A thread on 5ch themed around “everyday happenings and memories of the Showa era” drew a flood of posts about 1970s-80s daily life — school days where corporal punishment was just normal, collecting bottle caps from glass Coke bottles, scraping together 10-yen coins for the payphone, and the aftermath of using Japanese-style squat toilets. Some posters even casually recalled school violence and getting struck by instructors, framing things that would raise serious alarm by today’s standards as simply “how it was back then.” Most of the replies shared in nostalgia rather than conflict, but running through the whole thread was a gap between an unreconstructed fondness for Showa-era values and how things look through modern eyes.
What people said
1AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:09
Let's talk about the Showa era
2AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:14
Skip the non-AC bus and wait for the one with air conditioning
3AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:15
In elementary school I'd go full-force with the 'kanchō' prank on the girls in my class (kanchō: poking someone from behind with clasped fingers)
4AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:15
A high schooler smoking at the station
gets yelled at by a station attendant with a perm
5AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:15
If you got hit, it was your own fault — same goes for losing a fistfight
10AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:20
We used to wipe down the floors with rags in that wooden schoolhouse
11AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:21
These days bidets are standard and I can't even wipe my own butt without carrying wet wipes
but I honestly can't remember how we used to wipe with that stiff paper on squat toilets back in the Showa days lol
58AnonymousOct 11, 2026 01:59
Re: #11
There was that softer paper, about B5-sized, wasn't there
12AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:26
Junior high was peak school violence
getting hit or put in pro-wrestling holds was just an everyday thing
but going to school was simply what you did, so skipping never even crossed my mind
13AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:28
'Taking down' a teacher — that doesn't even make sense now
violence was right on the edge of being allowed
15AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:29
The instructor at driving school was terrifying
he'd punch you in the thigh lol
17AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:31
The science teacher who ran the kendo club
would whack your butt with the bamboo sword
18AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:33
Summer vacation in elementary school — swim at the pool, come home, and mom would have somen noodles boiled and ready
I'd love to go back, even for just one day
19AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:35
For some reason there was always some kid who'd poop and not flush
and everyone would go check it out together
24AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:42
Re: #19
I wondered for years why people didn't flush
but at 47 I finally experienced it myself — with a squat toilet and weak water pressure, only the toilet paper flushes away and the poop stays put
20AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:37
Back then, even in the middle of summer, opening the window in the evening let the breeze in and cooled things right down
21AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:37
Pooping at elementary school was basically a crime
23AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:39
Used to buy Plassy by the case at the rice shop and drink it (Plassy: a popular orange-flavored soft drink)
25AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:44
Magazines used to run completely sketchy mail-order ads for machines that supposedly made you smarter just by resting your hand on the back cover
26AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:44
In that case you gotta use the paper to nudge the poop along
27AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:45
I always wondered what the heck 'Bigger Pants' were lol
28AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:51
Vending machines where you couldn't see the goods in daytime, but they became visible once night fell
30AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:54
Canned drinks up through the early Heisei era had the pull-tab type you'd rip off and throw away
31AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:54
Speaking of vending machines, there were ones with bottled Coke and Fanta
I used to go digging through them hunting for Supercar or Star Wars bottle caps
33AnonymousOct 10, 2026 23:59
I wish they'd go back to selling bottled Coke like they used to
34AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:00
Whenever a train was delayed, a line would form at the payphone
38AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:10
It was a triple feature — The Castle of Cagliostro, Go For It, Tabuchi-kun!, and Mr. Boo: Gambling Champion
43AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:23
The bell rings in your room
I'd count to eight rings, then hang up
44AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:27
Re: #43
When I called the telephone dating service, it wouldn't connect at all on the first day
45AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:27
I was playing alone with a ball at the park when some old man just started teaching me soccer, totally uninvited
When I got home and told my mom about it, she wasn't even worried — just said 'Oh, is that so.' That's the kind of era it was
47AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:31
Guess that just means people weren't as overprotective back then as they are now
48AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:36
Pull-tabs were literally embedded in the asphalt
50AnonymousOct 11, 2026 00:51
Kōno dropped fly balls over and over and got benched for it (a reference to an infamous run of fielding errors by the player)
52AnonymousOct 11, 2026 01:32
Feels like all kinds of shops had pets back then
even my dad's company kept a dog
53AnonymousOct 11, 2026 01:43
The biggest difference is cell phones
those changed everything, letting people move around so much more freely
54AnonymousOct 11, 2026 01:44
I get the impression there were a lot of kidnapping cases back in the Showa era
Background and Key Points of This Topic
In the late Showa era (1970s-80s), corporal punishment was technically banned under the School Education Act, yet on the ground it was routinely tolerated — kendo club advisors and driving-school instructors regularly struck students. Canned-drink pull-tabs were also still the detachable kind up through the early Heisei era, and vending machines selling bottled drinks were something kids would rummage through in hopes of collecting bottle caps. The thread is driven mainly by shared nostalgia, with memories of corporal punishment and school violence recounted through the era’s own values — “it’s your own fault if you got hit” — and it’s the gap between that mindset and modern sensibilities that makes the thread worth reading. Worth noting: how common payphones and telephone cards actually were varied by region and generation, so the experiences shared in this thread shouldn’t be taken as the standard for the entire Showa era.
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