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The story
The old-fashioned claim that “kids raised on video games and manga never turn out to be decent adults” has resurfaced on 5channel, fueled by data pointing to declining reading comprehension. The thread cited a figure showing only a 38% correct-answer rate on a reading comprehension test for junior high schoolers, splitting commenters between those who saw it as “proof that kids today have gone downhill” and those who argued that “you can’t draw that conclusion without comparable data from the past.” The discussion also brought up the strong vocabulary of the generation born before World War II, as well as the story of Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino lamenting that his own work ended up creating a lot of war-loving fans — and from there it grew into a broader debate about the relationship between hobbies and education.
What people said
Far from getting slammed, it was basically the shared consensus among their own parents.
It's just that a lot of people engage with them the wrong way.
Same deal as religion.
That's just common sense.
Do you seriously believe people studied more back in the day?
Well, their lives are basically already over.
A whole different league from those born after it.
When you watch old interview footage of people born before the war, from back when they were still young, a lot of them are impressive — not just their manner of speech, but their vocabulary and how they structure what they say.
Anyone who got interviewed before the war was bound to be top-of-the-crop.
Film and cameras were precious back then.
Honestly, games should be capped at one hour a day.
Even today, reading nothing but light novels will make you an idiot.
Look at the kind of people who are still spouting anime trivia well into adulthood.
The bald Gundam director spouting anime trivia well into old age is exactly what you just described.
If anything, he's a monster who's been recycling the same old stories for decades straight.
Only samurai were allowed to carry swords in the first place, though.
Where'd you even get that info?
Japan's literacy rate is high, but more and more kids can't actually understand what a passage of text means.
Yeah, the correct-answer rate for junior high schoolers on this was only 38%.
Without an answer rate from junior high schoolers on a similar question in the past, there's nothing to compare it to.
No need to compare, really.
The fact that 40% of them get it wrong is true either way.
The whole point started from the claim that more kids don't understand what they read, so without a comparison the argument doesn't hold up.
Maybe the correct-answer rate has always been around 40%.
As the brain adapted to that complexity, it also refined a culture of putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
But at some point, one particular phrase started taking over.
That phrase is "mendokusai" ("what a hassle").
The instant the busy brain feels the strain, it goes "ugh, too much hassle" and gives up on reading,
growing more impatient by the day — and so here we are, watching short videos at 2x speed.
Apparently, as the TV shows and music that used to be popular across generations, and the culture shared by everyone regardless of age, disappear thanks to internet culture and growing poverty, Japanese itself is shifting from a high-context language toward a low-context one.
Manga, novels, and games clearly have the edge, since they involve a lot of exposure to writing skill, the ability to read subtle human emotions, kanji, and so on.
Videos, on the other hand, cover such a huge range of genres it's hard to generalize — but watching makeup tutorials or food videos probably doesn't broaden your knowledge all that much.
Also, how someone splits their time between studying and hobbies probably comes down mostly to individual disposition no matter the era — so even a kid glued to manga, games, and videos today would probably have just spent all their time drawing, singing, or chasing girls if they'd been born in the past instead.
I've always figured otaku have historically had a lot of socially awkward people among them precisely because they're often seriously lacking in the ability to read real-life emotional nuance.
Isn't it more that socially disadvantaged people tend to lack that ability to read real-life emotional nuance in the first place, and that's what created fertile ground for them to fall into otaku-type hobbies?
Borrowing books from a library is free, you know.
Take muscles, for example — they get built up by lifting heavy things.
But once technology advances enough that you can just use a machine, you don't need the muscle anymore.
A more convenient society basically means humans decline.
So whether it's games or manga, getting absorbed in them doesn't actually build your ability to read emotional nuance, huh.
Well, yeah.
No matter how you structure school education, the reality is you can't get low-IQ people to solve calculus.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The image cited in the thread showing a “38% correct-answer rate” doesn’t come with a clearly stated source, and even within the thread nobody could pin down exactly which survey or which question it’s referring to. It’s a figure that gets brought up often in discussions of declining reading comprehension, but without data on how children in the past scored on the very same question, the conclusion that “reading comprehension used to be better” doesn’t actually follow — a point that was raised within the thread itself, making the difficulty of simple generational comparisons one of the central sticking points. It’s also worth noting that ideas like “game brain” or “Japanese is a high-context language, and its erosion is driving declining reading comprehension” are closer to folk theories than to any broadly agreed-upon academic consensus. The claim that “today’s youth have gone downhill” is itself a stock criticism that resurfaces with every generational shift.
※This article was compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Old folks used to say ‘kids raised on games and manga never turn out well’ → turns out they were right…” .
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