“Shorts Are Gross”: The Blatant “Old-Guy Discrimination” Nobody Calls Out ⟨A Bug in Society⟩

Background and Key Points

Diamond Online is one of Japan’s major business-media outlets, and its target here — the notion that “shorts are gross” — sits inside a long-standing Japanese menswear code. Outside sports or the beach, adult Japanese men have traditionally been expected to keep their legs covered in casual and especially work settings; even the government’s 2005 “Cool Biz” campaign, which relaxed jacket-and-tie rules to save energy in the heat, never extended to shorts. The alternative the thread reaches for, steteko, is a loose cotton undergarment that became a summer-lounging staple in the Shōwa era (1926–1989), associated in the popular imagination with balding, middle-aged comedians like Ueki Hitoshi and Katō Cha — which is why “old-guy fashion” in Japan means steteko, not shorts, complicating the article’s framing.

The thread doesn’t split on whether the “gross” label exists — everyone agrees it does — but on who deserves it and why. One camp treats it as straightforward age-based mockery, even revenge for a generation that once policed younger people’s dyed hair; another counters that the accused “old guys” are in fact the same cohort that popularized brown hair and Western casual dress in their own youth, making the generational math incoherent. A side debate over women’s miniskirts and body hair further muddies whether this is really about age or just ordinary appearance-shaming applied unevenly.

What outside readers likely miss is that this isn’t a fringe complaint: bare male legs carry a mild social stigma in Japan even during dangerously hot summers, a norm rooted in decades of formal dress convention that the posters take entirely for granted rather than explain.