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The story
A thread that began with the post “Going to sleep now — hope I wake up back in 1985” got posters who lived through the era sharing their Showa-period memories one after another. The fragments piled up: how the catchphrase in the Sazae-san anime had switched to “Luxury is wonderful,” the shock of seeing Gradius and Space Harrier at the arcade, and the long lines for Bikkuriman chocolate. At the same time, cooler heads chimed in with “Going back would just mean living the exact same life over again” and “Games and entertainment were actually worse back then” — and that gap between nostalgia and reality became the thread’s central tension.
What people said
Some kind of force is at work, so you can't change a thing
If anything, knowing what's coming just makes it more painful
Heck, this very post might not even go through
That's fine by me
That time was simply the peak of my life
Seriously?! 🙀
Oh, is that so
It adds up fine, moron
Yahoo Google Apple Amazon
Yahoo Google Apple Amazon
Yahoo Google Apple Amazon
Got it? Never forget that
Add Bitcoin to that list too
Don't need it
I just want to loop endlessly between 1985 and 1987
and that bolt will send you back to 1985 (a Back to the Future reference)
We don't have the DeLorean, and "jigowatts" isn't even a real unit anyway (a nod to the mistranslated "gigawatts" line in the Japanese dub of Back to the Future)
I want to go to a world that loops endlessly from April 1, 1980 to March 31, 2020 🥺
1980, huh… did anything good happen?
We're never again going to hear a newscaster casually say "the economy's amazing right now" — not before, and not ever again
Let me give you something concrete
In the Sazae-san anime
they changed the line to "Nowadays it's not 'Luxury is the enemy!' — it's 'Luxury is wonderful!'"
Put in today's terms, it was like the whole country was throwing a festival every single day
Non-stop excitement, every day
Honestly the only memory I've got is standing in line
to buy a ton of Bikkuriman chocolate 🥺
But I do remember Shogakukan's grade-school magazines
were packed with articles about how booming the economy was 🥺
Then Space Harrier blew it even further
I remember thinking, "Japanese games have really come this far?"
I can't believe Space Harrier is a game from over 40 years ago. It's basically an out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) at this point
Was that the Symboli Rudolf heyday?
Everyone back then thought it would just go on like that forever
This, exactly
People who never experienced it probably just don't get it
how unhappy things are now by comparison
Some things really are better now though 🥺
There must've been tons of swimsuit gravure photos of them
Seiko feels more like an early-80s image to me
1987?
1997?
2007?
2017?…
August 1987 is way too sad
That's when Yuyake Nyan Nyan ended, so no way (a popular idol variety show that launched Onyanko Club)
1997 was around when Yuyu had just stepped out of the spotlight, I think
A society before social media
The '90s were straight-up Heisei era, never really felt it (as opposed to the Showa nostalgia here)
Back then girls' gym uniforms were still bloomers, too 🥺
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The “1985” discussed in this thread actually falls just before Japan’s full-blown bubble economy (the extreme surge in land and stock prices) truly kicked off. The yen’s appreciation following that year’s Plaza Accord triggered monetary easing, and land prices are generally said to have accelerated from around 1987 onward, with the so-called “bubble economy” peaking in the late 1980s. That means the thread’s shared memory of “a festival atmosphere every day” is probably better understood as an impression blending the back half of the ’80s rather than 1985 specifically. The thread also shows a split between those who say “going back would just mean reliving the same painful life” and those who insist “that era was the peak” — worth noting, though it’s not addressed directly in the posts, is that this nostalgia for the past likely stemmed not so much from how high the standard of living actually was, but from a sense of optimism about the future and the novelty of the entertainment available at the time.
*This article is an excerpt and summary compiled from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Going to sleep now — hope I wake up back in 1985.”
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