This site is about the parts of Japanese life that Japanese people take for granted — and rarely think to explain..
When I tell my daughter “back when Mom was a kid,” she always gives me the same look — a kind of huh, really? Scenes that were perfectly ordinary to me turn out to be a world she knows nothing about.
I was born in the 1970s, into what Japan calls the “employment ice age” — the generation that graduated into a collapsed job market. I spent seven years in a company, then went freelance as a web designer. I grew up in Osaka and now live in a small city in Aichi where a good share of my neighbors came from somewhere else.
An ordinary life, with nothing worth telling anyone. That’s what I thought for a long time. But “ordinary” stops being ordinary once you cross a generation, a region, or a border.
How has ordinary life in Japan changed over the past fifty years? And what hasn’t? I’ll be writing it down, a little at a time.
Sakura