Keep refreshed and get a glimpse of Japanese high school life with these charming bottle designs.
nostalgia (Page 2)
Seriously, it’s been a long, long time since these series aired, and now we feel really old.
We found a candy store/Showa-era time capsule in Fukuoka, and took lots of photos of its old-timey delights!
Stroll the streets of Electric Town at a time when computers and video games were just beginning to appear on the scene.
Grab your Virtual Boy and ready your quarters, it’s time to knock back a shot of gaming nostalgia!
Now that we’re two decades on from the ’90s, what shows would you like to see receive a modern day make-over?
Fans of fat Pikachu rejoice! The classic designs from the original Pokémon games star in this reprint of an old line. Gotta catch ’em all!
Celebrate 20 years of catching ’em all with Pokémon Center Japan’s new line of throwback goods.
Baby King Kitchen is a restaurant that wants to make adults feel like kids again. Is it just a happy meal pipe dream, or a trip down memory lane?
It’s weird being in your thirties (or thereabouts) in 2015. Kids today have no idea what a struggle it was for us growing up in the days before smartphone selfies, dumb internet trends, and myriad modern technological conveniences. Wait, what are we saying, it was absolutely awesome! For ours was a more innocent childhood, full of VHS tapes, talking on phones connected to the wall by a wire, and clunky dial-up internet that still felt like the greatest thing ever invented.
Japan’s 30s club is no different; they too are nostalgic for the relics of a simpler past. And in this article, we round up 22 nostalgic items that Japanese Twitter users say sum up their idyllic childhoods. But how many of them (if any) are the same as those we in the west enjoyed?
Recently, our Japanese reporter Yoshio visited his parents’ house and decided to finally take a stab at tidying up his childhood room, which had been left untouched ever since he moved out. In the process, he was surprised to find many lost relics and treasures from his childhood, and became caught up in a wave of nostalgia for several hours. Needless to say, he didn’t get much cleaning done in the end…
If you’re the nostalgic type, perhaps you’d like to take a peek at the treasures that Yoshio dug up, some from over 20 years ago!
The Showa period (1926-1989) was a time of immense change for Japan when the country went from being an imperial power to a poverty-stricken post-war nation and then becoming an economic powerhouse that dominated automotive and electronic industries around the world. Twenty-seven years since that era ended and the current Heisei era began, fond memories of “Showa Japan” still flood many Japanese minds.
But a recent online poll asked netizens to take off their rose-tinted glasses and consider the aspects of daily Showa-period life that, while seeming completely normal back then, would be unthinkable now. Join us after the jump for a look at the slightly grim feedback.
We’re constantly amazed by the creative ways people come up with to reuse defunct technology, and here’s another one to blow your mind. One YouTuber has used his programming and music skills to reproduce popular tunes and game music using… floppy disk drives!
The French actress Emmanuelle Riva is best known for her role in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, an innovative 1959 drama that explores memory and loss against a background of the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing. While filming on location in Hiroshima, Riva also took these striking photographs of the city and its people, which provide a fascinating peek into everyday life in Japan back then.
The names of the toys – Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard; Fun-To-Drive Dashboard – might not ring any bells. But the boxy red plastic exterior, the click of the gear stick and the repetitive roar of the engine that drove parents to distraction? Yep, you know this game.
One Redditor recently pulled his Dashboard out of storage and was delighted to discover that it “still runs like a dream”. Cue reams of nostalgic commenters flung back into their playground days, when kids could be kids and sit alone all summer playing 100-mile-an-hour driving simulator without prompting any hand-wringing or moralistic wailing. It’s time to raid your stash of enormous dry cell batteries – we’re going for the drive of your life.
In the wake of the exciting new video game systems hitting stores this season, our reliable Japanese friend Nintendo is taking us onboard the nostalgia express train with a Wii U game that puts a new spin on 16 well-known NES (or Famicom in Japan) games, like Super Mario Bros. and Excitebike. Besides turning these popular games into mini-game levels where players challenge their own high score, NES Remix changes these games up a bit with new challenges, like playing Donkey Kong in the dark or playing tennis against an invisible opponent.
For those of us that find it hard to believe that the NES (called “Famicom” in Japan) turned 30 this year, Nintendo is putting out an album of 26 of the best theme songs from classic games like Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The two-disc album comes out December 4, making it the perfect holiday gift for that person in your life that loves the simple 8-bit tunes of yesteryear.
Anyone remotely familiar with Japan’s comic culture has likely seen or at least heard of the world-renowned adventure manga, Dragon Ball. Honestly, thanks to the anime, the TV specials, the films, and the Hollywood movie adaption, it’s hard to find anyone without at least some awareness of this awesome title. The impact that Dragon Ball has had on Japan’s comic industry is so great that a world without Super Saiyans is hard to even imagine. But, every series has to have begun somewhere, and before the 51st issue of Weekly Shonen Jump Magazine for the year 1984, there was no such thing as Dragon Ball!
…Actually, that’s a lie. Issue number 51 certainly contained the first chapter of the Dragon Ball manga, but the hype began a short time before that. After all, it’s hard to sell an all-new series without some form of advertising. We found this to be true when the Japanese side of our RocketNews24 staff managed to dig up a copy of 1984’s Weekly Shonen Jump volume 50, one issue prior to the release of Dragon Ball. Inside, we found some awesome illustrated spreads announcing the creation of this comic wonder. It’s fascinating to see just how highly the series was anticipated, though the comic’s branding might have been a little off the mark at first.
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