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The story
A post on 5ch claiming that “old Japan had a bit more of a culture that didn’t just use up and discard its young people” sparked a wave of generational comparisons. The poster argued that “it felt like promising young people used to get picked up by society’s watchful eye,” but this was met with a flood of pushback insisting things were actually harsher back then — comments like “in the Ice Age generation, people dying from exploitative jobs was just normal” and “in the last war they were even turned into human torpedoes for kamikaze attacks.” Some pointed to the structural shift from falling birthrates and an aging population, where it’s now common to have four grandparents doting on a single grandchild, making this far from a simple case of “the old days were better.”
What people said
They've lost all seriousness and work ethic.
I think young people are a mirror of adult society — if they've got no seriousness or work ethic, it's probably because there are no adults left worth modeling themselves on.
I mean, there used to be this kind of watchful eye from society at large that would actually look out for promising young people. Feels like that's gone now.
It was like "young people suck!" (meaning "I'm jealous of their freedom") — that's gone now, it's just bash-and-crush.
Good old days.
Well, maybe it's a team-sport thing — cherishing the young doesn't translate into a win for "Team Japan" anymore.
They were literally turned into human torpedoes for kamikaze attacks though.
That's pretty vague — what exactly do you mean by "society's watchful eye"?
Hard to put into words, but it's like that saying "when one god abandons you, another picks you up" — back then it feels like just being young meant someone would look out for you.
Don't need clueless brats.
Plus there's importing foreign workers too… though I guess they'll end up used up and discarded as well in the end.
Once that's gone, it's over.
Hmm
Is there even one concrete example?
Like a story about someone famous?
The very term "Ice Age generation" carries the nuance that young people were victims.
If misery for the young had just been the default mode, a term like that wouldn't even exist.
There's never been an era where young people get coddled as much as now.
These days corporal punishment and workplace harassment are banned, so kids are overprotected and there are way more young people who can't handle any pressure.
I think it's the adults' fault that spoiling them too much led to so many kids refusing to go to school.
If it's 4 grandparents to 1 grandkid, wouldn't the meddling ("harassment") from other people's grandparents also end up 4x as intense? Well, I guess that does make for more overprotection too.
How many times was I smugly told things like "there are plenty more where you came from" or "we don't chase after people who want to leave"?
These days, if a direct subordinate quits it hurts the manager's performance review, so I feel like young people are actually treated better now.
Back then, even when that kind of harassment happened, it was more like 1 old person to 5 young people. Now the ratio's flipped, right?
Bubble collapse + dirt-cheap Chinese goods = non-regular (precarious) employment
so there wasn't even a custom of hiring new graduates.
and dump brutal workloads on them under the guise of "a challenge."
The misery of the Ice Age generation is on a whole different level than this.
It was a world where people literally dying from exploitative employers was just normal.
Not even comparable to now, when you can easily quit using a resignation-proxy service.
2 generations ago… inexperienced young men were used up as human torpedoes
1 generation ago… folded into the seniority system thanks to rapid economic growth and labor movements
Now… stable employment has collapsed due to the bubble bursting and the rise of developing countries
Background and key points of this discussion
The term “Ice Age generation” itself refers to those who came of job-hunting age from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, unable to land regular employment and instead forced into unstable jobs and grueling overwork — it was widely reported as a social problem at the time. The wartime kamikaze corps, and even earlier child labor in farming villages, also stand as historical facts of “young people treated as expendable.” What divided the thread wasn’t really whether “a culture of cherishing the young” existed in the past, but rather that each generation has a different standard for what counts as “cherishing,” and the overall amount of slack in society differed. There’s a real tension here: falling birthrates and an aging population have shrunk the number of adults available to support the young, even as labor protections have advanced — and this structural nuance, which can’t be resolved by a simple “which era was worse” comparison, never got fully spelled out in the replies.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Old Japan used to have a bit more of a culture of “let’s not treat young people as disposable,” didn’t it.”
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