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KAITO: The Vocaloid That Launched a Thousand Ships

KAITO: The Vocaloid That Launched a Thousand Ships

Stephanie Liu
October 16, 2026

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An incredibly bizarre mix-up has been happening on Twitter for the past week or so, akin to two completely alien races meeting each other for the first time at a space bar or an invasive species encountering a more powerful native species out in the wild. It involves KAITO (the Vocaloid), Kaito (of K&P), and miscommunication that somehow kept getting worse until one pivotal moment.

Let me start from the beginning.

On October 5, 2026, Kaito Takahashi of King & Prince debuted as a solo artist. He released “swim?” which is his first digital single. As a solo artist, he advertises himself on Twitter as #KAITO. If you’re familiar at all with Vocaloid and Vocaloid culture, you will understand why this is an issue.

To elaborate for those who might be unfamiliar, Kaito (officially KAITO) is a Vocaloid voice synth who came out in 2006. As a voice bank, KAITO is akin to an instrument that Vocaloid producers can use to make songs. Because there’s not really like an official way to aggregate all the content, like a shared YouTube channel for all Kaito-Ps or an online archive (like a Livejournal community), fans who want to find each other or share songs/fanworks or recommendations need to use that #KAITO tag. This has been a long-standing tradition. Remember, KAITO came out in 2006; he literally predates Twitter (2007), and so the usage of the #KAITO tag for finding and sharing content has been around since the site’s inception.

The problem with Kaito Takahashi fans isn’t that they don’t understand this culture. They don’t understand what KAITO is, period. Perhaps it’s the fact that KAITO exists in Project Sekai, but a (now-deleted) Tweet called for Vocaloid to EoS. Even though it’s a program and a onetime purchase… A common misconception is that KAITO is a VTuber, which would make the conflict one between VTuber fans and idol fans.

As you would expect on Twitter (and the Internet as a whole), the whole thing eventually devolved into name-calling and petty attacks on each other. It got worse and worse, mainly with the idol fans not understanding anything that the Vocaloid side was saying. To be fair, Vocaloid can be hard to get if you’ve been completely insulated from it.

However, this all changed when user renee uploaded a KAITO cover of “Cinderella Girl,” which is a King & Prince song. A complete unknown and random person, just like the idol fans themselves, creating a song with the KAITO program and uploading it was enough for them to understand what the issue is and become much more sympathetic to the issue with the tag pollution on Twitter. This earned renee the title of Nobel Peace Prize-P.

So the KAITO issue has been solved. Everyone lives happily ever after, right? Well, no, not really. The problem of #KAITO and understanding what KAITO is has been resolved, but there’s still another problem: “swim?” which is the digital single of the human Kaito. This issue was going on at the same time, with discussions happening concurrently.

Everything I described above has been pretty much contained to Japanese Twitter. If you get Japanese Tweets or have seen some summary posts from people, you might have been in the know, but the common international fan (as in someone who isn’t in Japan or Japanese) looking up KAITO (the Vocaloid) on YouTube got a nasty surprise after the release of “swim?” since it’s at the top of the search results. To prevent this random human from polluting the search results, people might have disliked the video to stop it from appearing again, but this earned the ire of the Kaito idol fans, who believed that this was a coordinated attack from the Japanese KAITO fans.

Again, though, the issue of KAITO (Vocaloid) versus Kaito (the human) was contained to Japanese Twitter. It’s not exactly well-known on the global Internet. Compared to troll movements like the Inazuma Eleven Gojo incident and the Pokemon Magnemite incident, the number of dislikes on the “swim?” music video was low enough that it genuinely looks more organic than coordinated.

Hopefully, the KAITO incident dies down with Kaito (the human) changing what official tag he wants his fans to use. But this has served as an interesting lesson for artists who are hoping to branch out and make a name for themselves, as well as what happens when long-lasting Internet traditions and such are ignored for no reason.

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KAITO: The Vocaloid That Launched a Thousand Ships

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