The two royal eras that made our world

Yet another instance of Japan and the UK being oddly comparable.

Hirohito is a weird mirror image of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie. Where Hirohito was the figurehead of Japan's darkest days whose reputation was remediated, Selassie was one of the first noble figures of resilience during the war who was (in my opinion) unjustly disrespected and cast down by his society post war. Imagine if someone like Charles De Gaulle was overthrown then died from a suspiciously botched surgery then hastily buried under a toilet.

I think a lot of people in North America feel like 9/11 was the end of our "Showa Era". You see a lot of people cite it as what they feel like a turning point in our culture.

For years, I understood the Godzilla series to be separated into "Showa" and "Heisei" eras, but had no idea that they were connected to the reigns of Emperors.

Nothing has really changed since 1066

I think the modern era we're living in today starts in 2012. Cell phones connected to the internet existed well before the iPhone (Remember the blackberry?). The iPhone was revealed in 2007, but was very limited in connectivity. 2012 was when phones using 4G data became widely adopted in the US, allowing for the EXPLOSION in smartphones. Without the smartphone explosion of 2012 there's no BLM, short form video, Angry Birds, video essays, VLOGs, and selfies among other cultural revolutions.

Nostalgia is a very strong emotion, even people like me in there mid 20s are hyper nostalgic for the 2000s from when we were growing up

I would argue that early home computers were an extension of middle class luxury, and it wasn't until the expansion of the Internet to home computers in the early 90s that they began the transition from luxury items to a core part of the household.

In Sweden we talk about ”rekordåren” - ”the record years”. Similarly to the French example it lasted from 1945 until around 1973. I would not say that the nostalgia around it is as heavy, it is more viewed from the lens of how “things just used to be good”. The end date is hard to pinpoint, some would argue it’s 1968 when the long time prime minister Tage Erlander stepped down, but I think 1973 is more fitting. It marks the start of the opec crisis and subsequent economic downturn, but also the first election since the 30s where the Social democrats did not win an outright majority in the parliamentary elections and quite fittingly to link with your examples, the death of the old King and the start of our current Kings reign. The previous one being a strong figurehead who was widely respected by Swedish society and more importantly by the left as well, while the new King was a 27-year old partier. Excellent video that made me reflect on my own country!

I'm 18, I wasn't alive in any of these years, but whenever I hear about the recent past it always strikes me that 1984 specifically comes up very conspicuously often, and not just because people were aware of the Orwell book. I definitely agree that it seems like a very pivotal year that could be used to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.

In the West, I tend to see a distinction between the "glorious 30" and/or "mid-century," compared to the last quarter of the 20th century. 1945 is an obvious beginning date, with an end date of perhaps 1969 or Fourastie's date of 1973. The 1960s were a very turbulent time, politically, but also full of optimism and idealism. This culminated with Woodstock and the first manned Moon landing in 1969. Less than 70 years after the wright brothers first flew a powered aircraft, humans walked on another celestial body! Free love would surely last forever! And then, people got bored and jaded and became more cynical. Space budgets were slashed and hippie culture began to fade. The United States, superpower of the West, had to accept that it couldn't defeat an underfunded but committed enemy fighting for their homeland. The West's stance towards Communism began to soften, as staunch anti-communist Nixon visited China to begin normalizing relations. And then, with the oil-shock recessions and Watergate, the optimism of the 60's was gone. And for the era that came after? I'd say it was mid-70's until 9/11/2001. One might call it the "Neoliberalism era."

I've generally considered the period between 1989 and 2001 to be a distinct "no man's land" between the Cold War and the Modern Era. I call this period between the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Towers the "end of history", after the famous Francis Fukuyama book that reflected a very triumphalist attitude in the West and a period of general optimism. I think, at least in an American context, September 11th was a sort of wake-up moment that broke the idea of an endless march towards prosperity under the banner of liberal democracy. It also coincides with the beginning of the internet as a player in American culture, although it wouldn't become dominant until around 2017 or so.

nostalgia isn't what it used to be

That "showa era" bar having a Nintendo 64 from the late 90s and an HDTV triggers me lol.

I’d keep 1989 as the pivotal year of inflections. The Showa Emperor died and Japan reached its economic apogee. The Berlin Wall fell and Europe was finally being reunited. The USSR started to unravel in that year. All the nasty Cold War “hot” wars in undeveloped nations sputtered out as money was no longer available to keep them going. This peace finally reigned in large parts of the world. The golden age of the 1990s was just getting started in the US, with American triumphalism a dominant theme in US and global culture. It seems like a great year to commemorate the end of an era.

I must say, 90s and 80s nostalgia seems to have had something of a comeback in the UK, particularly with the miserable cost of living crisis

I mean, if we're talking about how an era ended when computers gained more mainstream relevance as PCs, I think that the period between 1945 and 1984 (1985 if we want to do a solid, round 40 years) should be named something among the lines of "Post-war Analogue Tech era", at least if we're looking at technology and the impact it has on pop culture around that time given the predominance of things like vinyl records, cassettes, TVs, cars, videocassettes and so on With this definition, we can maybe call the years that came the "Digital era" and maybe we can slice this era into smaller bits depending on the different technology advancements, such as the introduction of tactile screens or AI into the mainstream

In Poland we also split modern history before and after 1989 - end of communism and beginning of democracy was watershed moment for culture, politics, economy, etc.

I would say our current cultural era began in 2007 with the release of the iPhone. The "Information Age" as we know it did not really begin until we all had relatively cheap devices that could access the internet from anywhere at any time. Social media was the killer app that had so many people purchase smartphones in such a short span of time. Within 10 years we went from nobody owning smartphones to nearly everyone owning a smartphone.

The end of the cold war was a very important shift in Europe. And it was followed by 20 peaceful years, until the financial crisis, followed by national populism and the war in Syria.