No Face Chasing Chihiro — Person in pink kimono running through balloon-decorated hallway from person in black cloak and No-Face mask

No Face Chasing Chihiro

2016object labeling image macroclassic

Published July 30, 2026

No Face Chasing Chihiro is an object labeling meme built from a 2016 photograph of Japanese students cosplaying the two Studio Ghibli characters at a school event. The image, showing a masked No Face figure appearing to pursue Chihiro down a hallway, spread on Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit as a template where each figure represents something chasing or fleeing.

object labeling anime manga japanese internet memes cosplay performance memes viral photo memes

Overview

No Face Chasing Chihiro uses a real photograph of two Japanese students in cosplay, one wearing the black robe and white mask of No Face and the other dressed as Chihiro in her pink and white bathhouse uniform from the 2001 Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away 2. The picture catches No Face mid-stride with arms outstretched while Chihiro runs a few steps ahead of him down what looks like a school corridor, and the staged, in-motion quality is a big reason the shot travelled so far outside anime fandom 1.

Once the image escaped Japanese Twitter, users treated it as object labeling material, captioning No Face with a pursuing force and Chihiro with whatever was trying to escape it 3. Common pairings run from academic pressure like deadlines catching students, to pop culture crossovers with shows like South Park, to wholesome and mental health themed swaps.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (source photo) / Tumblr and Reddit (meme spread)
Creator
@teru8936
Date
2016

Studio Ghibli first released Spirited Away in Japan on July 20, 2001, and the design of the silent, mask wearing spirit No Face and the young protagonist Chihiro are what the meme borrowed from fifteen years later 2. The origin photo was posted on October 3, 2016 by Twitter user @teru8936, who shared a set of three shots of the students in costume at what looked like a school festival. Before the account was set to private, the tweet had pulled in more than 190,000 likes and 120,000 retweets by October 6, 2016, as covered by Japanese pop culture site SoraNews24 1.

How It Spread

One day before the origin post went viral, Twitter user @Himeyurrrrry posted fan art of the scene on October 2, 2016 with the caption "ハクも追加でお願いします" (translated from Japanese: "Please add a Haku too"), and that tweet picked up more than 14,000 likes and 4,700 retweets over the next few years 4. The picture then jumped to English speaking sites when Tumblr user zenigata reblogged it on September 22, 2017 and pulled more than 86,000 notes on the post 5.

The object labeling edits started arriving in 2018. On March 20, 2018, Tumblr user KyleQueen posted a version tied to the animated series South Park that gathered over 785 notes and stands as one of the earliest known labeled edits 6. Reddit picked the format up on June 12, 2018 when user Megamiguel31 shared a wholesome variant to /r/wholesomememes, and by November 13, 2018 an anonymous poster had uploaded another edit to /r/me_irl that hit more than 11,000 upvotes with a 99 percent approval rate 3.

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How to Use This Meme

To use No Face Chasing Chihiro, people typically caption the masked No Face figure with something threatening, overwhelming or unwanted (a deadline, an obligation, intrusive thoughts) and label the fleeing Chihiro as the target or victim of that thing 3. The format works because the source photo is a staged action shot rather than an anime screencap, which gives it more physical urgency than a still frame and lets creators plug almost any pursuer versus pursued pairing into the two roles.

Frequently Asked Questions