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The story
A debate kicked off on 5ch after a post asked, “Are you saddled with a handicap in life just by being born in the countryside?” Counterarguments cited Shohei Ohtani as an example, arguing that “even people born in the city are handicapped for life if they lack talent,” while others floated concrete relocation plans like “countryside until elementary school, then Tokyo from university onward.” Opinions split between environment and innate talent.
What people said
Sucks to be you guys.
Just experiencing Tokyo in your early teens puts you on a whole different level.
Koharu's or Haru-san's hometown would count as a real handicap.
Even more so if you've only got one parent.
You're stuck wearing the "country bumpkin" label for life.
There's no real handicap between city and countryside.
Gonna build yourself a castle or something? (lol)
Even in the countryside, if you've got good parents and siblings, I think you can be plenty happy.
Swimming in a river like this every day in summer…
the best childhood.
If you actually lived nearby, you'd get sick of it fast.
The ocean never gets old. According to a guy from a remote island, there's no pool so you swim in the sea instead. No arcades either, so he used to swim with sharks every day for fun.
Way too jealous. Experiencing that as an adult versus experiencing it as a kid are totally different things.
Probably just because there's nothing else to do…
Crowds make your heart race and get scary (lol)
In the city, if you don't run with the herd you get treated like an outcast, so talent never gets a chance to develop.
There's no fun in this world that beats swimming with sharks in the ocean.
That might just make you the weird one…
Since I couldn't play in places like this as a kid,
I go all the time now that I'm an adult.
It's totally normal to get drawn to nature as you get older.
If anything, my interest in cities has faded.
Crawling with them.
Background and Key Points
Being born in the countryside saddles you with a handicap in life, right? was posted to 5ch’s Hello! Project board, a forum built around Hello! Project idol groups (Morning Musume and its sister acts), whose fandom skews heavily toward discussing where idols and athletes grew up and how that shaped their careers. That context explains why Shohei Ohtani comes up as a counterexample: he was raised in rural Iwate Prefecture in Tōhoku, far from Tokyo, and is cited as proof that talent overrides geography. Posters also reference Koharu and “Haru-san,” idols whose home prefectures are treated as shorthand for genuine rural hardship, a reference legible mainly to people who already follow the fandom’s roster of hometowns.
The thread doesn’t converge on an answer. It splits between two camps: one insists early exposure to Tokyo in your teens confers a permanent edge, especially for anyone chasing an entertainment or idol career where industry infrastructure is concentrated in the capital; the other argues individual talent is the real determinant, with birthplace as noise, pointing to Ohtani and to “many idols come from the countryside anyway.”
What’s likely to be misread by non-Japanese readers is the scale of Tokyo-centralization behind this debate. Japan’s entertainment, media, and corporate head-office industries are overwhelmingly headquartered in Tokyo, and its rail network makes commuting into the capital for auditions, lessons, or fan events routine for city kids in a way it isn’t for someone in a remote prefecture — several posts allude to this (“crappy air,” swimming with sharks, no arcades) without naming it directly. No one in the thread mentions Japan’s actual urban-rural population split or that roughly a third of the country’s population lives in the greater Tokyo area, numbers that would clarify just how large the “handicap” some posters describe really is.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “Being born in the countryside saddles you with a handicap in life, right?“
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