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The story
5ch reacted to news that “Iwate Seikyo Co-op Aterui” in Oshu City, Iwate Prefecture, has taken the unusual step of banning junior high school students from entering the store unaccompanied, citing ongoing disruptive behavior on the premises.
The thread ranged all over the place — from debates about parenting and discipline at home, to trivia about Oshu being Shohei Ohtani’s hometown, to whether the rumor that “co-op = Communist Party” is true, to talk about the younger generation’s habit of blasting music at full volume, to why the police aren’t getting involved.
Published 8/28 (Fri) 12:51
Kahoku Shimpo
“Iwate Seikyo Co-op Aterui” in Oshu City, Iwate Prefecture, has taken the unusual step of barring all junior high school students in the city from entering the store unaccompanied, citing continued disruptive behavior inside the store.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Re: #3
Apparently kids are raised by society these days, so parents get to be totally hands-off
I'm actually from Oshu. Apparently after Ohtani's team got knocked out of the summer tournament, he went to hang out at the local AEON mall with his classmates.
In the countryside, that's about the only place there is to go.
Ohtani's mother is from Yokohama, so apparently he used to visit his grandparents there a lot.
Sounds like the type to walk around with a boombox blasting on their shoulder
Do boomboxes even still exist these days?
"No TV, no radio" lol (a nod to the old rural folk-song lyric about the countryside having nothing)
Even outside, the default now is playing music straight from the phone's speaker instead of using earphones
I'm a guy in my mid-30s, and when I pass teens and people in their early 20s on the street, I've run into plenty of them walking or biking around with loud music blasting from their phone. Really feel the generation gap.
Nobody said anything about whether they're well-behaved. Can you not even follow what people are actually talking about?
It's pure childishness — kids who can only assert themselves by causing trouble for others.
Kids this immature grow up to join biker gangs, drop out of society, and end up at the bottom of the heap.
They just go with a parent, grandparent, older sibling, or some other acquaintance.
Even when I went there as a tourist, I noticed there was nowhere for kids to hang out.
It's probably like a 3-hour bike ride to the nearest AEON lol
Honestly the only good thing Iwate has going for it is the hot springs
Were you born and raised out in the mountains somewhere?
It's right near Ohtani's old junior high, actually
They're like bugs drawn to a light — scatter them and they'll just swarm right back
Why aren't they reporting this to the police? If the nuisance is actually causing the store financial damage, why not press charges, or take it to civil court and make the parents take responsibility? Why isn't anyone doing that??????
Taking it to court costs a lot of money and hassle, you know 😅
Plus it's an unspecified number of people involved
A co-op is basically just a regular supermarket
They'll ask if you have a membership card, but non-members can still shop there
I think membership is only required for the home delivery service
Background and Key Points
Seikyo (生活協同組合, “consumer life cooperative”) stores like this one operate under Japan’s 1948 Consumer Livelihood Cooperative Act — member-owned retail chains that function as ordinary supermarkets open to anyone, with membership only required for things like home delivery. Nationally these co-ops serve tens of millions of households and are common enough in smaller cities that, as posters noted, they’re often the only supermarket-scale retail around — which is also why Oshu’s Aterui store (named for a historical Emishi chieftain who resisted Yamato rule from this same district) matters as a hub: in a rural area without a nearby AEON mall, banning junior high schoolers from entering alone effectively removes one of the few places local teens can independently go.
The thread didn’t split over whether the ban itself was reasonable — nobody defended the disruptive kids. The disagreement was over causation and response: parenting failure versus a broader teen-culture shift (phones played openly at speaker volume instead of through earphones) versus simple frustration that the store isn’t calling in police or suing, met with the counterpoint that pursuing an “unspecified number” of minors through civil court is expensive and impractical for a private business.
What outsiders are likely to misread is the word “banned”: this is a private store enforcing its own entry policy, not a legal or criminal sanction, and Japan gives businesses wide latitude to refuse service on their own premises. The “co-op equals Communist Party” rumor that surfaces periodically stems from postwar-era associations between some cooperative and labor movements, but has no bearing on ordinary seikyo retail operations today — a point a few posters raised only to dismiss as outdated.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Iwate] Junior High Schoolers Banned From Shopping Alone — Oshu City Co-op’s Tough Call After Repeated Nuisance Behavior.”
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