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The story
A thread titled “Incidents only geezers born in the Showa era know about” drew a flood of case names from the Showa and early Heisei periods that rarely come up anymore — the Shimoyama Incident, the Toyota Shoji scandal, events tied to Aum Shinrikyo, and more. Posters chimed in with things like “Even us Showa-born folks don’t know about incidents from before we were old enough to understand” and “My teenage years were already in the Heisei era, so I’m not that familiar,” highlighting just how much knowledge varies even within the so-called "Showa generation."
What people said
Rumor has it that old guy tearfully belted out Anita's favorite song at some kind of prison talent-show event.
That's sad 😢 Has he been released yet?
This is the first thing that came to mind
You can watch the real footage on YouTube, plus the dramatization where Takeshi Kitano played the role.
The stabbing of Aum's Murai happened right around my puberty years, so it gave me a weird thrill.
The Osu Incident
The Asama-Sanso Incident
The Haneda Airport Control Tower Occupation
Yeah, our teenage years were already in the Heisei era.
I've never seen an incident get reported on that relentlessly, every single day, in my whole life.
It has nothing to do with the topic, but the impact was huge.
That'd be Oronamine C (a Japanese energy drink).
Oh, it was Oronamine C, huh
Back when the cap was still the same as Lipovitan D's.
Surely nobody here is in their 60s.
and was glued to the live broadcast in the archive room where the TV was.
Stuff like Kanta-kun the pelican, which got hyped up on daytime talk shows, seems more likely to be forgotten.
Pretty sure the pelican's name was Katta-kun.
Right after the war, Shimoyama, the head of the national railway, went missing at a department store,
and the next day he was found run over and dead on the Joban Line tracks.
Somebody help me!
Though it's probably better that way.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The Shimoyama Incident was an unsolved 1949 case in which the president of the Japanese National Railways was found dead under mysterious circumstances, while the Toyota Shoji scandal was a 1985 investment-fraud case in which the company’s chairman was stabbed to death in broad daylight — both dominated news coverage at the time. As commenters in the thread pointed out, awareness of these cases varies widely by birth year, even among those born in the Showa era, let alone those born in Heisei. Incidents from an era when television was the main source of information don’t surface easily in internet searches, which makes them harder to pass down across generations. That said, some of the rumor-like content and details about unsolved disappearance cases in the thread remain unconfirmed, so they should be treated as unverified information.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G, a live-commentary board) thread “Incidents Only Geezers Born in the Showa Era Know About.”
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