Something from the Shōwa era reached you. That is probably why you are here.
A song from 1984 that the algorithm decided you needed. A photograph of a street with too many signs on it. A teapot in a box that had never been opened. An illustration of a car on an elevated road at night, made by someone who was not born yet.
Whatever arrived, it arrived edited.
Not maliciously. Just by attrition. Things travel a long way and forty years, and what survives the trip is whatever was easiest to carry — the parts that photograph well, the parts that need no context, the parts nobody has to apologise for.
The commuter crush did not make it. The recession that started in 1991 and never entirely ended did not make it. The tedium did not make it.
What did make it is genuinely beautiful. I am not going to argue with your taste.
But it is a version, and there is another one, and I happen to have it.
What I am and what that is worth
I am Japanese. I taught in Japanese schools and universities for decades and I have worked as a counsellor for around forty years. I was alive and paying attention for most of the period this half of the site is about.
It is worth being exact about what that does and does not qualify me to say.
What it gives me.
I was in the rooms. I know what a particular kind of Sunday afternoon sounded like, what the inside of an ordinary house contained, what people said about things at the time as opposed to what they say now. That is not research and it cannot be reconstructed from research. It is also perishable — there are not many decades left in which anyone can write it down first-hand.
What it does not give me.
One life in one country is a narrow instrument. I was a particular age, in particular places, doing particular work. I am not a historian, and where I am relying on a figure or a date rather than on memory, I will say which and where it came from. When I do not know, I would rather write that I do not know.
I mention all this because the standard voice for writing about Japan in English is confident, and I would rather be useful than confident.
Two ways in: sounds and objects
This half of the site is organized into sounds and objects, and the reason is not arbitrary.
Eras are usually explained through events — dates, prime ministers, economic figures. That is how the Shōwa period gets taught, and it is nearly useless for understanding what living in it was like. Nobody experiences a decade as a set of events. You experience it as the specific noises that were in the air and the specific things that were in your house.
Those two categories also happen to be what physically survives. A record still plays. A teapot is still in its box. That makes them checkable in a way that memory alone is not — I can put the object in front of you.
Sound
The genre you have a name for did not have that name. We called it New Music. And the reason nobody can define it is not musical — it is that these artists were shut out of the television format that would have imposed a shared shape on them. Tatsuro Yamashita, who is famous for refusing television, has said that at the start he simply was not invited.
Why City Pop Sounds Like a Memory You Never Had On the feeling itself.
Anemoia is not a psychological term — it was invented by a poet in 2012 — but the phenomenon has been studied under another name, and the research is more interesting than the invented word. Includes what I actually remember about that music, which is not nostalgia.
Still to write in this section: what an ordinary Shōwa household sounded like from the inside, what Japanese people were really listening to on vinyl beyond the handful of tracks that travelled, and the noises of a neighbourhood — vendors, radios, the sound a festival makes three streets away.
Objects
This section is being built now, and it starts with something concrete.
My mother kept four teapots. Bought, boxed, and never used — which is an entire subject in itself, because a house full of beautiful unused things is a completely normal Japanese situation and an incomprehensible one from outside. One of them is Banko-yaki, from Yokkaichi, and the sticker is still on the lid. Inside the box was a single sheet of paper explaining how to brew tea properly: leaf quantity, water temperature, steeping time, by type of tea. That sheet came free with a teapot. Nobody read it.
That is where Objects begins. After that: what else was in the house and where it came from, and why old Japanese things have the particular physical quality they do — which is a question about materials and firing and hands, not about aesthetics.
Some of these objects I own and some I will sell. Where an article links to something for sale, that is disclosed on the page and in the affiliate disclosure. I would rather tell you that plainly than have you work it out.
What this is not
Two things I want to rule out, because both are easy to slide into.
It is not a history course. If you want the political and economic narrative of 1926 to 1989, there are better sources and I am not one of them.
And it is not the warm version. There is a well-established Japanese genre of Shōwa nostalgia — the film Always: Sunset on Third Street is the reference point — in which the period is remembered as poor, crowded and kind. Some of that is true. It is also a product, made and sold to people who wanted it, and I have no interest in producing a foreign-language edition of it.
The Shōwa era contained a great deal that was ordinary and some things that were bad. I would rather describe it than defend it.
Still to come
Subjects I intend to write about here, listed so you can see the shape of the thing:
- What the word “Shōwa” is doing now.
It has stopped being a date range. It functions as an aesthetic, and also — this is the part that does not export — as a mild insult. Calling something Shōwa in Japan today can mean charming or can mean obsolete and slightly embarrassing, and often means both at once. - The bubble, from inside it.
Everybody has seen the graph. Fewer people have described what it was like to be an adult in the middle of it, including how little of it reached ordinary households. - The classroom.
I spent my career in Japanese education. Shōwa schooling was not what the outside imagines, in either direction. - 1989, and what did not end.
The era has a closing date. Almost nothing about it stopped on that date.
Some of these will connect. I will say so when I have worked out how, rather than in advance.
The other half of this site
There is a second half, about what is happening in Japan right now and why — the enormous fan economies, the stuffed animals, the characters.
The two halves are less separate than they look. Japanese teenagers are currently treating the 1990s as a fascinating foreign country, for the same reasons you are treating 1984 as one.
If something here does not match what you have seen of Japan yourself, I would like to hear it. One vantage point is not many.
Showa / Japanese history
