1980년대 일본 버블경제 체험담
https://www.quora.com/How-rich-was-Japan-in-the-80s
Japan’s GDP surpassed the Sowjet Union’s to rank 2nd in the world before 1990. By 1990 Japan’s nominal GDP was ~60% that of the US. Per capita GDP grew from 9.6 kUSD in 1980 to 25.9 kUSD in 1990, surpassing that of the US which stood at 23.8 kUSD at this time. In retrospective we know that much of this astonishing growth was fueled by a bubble economy, particularly from the 2nd half of the 1980s. In 1991 the bubble burst and a rapid decline of the Japanese economy followed resulting in decades of deflation and low or negative growth. Today, Japans per capita GDP is 39.2 kUSD, far behind the US’s 76 kUSD.
There are stories from the bubble time in the 1980 that companies were very generous, paying their workers business class travel and frequent ‘Nomikai’ drinking parties incl. taxi rides home. Salaries of average Japanese salarymen where so high in terms of purchasing power, that many bought houses, cars and frequent overseas holidays (often traveling in business class), sometimes co-sponsered by their employers. These golden times came to an abrupt end in 1991.
Here’s part of something I wrote quite a while ago, nearly 20 years in fact. I lived in Tokyo throughout that period.
Japan as number one
By the 1980s, the country had become an economic superpower. Eight of the ten largest banks in the world were Japanese. The Tōkyō Stock Exchange was roughly the same size as the NYSE. In 1987, Japan accounted for one third of the $150 billion U.S. trade deficit. As General Motors, Ford and Chrysler laid off thousands of workers and closed ageing plants, container ships disgorged shiny new Honda, Nissan and Toyotas onto docks along America’s West Coast. The Japanese domestic economy was 80% the size of that in the United States, despite half the population base, about one-fortieth the land size, and virtually no natural resources. By 1990, every single week, a billion dollars flowed from the United States to Japan. Ezra Vogel’s bestseller ‘Japan as Number One’ was published around this time. Foreigners studied books purporting to show the samurai way of doing business, to the amusement of many in Japan. A poll of 129 by Tōyō Keizai, an economics magazine, predicted that Japan would outstrip the United States in output of goods and services by the year 2010. When President Bush Sr. visited Japan, he appeared to be pleading for mercy for the ailing American car industry. Prime Minister Miyazawa responded by saying that Japan would show “compassion”. As Bush vomited and collapsed at a Tōkyō state banquet, video cameras showed the diminutive Miyazawa trying to push the U.S. president upright. It seemed an apt metaphor for the two countries’ relationship during this period.
Year by year, Japan’s trade surplus with the rest of the world continued to increase by phenomenal amounts. With the exception of Middle East oil producers, every trading partner incurred a large trade deficit. By 1990, Ōsaka City and the Kansai had an economy that ranked seventh in the world. By the following year, Tōkyō officials were boasting that their city’s GDP was also closing in on that of the U.K.
Peak of the Bubble
The average Japanese had the highest income in the industrialised world by the end of 1987 – $23,022 a year. By 1990, senior managers were earning the equivalent of around U.S $60,000, plus twice yearly bonuses of between one and a half and three months additional salary.
At the height of the bubble economy, a million gallons of Beaujolais Nouveau would be flown to Narita Airport and quickly rushed to restaurants throughout Tōkyō so that, because of the nine hour time difference between Europe and Japan, it could be consumed before even the French had tasted the new wine. People happily paid $40 a bottle for this dubious privilege. After the decades-long infatuation with all things American, the bubble period saw a new inquisitiveness with respect to European fashion, food, art, music and culture in general. The bank accounts of Armani, Sonia Rykiel and Chanel swelled as Japanese snapped up their ware. Brown plastic Louis Vuitton handbags were almost de rigueur accessories for many years. It would be no exaggeration to say that, during the 1980s, almost every Japanese young woman carried one of these bags.
French restaurants could charge small fortunes for meals, simply because Gallic food was considered the epitome of sophisticated cuisine in trend-chasing Tōkyō. If you could persuade Japanese people that something was exclusive, sophisticated and fashionable, they were likely to pay exorbitant amounts for the privilege of sampling it. The best seats for concerts conducted by Herbert Von Karajan, for example, cost $574 each. When Miles Davis played at the opening of the Blue Note jazz club, punters paid $328 apiece.
Consumer confidence had never been higher, and this was reflected in changing tastes for expensive items, including imported cars. Tōkyō’s notoriously overpriced department stores made brisk sales throughout the 1980’s, in spite of the several hundred percent mark-up they charged. By 1991, Tōkyō had become by far the most expensive city in the world. 24 carat gold-flake filled soap became popular with women in their 40’s, though ten times more expensive than ordinary soap. Sales of male toiletries grew 30% annually. Pricey customised products sold well too: best-sellers included custom-made golf clubs, and personalised perfumes or wine, which had a minimum order of 200 bottles. Women’s tights, containing tiny capsules that emitted lavender, rose and other scents when heated by body warmth, sold in the millions.
Japan became the world’s leading purchaser of diamonds during this period, and indeed it still is. The chief of the jewellery section of the swank Mitsukoshi Department store said, “Several years ago you could buy a house for 50 to 60 million yen ($400,000 to $600,000). Now it costs up to 500 million yen. It tends to dull people’s sense of money. Nowadays customers come in asking to see diamonds of about 100 million yen”.
The bag man
One day during the bubble period, while travelling on the Yamanote Line, a middle aged man carrying a brown paper bag sat down beside me. He took out large wads of 10,000 yen notes from the bag and began to count them so, out of curiosity, I began to silently count along with him. By the time I had to get off the train, he had reached 900,000 yen and was still counting. The man was carrying at least $8,000 in cash, and thought nothing of counting it in full view of other passengers!
Prices in Ginza’s famed hostess clubs reached outrageous levels. One ex-patron of such clubs told me that he was once charged $246 for the ice for his whiskey. The charge for alcohol and the privilege of having a series of pretty young hostesses flirt and flatter for a few hours often ran into the hundreds of thousands of yen, usually paid on a very liberal company expense account. Prices at exclusive restaurants such as Kitchō, where prime ministers entertain their guests, or Fukudaya, where customers can dine in a wooden building 800 years old, were $578 per person for the basic course. They probably still are.
Costs compared to other countries
A survey conducted in 1988 revealed that rent in Tōkyō was double the levels in New York and Hamburg of that period. Another survey estimated that purchasing power of most Japanese remained at two thirds of their German and United States’ counterparts, and that quality of life was only 55% of Americans’. Infrastructure still suffered from decades of comparative neglect. In 1990, less than half of Japan’s households were connected to mains sewers (this mostly in the countryside). The family budget had to cope with light, heating, water expenses and postal charges twice as high as those in New York. Because of a multi-layered distribution system, even products manufactured in Japan cost more at home than abroad. Rice cost up to four times more, thanks in large part to a ban on imports and to generous subsidies that the LDP paid to farmers. California oranges costing 40 cents per pound in the U.S. could be priced at $4 dollars in a Japanese supermarket. And then there were the infamous muskmelons costing $40 to $50 each in high-class department stores.
Art
Beginning around 1987, the international art market saw the sudden arrival of Japanese collectors and investors, a new breed of multimillionaires who had made huge profits from land and stock transactions. Many treated artworks as assets to be used as collateral for business deals, or else resold at a quick profit. Others bought art for the status it gave. The owner of a gallery in Tōkyō explained, “If you owned a big chunk of Tōkyō’s high class Akasaka district, you were a nobody, but if you bought an expensive painting at auction, you could become one of the most famous people in Japan”. Yasuda, a Japanese insurance company, spent $40 million for the Van Gogh painting “Sunflowers”, more than triple the previous record paid at an auction. By 1989, Japanese art purchases accounted for 43% of global sales, setting new auction records for paintings by Chagall, Van Gogh, de Kooning, Matisse, Klee, and Renoir. Tens of thousands of artworks were acquired over a three-year period.
In 1990, a Japanese businessman, the late Ryōei Sato, stunned the art world by paying more than $160 million for a Van Gogh and a Renoir. When asked about criticism that his profligacy would push up prices for other masterpieces, he said, “It depends on the time frame you are talking about, when cheap and expensive are discussed. I don’t think these prices are expensive”. When asked what he would do with a Rodin sculpture that he bought in the same week, he said, “It was only 650 million yen. That’s for my yard”.
Hawaii
In 1987, more than a million Japanese businessmen and tourists visited the islands of Hawaii. It became the “in” thing to purchase a second house on the islands. Japanese bought golf courses, farms, hotels, and seemed to have a bid on every major office building in Honolulu. A leading realtor estimated that purchases of residences in 1987 had exceeded $250 million and, “are now reaching price levels which are beyond the means of even the wealthiest local residents”. The TV program ‘Newsstation’ broadcast an interview with a Hawaiian woman who complained on camera, “this Japanese man just came up to me and said ‘I want to buy your house’. He offered one million dollars”. The woman refused and told him to go away. The following day, he returned and offered to pay two million dollars cash if she would move out within a short period. Indignantly she demanded, “Just who do these people think they are anyway?”
At the height of the bubble, a program titled Deta Mono Shobu was aired once a month. The object of this program was to search North American and European countries for properties that might be of interest to rich Japanese. In a typical program, a helicopter carrying a Japanese TV crew landed at a 15th century French castle. After greeting the owners, the cameras transmitted images from the chateau live, via satellite, to Japan. The owner was asked how much he wanted for the property, and to write the figure on a card which he sheepishly displayed to the camera. In this case a mere $U.S 1.9 million, which prompted cries of yasui from the excited studio audience. Soon, potential buyers for the chateau phoned in to make inquiries. Amazingly, the program was produced with the co-operation of the Japanese government, which was attempting to show that it was making efforts to reduce Japan’s prodigious trade surpluses. During yet another broadcast, viewers were astonished to learn that a 175 acre chateau in France cost only three times more than the average central Tōkyō apartment. Yasui.
The ocean of liquidity
After the 1985 Plaza Accord currency realignment, the Bank of Japan reduced the discount rate to an all time low, resulting in an abundance of capital, often referred to as the “ocean of liquidity”. Stock prices soared. Heavy industries began to be valued on the basis of the vast tracts of realty they possessed. Landowners were able to borrow astronomical sums of money by mortgaging, and could then build factories overseas, or go shopping for ‘cheap’ foreign properties. The value of land in urban Tōkyō had increased throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, rising steeply in the mid and late 1980’s. There was a 75% average increase in the price of land during 1987 alone – in certain areas it rose by 100%. The land of the Imperial Palace was valued at more than all of the real estate in California. By 1990, a single square metre of land in Sanbanchō, a small residential area of central Tōkyō, cost up to $98,400, by far the most expensive residential land in the world. The madness had almost reached its peak.
During the 1980s, I was in elementary school. I have looked over the "Japan in the 1980s" entry in Wikipedia and many of the items there overlap with my own experience and observation from spending my own childhood in that decade. I would say my life back then was pretty typical of a kid born to a family of the baby boomer generation working in Tokyo but living in a suburb. I was in Saitama, a.k.a., New Jersey of Japan.
Overall, what I distinctly remember is that even the nonchalant child could feel things were going upward in Japan. That might actually be the reflection of my youthful optimism coincidentally overlapping with the state of the country, which was enjoying the rise to the economic superpower, threatening even the United States.
Unfortunately all the photos I have from the days are with my parents in Japan, so all the images in this post are something I borrowed from the web, without permissions. (I will take them off if there are any issues.)
What follows are my personal impressions of the decade from actually being there as a young boy.
Very strong economy
Economy was going very strong. Even as a kid I had a habit of reading newspaper and watching TV news (perhaps I was destined to become very lame). I could feel that I was in a very well developed country, receiving all the benefits of being in the lucky environment, affording to feel sorry for those who did not.
Yen was becoming very strong. The value of Yen almost doubled from early- to late-1980s (about 240 to 130 JPY/USD). I read/heard a lot about international trade issues arising between Japan and the U.S. I vividly remember seeing the image of Americans destroying Japanese products.
The consensus was that the "Buy American" movement spoke for the quality of the work Japan was doing. This probably was the decade when Japanese products started receiving reputations for quality over cheapness (the latter being where Chinese products are at right now). I think the images like the one above made Japan more confidence than anything else. As a child, though, I felt fear and sadness in the image of rejection (Americans are so wild and cruel!!).
I also heard a lot about the crazy real estate market and Yakuza's involvement in it (地上げ屋). In the late-1980s, there were already many signs that the economy was in a bubble.
Despite the rise to prominence in the global economy, the foreign influences were not strongly felt in terms of culture. This is well before the Internet era, but looking back I am quite surprised how a lot of things were produced and nurtured domestically. There still were a lot of "Made in Japan" stuff. Some of the things that non-Japanese find cool these days have their origins around this decade, but those creative efforts were purely targeting the domestic audience. Perhaps that helped breed originality, but I am surprised yet pleased that some universal appeal came out of the efforts oriented domestically.
Some differences from Japan today...
First of all, the Yamanote line was green yet looked like this.
Trains used to be made of steel and therefore looked very sturdy before being replaced by stainless (lighter and therefore more cost efficient). Bodies were painted liberally, so they looked more colorful compared to trains of today, which are dominated by the color of stainless.
When you travel around Tokyo, one thing that sticks is the variety of musical tunes you hear in train stations signaling the arrival/departure of a train. Back in the 80s, most stations used an older style bells, which sounded like this:
Really annoying, this quite possibly helped already tired salarymen to be further exhausted before arriving home. After the Japanese National Railways were divided and privatized in 1987, they slowly started introducing more relaxing, musically pleasing signals that we are now very familiar.
Oh, the trains were just as packed during rush hours...
Shinjuku Station, circa 1984. Started off with trains since I like them and it's also fairly integral to the daily life over there.
Houses were still equipped with this type of phone set:
Commodity cell phones were not around, of course. You actually remember your fiends' numbers. When you called your friend's number, it was often one of family members who first picked up the phone. Not much privacy in conversations over the phone back then.
Oh yeah, we still had the dreaded Japanese-style toilet in public rest rooms.
At home, we already had regular western-style toilet. But it still didn't clean your ass thoroughly, like it can today. I hated the Japanese-style, so it was extremely important for me to avoid being in need of shitting while going out, haha.........
Adults could smoke virtually anywhere. My parents do not smoke, but my grandfather smoked like crazy. I actually fondly remember the smell of smoking because of it. It was the smell of my grandparents' home.
Major fast food chains (McDonalds, Lotteria, etc.) were around already, of course, but convenience stores (notably, 7-eleven) were neither as omnipresent nor as useful as they are today.
No Starbucks.
Still no purikura.
So what's fun?
How did we have fun?
Nintendo, or famicom (ファミコン), enough said. The very first wave of video gaming culture. Many people in 30s and 40s have fond memory of famicom. There are quite a few slangs from the games from this era that have made into the everyday vocabulary among this generation.
In a school class (of 30 - 40 kids were standard), you literally needed just one hand to count the number of kids who did not have the console at home. Chatting among friends often was about currently popular game titles. Families often imposed one-hour-a-day limit to playing time. Kids often congregated to home of a family with looser play-time restriction. Famicom was so popular and standard that I often found refreshing when we found some other ways of having fun with friends.
A couple of notable games from the era... Super Mario Bros
which everyone knows, and the Dragon Quest series
which was the first JRPGs to become extremely popular.
Bicycles have always been important for transportation especially in suburbs. What special back then was that kids (boys) were into really fancy bicycles like this:
A typical kid bicycle had five to six gears, turn signals, and also speedometer in addition to other standard equipment.
My family was pretty old fashioned (or just not catching up with the times), so for a long time I was riding a generic bicycle, the kind that moms use (ママチャリ):
Eventually I had to beg for the cool looking shit all my friends were riding. My mom wasn't the type who bought me anything, so I had to get tips for doing little errands, like opening/closing all the shutters of the house, washing dishes, cleaning and folding clothes, etc., etc. The bicycle was the first thing I ever bought with my own earning. Guess my mom was trying to teach me a lesson.
Sometimes, kids would ride the bicycles like above and go hang around near dagashiya (駄菓子屋), where cheap snacks and small toys were sold:
The number of this type of shops were already in decline back then. I hardly see any of dagashiya these days.
There, you could buy snacks and small toys to have fun. Things we played with include (but not limited to):
Mini 4WD (ミニ四駆) -- They are miniature cars powered by batteries.
Card exchange (ビックリマンシール) -- Bikkuriman Choco(late) snack consists of chocolate and peanuts in between wafers:
What made this popular was the decal that came with the package.
It was effectively the precursor to Pokemon before Game Boy. Kids would buy a bunch of packages and try completing their collections. Each character has its own story, so more cards you get, more interesting your story becomes.
Kinniku-man erasers (キン肉マン消しゴム) -- Collectible erasers designed after popular anime/manga series, Kinnikuman (キン肉マン).
They were available in capsule toy vending machines.
This kind of vending machine actually originated in the U.S.
More traditional games continued to be played, such as pogs (めんこ)
... and of course other typical kids stuff like hide and seek, catching small animals, fish, insects, etc., if they afforded to spend time outside; kids increasingly spent time at home because of famicom.
When playing sports, catch (baseball), soccer, and (a variant of) dodgeball were popular. Interestingly, basketball was still a very niche sport and not popular at all back then.
Cram schools (jyuku) and other after-school programs
Cram schools (Juku) have been around forever in Japan, and it was no exception in 1980s. I was not in a neighborhood where many families considered sending their kids to private schools (in Japan, only 1st - 9th grades are mandatory, with 7 - 9 being the middle school), but most kids joined some form of after-school program(s).
The fraction of kids going to jyuku obviously increased as the year of school admission exam approached (before 10th and college, possibly 7th for middle school). It was simply sad to lose friends to jyuku, but it was also a revelation of the tougher aspect of life; you need to compete for survival at some point. At the same time, jyuku provided a place to continue friendship outside school hours.
Despite the rapidly falling fertility rate, it was said that the competition for school admission would peak and be tougher for Generation X (i.e., kids of the baby boomers) simply due to the larger pool of students.
These are students waiting for the start of admission exam.
Other than jyuku (and kumon), things like soroban (Soroban) and sports program (swimming, soccer, baseball, kendo, judo, karate, etc.) were popular after-school/weekend programs for boys. Girls would also choose piano, shuji (書写; traditional caligraphy), ballet/dance, etc. I do not think this has changed much.
High-pressure education
There has always been an element of authoritarianism in how school treats students in Japan, especially in middle and high schools, though not so much in elementary school. It has been said the 1980s was a decade when schools took stronger, more stringent stances toward delinquency and what they perceived as deviance, called 管理教育. I don't know the best way to translate this, but it roughly means the educational environment was highly controlled under rigid rules and was rather inflexible.
For example, it was common for middle and high schools to force boys to wear buzz cut.
There was a bunch of rules like how hair could not be longer than an inch for boys, the girls must not shorten the length of skirt, etc. It was also pretty common for teachers to use force to shut students up.
Even in elementary school, there was an emphasis on teamwork and developing a sense of being part of a larger community whose code should not be broken. This is a photo of kids in undoukai (運動会).
Looks fun, but there was a lot of practice before they can performing together in harmony. Through education like this, Japan tends to produce people who learn to work well as part of a team and conform to the norm. Not that things have changed much, but if people feel how amazingly orderly Japanese people are, this type of education must be playing a huge role.
Oh you also notice that girls were wearing a kind of gym slip called buruma (ブルマー) during gym classes.
As you see, it is quite revealing, and many guys developed fetish and were secretly (or not so secretly) fantasizing over this thing. As it turned out, most girls hated wearing it for good reasons. It was slowly abolished over the next decade as the society became more sensitive.
Also the above photo is funny because it captures when boys and girls are forced to dance together in undokai, which was pretty common. Kids usually looked either (1) extremely awkward, (2) pretended to be indifferent, or (3) laughed to hide embarrassment. Casual dating isn't really their thing.
Of course there are some kids who did not abide by the rules, and made some fashion statements when they grew a bit older.
Inspired by Elvis Presley, that kinda hairstyle (リーゼント) was popular among guys who wanted to look bad/cool.
Notice how the length of skirt was much longer, not shorter like you would assume? I feel very blessed that I was in high school in the 1990s, when the skirts were much shorter... just kidding.
In fact, things were so bad that even cats needed to rebel.
Note that teen delinquency surfaced as violent incidence in school was not necessarily higher (in number at least; there are in fact more of them reported these days). While it probably was true that schools at the time were more inflexible, it was more of a cultural climate at the time that we have this impression. The society became affluent enough that people started to noticing what they used to overlook, overly oppressive education.
Highly stressed students and intolerance for nonconformity and diversity may have contributed to the rise of serious, high-profile bullying cases as well.
Oh, Saturday used to be a (half-day) school/business day as well. I cannot believe I actually survived...
No wonder Japanese back then had a reputation for being workaholic.
Middle/high school was also kinda depressing because you actually got ranked by exam performance; you exactly learn where you stand against your peer. I was actually a better student, but scoring high in exams was obviously not for everyone, so it must have been very soul-crushing to be ranked that way as a kid.
Nonetheless, my own experiences through elementary school were mostly positive in the Japanese system. I am actually a kind who do not like to be told to do something (called わがまま), and have always felt some degree of hypocrisy in preaching the unquestionable value of common interests over individual needs. However, I actually remember very fondly of achieving many things together with peers and being considerate and mindful of the surrounding. That feeling is something that I have not really experienced after I transitioned to the U.S. system.
Mainstream entertainment
I remember that TV was really fun to watch, though our TV still looked like this:
A few of the most hilarious programs came out in that era, such as Takeshi's Castle (痛快なりゆき番組 風雲!たけし城 or MXC in the U.S.). Many of what people outside Japan perceive as those "crazy Japanese shows" may have their origins in this decade. I feel the shows back in the 80s were more carefully crafted compared cheaply made game/talk shows that we often get to watch today. Perhaps I'm biased because I was young and therefore not as jaded back then. I should also mention that TV was by far the most available home entertainment option before the Internet, of course.
Society overall had less sensitivity toward political correctness, so there were quite some outrageous things going on which would not be approved today (like an African character seen in the following video; bare female breasts could also be seen during prime time shows). Here is some clip from one of the popular comedy shows from the era (オレたちひょうきん族):
The 1980s also produced a few of the most notable TV personalities from the pool of very talented comedians, such as Takeshi Kitano (probably now more famous as a movie director), Akashiya Sanma, Down Town, Tunnels, etc. They remain influential to date, which may be a bad thing.
Teen idols had a bigger presence. No YouTube stars, so the media and PR companies basically dictated any sort of trends.
One of the biggest stars was Seiko Matsuda (Seiko Matsuda):
She was so popular that many girls imitated her hairstyle (聖子ちゃんカット) and mannerism (ぶりっ子; roughly meaning girls acting very cute, innocent, and feminine in front of men, cleverly hiding her true intention... well you see that very well in the video above... very fake). She was actually a great singer, no lip syncing.
Then Johnny's group... Hikaru Genji (光GENJI)
The girls from my class were CRAZY over the group... I fucking hated them. I think Hikaru Genji at its peak was more popular than SMAP.
Also worthy of mention is Onyanko Club (おニャン子クラブ).
The group was in many ways similar to AKB48. Both are projects of the same producer, Yasushi Akimoto (秋元康). Kinda depressing guys from different generations, separated by 30 years no less, react to similar baits. (But don't you notice that girls weren't that pretty back then??)
Sony was very cool. It was basically "Apple" cool. Lots of innovations from the company, very symbolic of Japan as the electronic giant.
Here's Walkman ad:
Hit songs were heard on TV and radio. CDs were coming around, but music were still dubbed onto cassette tapes using radio cassette recorders like this.
When recording from TV, we often had to ask the whole family in the room to shut up, to include as little noise as possible. But you could still hear the ambient noise, like your mom cooking and doing dishes, recorded together with the song. Exchanging cassette tapes among friends was one of cooler things to do in school.
Music itself was fairly in sync with the global trend, I would say:
This is "My Revolution" by Misato Watanabe (1986), simple yet memorable, which is typical of 1980s music. Lots of synths, DX7, drum machines, mechanical sounding pops.
Spectator sports
Baseball was by far the most popular professional sport. This is a picture of baseball board game, featuring Tatsunori Hara, the slugger from the Yomiuri Giants (like the Yankees in the U.S.).
How popular? All the Yomiuri Giants games were nationally broadcast live on TV during prime time. Those not interested in baseball hated it, since their favorite shows airing at the same time slot often got delayed/cancelled.
But it was actually the Seibu Lions who dominated the decade in winning.
but their games were rarely on air.
Soccer was also gaining the ground then, largely due to the popularity of anime/manga Captain Tsubasa (キャプテン翼).
There was still no J-League, so soccer was not really an option as a spectator sport. And the national team stunk.
I am not sure if this should be included into sports, but professional wrestling (プロレス) was fairly popular on TV. I wasn't into it at all.
Anime & manga
Shonen Jump weekly magazine was extremely popular.
It wasn't really allowed to bring them to school (at mine anyway), but kids were passing around the copy after school to follow popular series very closely each week.
Some of the anime from the decades:
As for anime, Hayao Miyazaki was already prolific, but he was still relatively unknown among the general public throughout the 80s. I was literally blown away when I first watched Castle in the Sky at a friend's house, but I did not know him till then. Miyazaki became commercially very successful after Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989.
If you are wondering why otaku has a negative connotation in Japan, part of the stigma comes from a very disturbing criminal case of Tsutomu Miyazaki. He was convicted of shockingly bizarre serial kidnapping/murders of young girls from 1988 to 1989. During the investigation, it was discovered that he possessed a huge collection of lolicon and horror movies/materials. As far as I remember, the term otaku was already in use among people in the know of SF/anime subculture since 1970s, but came to be widely known/used among the masses in part to stigmatize the people who have similar habits as Tsutomu Miyazaki did. At least that when I learned about otaku.
Apology for a long post... the 1980s is actually one of my favorite decades. I wish I had more photos of real people from that decade.
I am sure I left out a lot of interesting stuff while including something I should not have bothered. I covered a lot from what I remember of the top of my head.
Hope others would chime in!
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