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The story
A thread titled “The boy who hates capitalist society” popped up on 5ch’s News Speed VIP board. The OP laments, “Money should just disappear,” but is immediately accused of being “someone who bought a luxury condo,” to which he fires back, “That was just luck.” The conversation veers off into the evolution of Kao’s shampoo commercials, a rant about corporate greed, and even the proper technique for washing your hair with hot water alone (no shampoo) — before the OP lets his guard down at the end and admits, “Even so, with around 20,000 deaths a year, this society really is hard to live in.”
What people said
If you smell doing it, you're doing it wrong
Looked more like "stink-wash" to me
Whoa, that's seriously not something to joke about 😥
Noted, I'll be careful 🥲
Just luck, that's all
It told me it loved me
Meiji era
Showa era
No medical basis for that whatsoever
Twice a month is apparently fine?
What an amazing product
It'll take the edge off
I don't drink — alcohol just makes me depressed
I'm begging you
Please
1976: "It's fine to shampoo every day" 1983: "Can you believe it? One in two teens shampoos daily"
Corporations are greedy
Yeah, this is about the only place you can say that
We were marketed into buying it
Background and talking points
On 5ch’s VIP board, whenever someone posts that they “hate capitalism,” the standard reflex is for other posters to question the poster’s own living standards. True to form, this thread saw the OP branded as “someone who bought a luxury condo,” to which he shot back, “That was just luck” — putting front and center the question of how convincing it really is for someone doing fine under the system to turn around and criticize it. Midway through, posters pointed to the evolution of Kao’s shampoo commercials (1976: “It’s fine to shampoo every day” → 1983: “Half of all teens shampoo daily”) as evidence that corporations manufacture demand — a claim that’s actually well documented in advertising history. Later on, the thread touches on Japan’s roughly 20,000 annual suicides (a number that has been trending downward since its 2003 peak) as a way of talking about how hard society is to live in. It was a classic VIP thread: mostly teasing and jokes, with the occasional flash of real feeling breaking through.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed VIP) thread “The boy who hates capitalist society wwwwwwwwww.”
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