What have baby boomer juniors experienced?

Takero Hayami, born in 1973

The baby-boom junior generation has been called a loss generation, a super ice age, and a burden. The baby-boom junior generation has long been viewed as a miserable generation, but Takero Hayami, a writer and critic, points out that such a view is one-sided. He has recently published a book titled “I was born in 1973”, but this book distances himself from the loss generation theory that is circulating in the world and discusses the experiences of baby boomer juniors. We spoke with Kenro Hayami, who has finished writing this book.

“Born in 1973 Half a century of the baby boomer junior generation” (Tokyo Shoseki)

Lost generation, the super ice age, and the middle zone of the baby boomer junior generation, who have been called burdens, have finally entered their 50s, knowing their destiny.
The author, who was born in 1973, explores the changes in Japanese society, media, and lifestyle from the 1970s to the 2020s, when this generation lived, and what was born and lost in this era. A non-fiction chronicle drawn with imagination and detailed detail.

From Tokyo Shoseki Book Commentary

The image that it will be dark after the bubble burst is a common imprint

――For Hayami-san, this is your first solo book in six years. The subtitle of this book is “Half Century of the Baby Boomer Junior Generation”. Speaking of baby boomer juniors, it is also said to be the loss generation. Is the content conscious of that?

Mr. Hayami:As you can see from the title Born in 1973, this book is a history of the same generation that analyzes and critiques from childhood to the present as seen from that generation. I just used the term “same-generation history,” but the word “same-generation” does not exist strictly. It covers changes in media, incidents, events, etc. that can be shared by people of the same generation.

I was born in 1973. Ichiro is a baseball player of the same age, Nobuhiko Matsunaka of the Daiei Hawks who won the only triple crown in Heisei, the Japanese national baseball team at the Athens Olympics in 2004, and the Japanese national team in the first World Baseball Classic held in 2006. Michihiro Ogasawara, 2007 Japan Series MVP Norihiro Nakamura, Kazuhisa Ishii, pitcher for the Yakult Swallows and currently manager of the Rakuten Eagles, and Kuroki, nicknamed Soul Ace for the Chiba Lotte Marines. Tomohiro and others born in 1973 are a hit year in professional baseball.

In soccer, most of the players are from the age when they saw the world for the first time at the Atlanta Olympics, but there are only two players born in 1973, Masakiyo Maezono and Takashi Ogura. In addition, in the entertainment world, Rie Miyazawa and Yo Oizumi are the same age.

In this book, I discuss how those people made their debut, how they played an active role, and if they were athletes, how they retired. I don’t know how far the editor who sounded out the project intended, but the year of birth in 1973 is the year with the largest population among the junior baby boomers.

The loss generation generation is a generation that is also called the employment ice age, but during the so-called employment ice age, the Japanese economy lost its momentum after the collapse of the bubble economy and refrained from hiring new graduates. As a result, the number of regular employees decreased, and it was also a time when freeters who lived with so-called part-time jobs were attracting attention from society.

A freeter is a concept up to the age of 34, and from the age of 35 it is treated as simply unemployed. As a result, the topic of what to do with people born in 1973 around 2008 when they turn 35 has become a social issue. I have not touched on such labor issues in this book because they are touched on in any book. There is no solution to the loss generation labor problem. Also, if you start talking about only one axis, only that will be highlighted and other phenomena will not be talked about.

――Certainly, when it comes to the loss generation generation, I get the impression that everything else is blown away.

Mr. Hayami:This book overturned all the images stuck to the loss gene generation. People born in 1973 will come out to society with the end of the bubble, but the bubble of the media industry will come instead.

This is because when you look at the sales data for CDs and books, they continue to grow even after the bubble burst. Furthermore, the IT bubble has also occurred after the bubble burst. I worked as an editor for the computer magazine “Weekly ASCII”, so I experienced the IT bubble up close.

“Weekly ASCII” is not a magazine with a wide target audience like a general weekly magazine, but a magazine with a limited readership like a PC magazine. The magazine sold over a million copies. Millennials and Generation Z may ask, “What on earth were you writing about about your computer?” If you’re a younger generation, you might say, “Why don’t we just google about PCs on the Internet instead of looking them up in magazines?”

First issue of Weekly ASCII

――Nowadays, do you look up information about computers and the Internet in books and magazines?

Mr. Hayami:Google was founded in 1998, and “Weekly ASCII” was launched in 1997, the year before. This era was called the internet bubble. Takafumi Horie, who appeared as a darling of IT, was born in 1972, so he is one year older, but Susumu Fujita, a cyber agent, was born in 1973. Satoshi Matsushima, a crayfish who was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers and Nasdaq at the same time at the age of 26, was born in 1973.

Such goodness is not limited to personal computer magazines. While Japan as a whole was aware of the bursting of the bubble economy, new markets such as computers, IT, magazines, music, and clubs were emerging.

The word “IT bubble” is often heard, so you may still be able to feel it. However, music and clubs have also been booming since the bubble burst. Music connoisseurs say that the Japanese music industry peaked in the 80s, but there were no large-scale venues like the Tokyo Dome in the 80s.

Tokyo Dome opened in 1988, and in the 1990s, big artists such as Billy Joel and Madonna began to perform in Japan one after another. In other words, in the world of music, the economic figures have changed since the 1990s.

For this reason, the image that the economy was bright during the bubble period and gloomy after the 1990s when it burst is a common imprint and nothing more than a misconception.

――Do you mean that the loss generation generation has been talked about only in terms of employment and employment, so it has given the impression of being a miserable generation?

Mr. Hayami:For example, I am also working as a freelancer, but later on I learned that the baby boomer generation was having a hard time with non-regular employment. At that time, it was difficult to get a job as a regular employee at a company, but there were jobs available and there were many part-time jobs.

Around the year 2000, many people in their 20s who had just graduated from university started startups. Of course, only one in tens of thousands will succeed as a venture entrepreneur. However, before the bubble economy, no one even started a venture business. The birth of a venture means that a new market has been opened up.

It was a bubble in some industries and still tolerant of companies spending money. At that time, I was just starting out as an editor, so I didn’t get paid much. Even so, I went out drinking with other publishers, but the editor of the big publisher generously paid for everyone’s drinking expenses. It happened about twice a week, and when I was dealing with music, I ended up going to clubs twice a week. Going out drinking two days a week and going to clubs two days a week is clearly a bubble life.

This is not because I was in the privileged class, so I was able to live like that. I’m an editor at a small publishing company, and I started working part-time when I was a student, and I’m still employed as a contract employee. It was after the 1998 finance ministry entertainment corruption scandal, the so-called no-pan shabu-shabu scandal, became a hot topic.

Among the developments in telephones and communications, attention was paid to cordless telephones

――Hearing the story, I feel that this book was not particularly conscious of loss generation.

Mr. Hayami:While I was writing, I thought it was unnecessary to write a story about loss generation, so when I was choosing what to write, I ended up writing about the IT bubble and the culture of deflation and consumption in the 90s. In this book, a lot of paper width is also devoted to IT and home appliances.

Today, when asked, “What is the thing that revolutionized society?”, almost everyone answers that it is a smartphone. But when we look at the history of youth culture, we find something interesting.

For example, my mother was born in 1949, when the baby boomers had the largest population. The period when the baby boomer generation was growing up is the period of high economic growth, but this generation definitely remembers when the TV came to the house. In 1958, the Mitchie boom occurred, and in 1964 the Tokyo Olympics were held. It was during this period that television became the most common household appliance. These events are also very important topics in postwar media history. Baby boomers experience this around the age of 10.

In comparison, baby boomer juniors do not experience social events around the age of 10 that would cause significant change. So I changed my perspective and looked into the history of the telephone. In 1985, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation was privatized and became NTT. Privatization will usher in an era of information liberalization.

Black telephones, which had only been able to make calls up until then, gradually increased their functions. In terms of functionality, an answering machine function was added, and a competing company called Daini Denden was created.

Assuming that mobile phones became popular in 1993 and PHS in 1995, there is a hidden history of development in telephones and communications during that time.

In that hidden history, the cordless phone caught my attention. In my generation, there is only one phone per household. Telephones were generally placed in living rooms or corridors.

Therefore, when my friend or girlfriend called me, I didn’t want my parents to listen to me, so I pulled the phone as much as possible and brought it into my room. If that wasn’t possible, I would whisper while holding the receiver when it came to something I didn’t want to hear. There was a sense of tension even in the child when the phone was within the reach of the parent’s eyes.

However, the cordless phone gave birth to a handset, which made it possible to make phone calls without parents noticing. This is an important moment in media history.

Cordless phones are becoming more popular among young people, and if you look at the 1990 POPEYE magazine, you’ll find that among the ads for cars, car navigation systems, and jeans, cordless phones have the most ads. Looking back on the history of communication and information, it is difficult to realize the value of cordless phones, but we can see that cordless phones were the thing that young people wanted most at the time.

Cordless phones have become more popular among young people (picture is an image)

――It is a refreshing surprise to see so many advertisements for cordless phones in magazines read by young people.

Mr. Hayami:My generation also belongs to the Famicom generation. The Famicom was released in 1983, so it was released when I was 10 years old. Half of the boys in my class had a Famicom computer, but the other half played with hobby computers. Hobby personal computers were sold by NEC, Fujitsu, and Sharp, but the most famous among them is MSX, whose standard was born in 1983.

Half the boys in the class had a Famicom

The children who were playing with hobby PCs looked down on the Famicom, and the children who were playing with the Famicom were proud of the higher performance of the Famicom. Within the class, two groups were formed: the Famicom group and the hobby PC group. There were also Sega and Cassette Vision groups, but history has been rewritten.

When I talk to men of my age, I hear them say, “Everyone in my class played the Famicom. There was no one who was into hobby PCs.” In other words, the hobby PC group was not visible from the historically victorious NES group.

For example, Makoto Shinkai, who was born in 1973, released a Sharp personal computer called the X68000 in the production of his masterpiece movie, Your Name. Makoto Shinkai used to work for a hobby computer company called Nihon Falcom, so I guess he has that feeling. As a memory of his generation, he answered in an interview, “Because I was a hobby computer person, I’m narrow-minded, isn’t it?”

This is like the Beatles of baby boomers. It is said that everyone in the baby boomer generation listened to The Beatles, but Yukio Hashi was the perfect match for the Beatles. Therefore, half of the class should have been listening to Yukio Hashi, but later they began to say, “We are the Beatles generation.” I think that this is not a phenomenon of riding a winning horse, but that the memory has been tampered with somewhere.

――Listening to the story, it is very different from the loss generation historical view that has been told so far.

Mr. Hayami:I think that many people who buy this book at a bookstore will pick it up because they are attracted by the phrases “loss generation history” and “baby boomer junior history”. However, I am proud that it has become a content that cannot be imagined.

It is said that after ChatGPT, the way books are written will change. But even before that, when I was talking about history, as a writer I wanted to write a book that defies preconceived notions in a good way. Magazine articles and serialized novels have survived in book form, but the advertisements collected for writing this book are never compiled into one volume. However, advertisements reflect the social conditions of the time, so if you look at the advertisements in magazines, you will see a society that has not been talked about before.

I unearthed such things and wrote them in my book, but recently readers sometimes say, “Wikipedia doesn’t write about such things.” However, being told that is exactly the image of a writer that I have been aiming for, and it is my long-cherished desire.