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The story
A thread on the Hello! Project-affiliated board “Ōkami” kicked off when a poster believed to be in their 50s showed up, and it snowballed into a full-blown generational debate rooted in memories of the internet’s early spread and the ages of various celebrities. The discussion ranged from age comparisons with novelists Ryu Murakami and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, to arguments over exactly when the internet “went mainstream,” musical tastes split between Ventures fans and Group Sounds fans, and even the age bracket of those who were around for the Ai Takahashi era or at Mikitty’s live shows. The biggest sticking points were where to draw the line between “boy” and “old man” on Ōkami, and disagreement over the timeline of the internet’s spread.
What people said
Cars from right after the line opened in the early Showa era mixed in with cars from the late 1950s-60s, coupled together haphazardly
Right before pulling into the station the fluorescent lights would cut out and switch to the backup incandescent bulb
Yeah lol
And it's not even obscure enough to be called dead slang lol
Sh*t that's hilarious, woof♪🐈🤗 (the "woof" is just a cutesy verbal tic, not literal)
If you'd said 'Oshin' (the famous old NHK drama), now that I'd know
That's young!
Being classmates with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (the early-1900s novelist) is the norm around here
The internet was already mainstream by the mid-1990s, so that makes them seriously old
You mean around the Windows 95 days? It wasn't mainstream yet back then
It only went mainstream around the Windows Me era, after 2000
Telehodai (the flat-rate night-time phone/internet plan) launched in 1995, and Yahoo! Japan opened in 1996
The internet was already mainstream by then
Windows 95 alone was a full-blown social phenomenon
Also, by that point top trading companies and electronics makers had already switched their internal memos over to email as standard practice…
60s is 'young men'
70s is 'prime of life'
80s and up is 'elderly'
Most Hello! Project fans these days are in their 20s and 30s
The 50- and 60-something old guard really need to stop deluding themselves that they still run the place
I'll grant their numbers have grown, but strutting around Ōkami like you own it is cringe
Way too cringe
Just a loser (inkya) flexing
Re: #1
No way today's Hello! Project fans would ever set foot on Ōkami
Dial-up through IIJ
I was an acting section chief at 35 back then
Retirement's coming up soon then, huh
That's only true for companies though, right
Idiot, of course it was color
The thing where you fix the TV by smacking it while clicking the dial — that's only up through elementary school
By the time I hit junior high, records had vanished from most households in favor of CDs
Of course
You probably don't even know what a QQQ TV is (an old-school TV brand)
That's why it only counts from when flat-rate pricing came in
Before that, hardly any regular household had it, I'd think
Final Fantasy XI came out in 2002, and by then it had grown quite a bit
Seems roughly in line with that graph
We've been talking about when it went mainstream from the very start, are you dense
Just look at Re: #83, it's obvious
I'm a bit younger, but all through elementary, middle, and high school, Saturdays ran until noon
I was an Astronauts guy myself (both 1960s instrumental rock bands)
I was more of a Group Sounds guy myself
At around 50, you were still about 20 during the 'Asayan' era
Too busy having fun to care — idols were just something you caught on TV
Most people probably just watched on TV, but the active ones must have seen Okamura show up unannounced in person (Okamura Takashi, the comedian who co-hosted 'Asayan')
Not a bald guy in sight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaU8qn2MIc8&t
You're basically a kid
Go to pediatrics
Depends on the department though
Like if it's cardiology, 42 would indeed be young
Background and Key Points of This Debate
“Ōkami” (literally “Wolf”) is the nickname for a 5ch board where fans of Hello! Project idols gather, known for its own quirky age scale where even someone in their 50s gets called a “boy.” The dates cited in the thread — the 1995 launch of the Telehodai flat-rate phone plan and the 1996 opening of Yahoo! Japan — do match real history, but opinions split over what counts as the internet “going mainstream”: household penetration versus how big a social splash it made. The real fault line in the argument is likely not the dates themselves but differing definitions of “widespread adoption.” Likewise, the age comparisons to novelists Ryu Murakami and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa are classic exaggerated jokes about the gap between posters’ actual ages and the thread’s self-image as “youthful” — not precise claims about age differences. One thing readers might misread: labels like “boy” and “elder” used on this board are purely local in-joke culture, not a reflection of how age is perceived generally.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “A 50-Something Geezer Shows Up on Ōkami Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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