This is one of those random events you sometimes experience on YouTube.

You begin by looking for one thing, and then you follow a few more, and in not all that many minutes you stumble across something you didn’t plan to play — and didn’t know existed.

Such as 10,000 Japanese performing the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — also known as the Ode to Joy.

Give it a look. It’s oddly compelling.

Some facts:

–Apparently, playing the Ode to Joy is common in Japan, especially on New Year’s Eve.

–The 10,000 people here happen to be in Osaka. Theirs may not be the only city that does this fairly regularly.

–The 10,000 are all just regular folks. Members of the community. Aside from the soloists and members of the orchestra, who are pros.

–The conductor goes at this so hard that (spoiler alert) by the end of the 17 minutes he nearly spontaneously combusts.

–The Japanese picked up Beethoven’s Ninth from German prisoners of war during the First World War.

–I like to think I know enough German to be pretty sure the soloists here have good German accents. The baritone, in particular.

For more factoids, check this bit of text here.

Beethoven was, you may recall, deaf when he composed his last symphony, during which he attempted to fuse orchestral innovation with Schiller’s poetry, as conveyed via song.

He came awfully close to succeeding, I think we must concede.

It is a bit odd, for those of us in the West, to think of Japan doing a mass-participation concept like this. We normally associate these with China or with North Korea. (You remember the 2,008 drummers from Beijing’s opening ceremonies at the 2008 Olympics, yes? After that opening was finished, a Chinese official said “nobody in the world could have done that, except maybe the [North] Koreans”.)

Give it a listen. See if you don’t make it through to the end.