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Comment by porknubbins | Hacker News Reader

JRPGs look like yet another piece in the puzzle that so many things in contemporary Japanese popular culture seem to peak around the same time in the 90s (anime, fashion, popular music, industrial design etc). I’d guess this too is related to what Masachi Osawa calls the “fictional era” when the national psyche kind of turned inward to escapism and fantasy. I don’t see this talked about much in English or even Japanese for that matter but would be interesting to try to figure out why a cultural output peaked and the stagnated.

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Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an effect. You could be making the most obscure music, film, or fashion and you still had an audience willing to pay for it.

Also I remember people's attitudes shifting in some inexplicable ways, suddenly cultural capital seemed to carry much more weight than other forms of capital. For a while it felt like everyone in Tokyo was trying to one-up one another, not financially but through cultural connoisseurship. Strange times but I do miss the general atmosphere, Japan feels like a completely different country now...

It's probably not talked about much because I don't think many people agree that all those things peaked in the 90s, outside of some sense of nostalgia. Objectively, all of the cultural outputs you mentioned have continued to grow, so any sense of peaking is probably based mainly on subjective taste.

> outside of some sense of nostalgia.

I think there's a case to be made that WE changed since then and that it's not purely nostalgia. There weren't the same level of distractions in the pre-internet world (I understand that the Internet existed but it wasn't the attention economy driven behemoth that it is now). People could engage more deeply with things like Video Games and Anime.

People today are conditioned to jump from dopamine-burst to dopamine-burst as they quickly scroll through their social feeds. Those attention alternatives also fill a big part of free time and mental bandwidth, so the time left over that is dedicated to games and other entertainment is limited. Generally our engagement is much more superficial now.

Isn't the fact that societies change part of what nostalgia is?

Sure, the internet and social media has contributed heavily to changes in taste and modes of consumption, much like television and motion pictures (and video games!) before that.

Some of it comes down to taste certainly but I stil think theres an argument to be made that the kind of cutting edge stuff that was allowed to make it into the mainstream in Japan at that time represents distinctly identifiable period (if peak is too strong a word because $ and volume of output has gone up as you point out.) kind of like how in the us were seeing articles asking why hollywood made The Matrix in 99 and a million comic sequels today, Japan bloggers are wondering why One Peice and Idol groups dominate?

I agree with you that the output of the 90s represents an identifiable period in Japanese pop culture, but don't agree with the original sentiment of things having necessarily "stagnated" since then. There may be an argument, as you suggest, that the period was more progressive in a sense, but I'd have to see more examples of what you're talking about before I could agree.

The dominance of things like One Piece or AKB48 don't preclude the creation of "cutting edge" stuff, though they might certainly drown those out and make them less visible. I think something similar could be said for the 90s, with the popularity of Dragon Ball and Morning Musume, for example (though to a lesser degree). Still, the Internet has allowed for the creation and popularity of lots of interesting stuff, even if they may not be "mainstream."

I find this comment pretty confusing for a number of reasons.

One Piece started in 1997, and many argue that it's only gotten better with time.

The Matrix came out in 1999, but so did things like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. I think there's a major survivor bias in your analysis.

I suggest that from any given person's POV, popular media peaked during the time they were aged 15-25.

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