turn moments like the arrival of Perry's Black Ships or Japan's 1930s foreign policy into punchlines3.

What made the format travel was density. Nearly every second of the runtime contains a graphic, a joke or a quotable line, so Tumblr and Twitter users could clip dozens of standalone reaction moments out of a single nine-minute upload3. Wurtz's website hosts the rest of his short, jump-cut vignettes, which use the same visual voice on much smaller scales2.

People typically use History of Japan by pulling short GIFs or screenshots from the video and captioning them as reaction images. Common conventions include the 'How 'bout I do anyway?' clip for ignoring a warning, the 'and everybody was Buddhist' cutaway for sweeping generalizations, and the sudden singing frames as tonal whiplash punchlines4.