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The story
A serialized feature in the Asahi Shimbun investigated whether the idiom “turn the dial” (used to mean “make a phone call”) still makes sense to today’s elementary schoolers, who have never touched a rotary phone. The piece found that even without ever seeing the real thing, kids could correctly guess what it meant — and on 5ch, this set off a wave of posts reminiscing about spinning the dial on old black phones. At the same time, some pushed back, arguing that “people didn’t actually talk that way even back in the Showa era” — a rebuttal that talked past the article’s actual point (whether the phrase is *understood* today) versus whether it was ever *actually used*, leaving the discussion somewhat at cross purposes.
Asahi Shimbun > Series > Kotobazu > Article
Does “turn the dial” not click anymore? Turns out elementary schoolers can still picture it: Asahi Shimbun
September 25, 2026, 11:00 AM — Paid article
Source: asahi.com / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, that's exactly what comes to mind.
Yep, this is the one.
Turning the dial~ and held in my fart~♪ (a pun swapping "hand" for "fart," which rhyme in Japanese)
People did say that before push-button phones caught on.
We still had one in the late '90s. My parents had cell phones, but the home phone was still a black rotary one.
Spinning that dial was fun as a kid.
The word "rewind" actually shows up in the lyrics of The Buggles' famous song "Video Killed the Radio Star."
It's used in the back half of the chorus, like this:
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind, we've gone too far
(The Buggles – "Video Killed the Radio Star")
It means to turn back time.
I've got a rotary phone at home too — I actually learned how it works from a book called "Why Do Phones Connect? The Basics of NTT Phones, IP Phones, and Cell Phones You Should Know," by Masaaki Yoneda.
You can actually dial a rotary phone without turning the dial at all — just rapidly tap the switch hook where the receiver rests.
We did say "teru suru" though (old slang for "to call," shortened from "telephone").
Something like "checked their contacts, then let the screen go dark"?
And there's no A: or B: drive anymore either…
Ahh, that's gonna drive me crazy.
Conversation blossoms around the family dinner table.
A slice of Japan handed down from parent to child across the Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras.
Off to the side, the NHK news plays on the TV.
SUT = Shizuoka TV
TKU = Kumamoto TV
UMK = Miyazaki TV
TUY = Yamanashi TV
UHB = Hokkaido Bunka Broadcasting
KUTV = Kochi TV
Probably a lot of young people don't know why the "U" shows up in so many of these for the same reason.
It's still around in names like "TV-U Fukushima," isn't it?
That's the "U" from Ultra(man), right?
I like Maxell's High Position tapes (Hi-Position, Type II) — they cover a wider frequency range with better sound quality than Normal Position (Type I).
My car stereo still runs on cassette.
Prices exploding with savings, everyone's Sakuraya~
Ono Den's mascot boy, playing with the future~♪ (a nostalgic mashup of jingles from old Akihabara electronics-store TV ads)
Your neighborhood Akihabara! Sato Musen!
Osaka's not gonna lose either~
Head east past Daimaru and Sogo, fifty steps on and there's Naniwa~
Deep in Shinsaibashi, Kankan Camera's Naniwa~
Common in cheap apartments. If there's an apartment building near you, go take a look sometime.
There's a type of lock where you turn the dial right to line up a number, then turn it left to line up another.
Background and key points of this discussion
The black rotary phone was the standard home telephone of the Showa era, but it lost its dominant position to push-button phones through the 1970s–80s. Even so, the phrase “turn the dial” stuck around for a long time as a stand-in expression for “make a call,” and the article appears to be testing whether that metaphor still lands with generations who’ve never seen an actual rotary phone. What split the thread was less about the article’s actual question — “does it still get understood?” — and more a separate claim that “people didn’t really talk that way even in the Showa era to begin with.” That’s less a rebuttal of the article’s findings than a point about the gap between a set phrase and how people actually spoke, and some posters argued it missed what the article was actually testing. Worth noting too: much like how the save icon still looks like a floppy disk long after floppy disks vanished, the “visual metaphor” of the rotary dial outliving the object itself is far from a phone-only phenomenon. From there, the thread drifted off into other shared “Showa memories” — regional TV station abbreviations, old electronics-store jingles, and more.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Does “turn the dial” not click anymore? Turns out elementary schoolers can still picture it: Asahi Shimbun.”
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