YouTube star Piko Taro encourages people to pursue their dreams

and milk them for all they're worth

He doesn't seem to know the difference between dreams, pipe dreams and total fantasy.

Well, if you don't admire or respect the man for anything else, I think you have to at least respect his humility. He knows he's lucky, and has always known it. Personally, I also admire his outlook on dreams, although I think getting a Grammy is indeed a pipe dream. The Olympics? I can see the JOC thinking he would be a good 'ambassador' even though really it would just end up being one of those thing they look back and view like Japan's 2002 'uniforms' they entered the Sydney Stadium in.

99 percent of my success was the result of luck,

Almost nailed it. Because he said 99%. Not to say it isn't a commentary on his audience.

Perhaps his next song should be a cover of "Happy Talk"

You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream

how you gonna have a dream come true?

"99 percent of my success was the result of luck,"

Humility from a successful person, one of my favourite things to see. Too many of them can't wait to knock out a "How to succeed doing it my way" book detailing some invented self-aggrandizing strategy behind it all.

His act itself soon became tiresome, but reflects Japanese media's eagerness to keep pushing the same formula again and again and again. I think you'd be hard pressed to find another country where the biggest commercial tv channels have programming that is as identical.

On the subject of humility in the face of success, he reminds me of Alexander Graham Bell, after he first successfully demonstrated his new-fangled telephone:

" I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of my invention, but I can perhaps foresee the day when there is a telephone in every city in America."

To paraphrase tmarie, on the thread about the pitiful sight of the walrus in a Halloween costume...

Poor Piko. Suffers for the sake of "amusing" selfish, clueless humans.