A visit to Japan: middle-class objects & Showa nostalgia

Hey J.J., I am from Germany and from interviews I learned that a lot of Japanese people see us as their closest cultural equivalent. Which I always thought was pretty weird and maybe a bit too heavy on conventional wisdom and stereotypes. But in this video I learned that there is way more to this comparison than meets the eye at first. Germany is outside of the big cities also a society that’s pretty heavily monoethnic and the middle class seems to follow the same trends as japanese middle class does today to a frightening extend. Especially the Showa (Also a very heavily sentimentalized period in Germany) coffee shops, the style was pretty much a carbon copy of old german cafés where I come from and a lot of retirement homes are purposely built and decorated in that almost exact style. Sameness is also something that’s very heavily embraced in Germany, change is often seen as something that infringes on culture and is heavily rejected by a lot of people sometimes to a comical extend. Thank you J.J. for this video, this was a very eye opening experience and a good insight.

Another award winning video

The early 2020s revival of City Pop music is an example of globalized Showa nostalgia, I think.

The red triangles on the buildings/hotel windows are the rescue paths to be used in case of fire. They mean the fire fighters can quickly locate the best way to enter buildings to search for people.

While it was an unpleasant time for you, there's something satisfying for me thinking about a bunch of Japanese people now speaking English with a heavy (and cool) Canadian accent. All your efforts weren't for naught, JJ!

There's actually a Crayon Shin-chan film that's all about Showa era nostalgia! A huge theme park based on the Showa era opens and makes the adults forget all their responsibilities, so the kids have to save them. It's called "The Adult Empire Strikes Back".

As a member of the monoculture, it never really occurred to me that other cultures wouldn't have a universally recognizable help wanted sign. Quite eye-opening.

I lived in Saitama in 1975-76 (Showa 49-50), and I remember the Kita-Urawa station (8:35 in the video). I was a student on a “year abroad” program. I’ve never ben back and from what I’ve seen the changes have been enormous. I really appreciated this! Thanks!!

The way you talk about the showa era reminds me of how us Americans look fondly upon the 50s. You said that coffee shops show this very well, which is similar to how diners show the 50s off very well.

“a healthy sense of nostalgia can be a critical component of a productive future” is a perfectly succinct and wonderful tagline for so much of what this channel is about. I loving coming here to feel validated about my love / nostalgia towards the stuff of my younger years, rather than looking at reminiscence as something unproductive and stagnant

Aw man, I had no idea you lived in Japan! This is Cary's brother Michael (I know you met him at VidSummit after all 3 of us met at VidCon 2023), but Cary did a study-abroad semester in Japan! Maybe the university experience is just universally conducive to friend-making, but he seemed to really enjoy it due to the shared experience of the study-abroad cohort and the faculty-arranged events. I can definitely relate to moving somewhere and having a hard time though! And that's mostly why I'm back in school now.

One thing that a lot of people (hate to use this term but it's the closest) who aren't familiar with Japanese culture and history in general don't see, the Showa era was probably the most dynamic period in Japanese history dating back to the Warring States Period. It came off the back of Westernization in the Meiji era and attempted democracy in the Taisho era (I don't tie it with this but for those who do watch or read Kimetsu no Yaiba/Demon Slayer, this is the period the story takes place) and had both the first ever total defeat of Japan as a society and the closest Japan as a society got to world dominance. It was also the period when Japan really centralized as a nation, through the Meiji and Taisho periods, parts of Japan were cut off from the modernizing, whether it be due to geographic location, historical social status or a mixture of the two. If these two periods were Japan finding its national identity, The Meiji era formalized what Japan was going to be in relation to the rest of the world. This is where all the current social and governmental standardizations that you pointed out really start to solidify and become a sort of cultural identifier of sorts. In comparison to the Heisei era which followed and the current Reiwa era, which contains the downfall of Japan's status as the next world leader in the economy, the two most significant natural disasters in modern memory which were the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the pandemic, rising tensions with China and North Korea, various dramas and maladies that seem to be constant of this time and you have the sort of framing of the Showa era as this sort of golden age of Japan. When things were right and they were respected as a society. When people did good things because it was the right thing to do. When society worked as one. Everything since is trying to get back to that period while trying to stave off potential dangers of the future. Hope this wasn't too much of a drag, I grew up around a lot of the mid to late Heisei stuff due to visiting family who had kept a lot of their Japanese cultural ties when they moved to the US and so a lot of the "Showa" and other things which people associate with Japan aren't really new to me. I'll try to answer any questions people have.

I went to Japan for the first time in 2015 and I hated every moment of it. In retrospect, I realise now it was all coming from me and the problem wasn't Japan at all. I've been fortunate enough to visit again since then in 2018 and 2023 and I loved it and I love Japan and I will do anything to get back there asap.

I feel ya JJ, the year I finished college I moved to Columbus, Ohio (I know, not exactly Japan but still a change) for exactly one year. Moved for a girl and a friend who also moved there and they both left within a few months and I was left with the lease for rest of the year. It’s not a place I look fondly of and I always tried to find a villain in the story, but in reality the closest thing to one is my youthful Naïveté. A very relatable story to hear.

Wow, terrific video. The Sketch Book nostalgia got me thinking about my own upbringing (which of course many Canadians can likely relate to), with the standard-issue Hilroy notebooks bearing the map of Canada, or the much cooler speckled Composition Books that I remember being so ubiquitous that even the chapter books and graphic novels I was reading in elemtary school prominently featured them in the hands of some grade-school detective

Hey JJ. I had a similar rediscovery/reconnection of my youth when I studied abroad for a year in France from 06 to 07, and I returned for the first time last year after 16 years. It really both takes you back ("Oh I remember this/that!") and strikes you as so different

I'm going to start using that green and yellow newbie chevron 🔰in my everyday life. There are so many places it would be helpful.

I did my junior year of college in Japan, so that gave me a different and more positive experience than working as and ESL teacher or anything else. It was like being a tourist for a year. A lot of non-Japanese people are attracted to Japanese culture because of the monoculture. You get the feeling that shared experiences are much more common in Japan, or as you put it in the video communication is easier, while in a more diverse country its like feeling you might be living in a separate place even dealing with surface level issues rather than dealing with deep political and social divisions. Growing up in suburban New York, I was literally a 30 minute train ride to Manhattan, is a lot different than growing up in the suburban south where Evangelical churches are much more prominent. I also suspect that Japan's very developed nerd culture is just attractive to Western nerds who were much less catered to in the economy until recently.

the beginner symbol is one of the 10 badges Gary Oak had, I was today years old when I made this connection

I think "Showa era nostalgia" is acutally a very useful way to explain a lot of feelings, especially among older people or certain kinds of people on the internet who basically say "New thing bad, Old thing good". That despite its primitiveness or simply being corny, you can feel a certain "heart" or soul to things much more than newer things that might be on the surface better. I think one of this decade's cultural trends is the mass media consumers/general public moving away from "Bigger and Better" and towards "I can feel its soul more". Think of the success of the Barbie movie as an example or the rise of Indie/"AA" gaming.