Reiwa and Showa: The Different Fears of Junior High Boys. Why Manual-Based Matchmaking Was Inevitable in the Reiwa Era.

In every age, the wish of junior high school boys remains the same.“I want a girlfriend.” However, the difficulty and the background are completely different between the Showa and Reiwa eras.

We young, immature boys of the Showa era charged forward with our “wild” nature laid bare. And what we feared most was...

In an era without mobile phones, the only way to contact the girl you liked was to call her home landline. And if, by some chance, her father answered, terror awaited.

“What business do you have with my daughter?”

That low, rumbling voice. In that moment, while breaking out in a cold sweat, we experienced the depths of death—a state that can only be described as a contradiction—known as “barely a fatal wound” time and time again.

But we lived in an environment where, even if we suffered a fatal wound, we could recover just by being laughed at by our friends. By being embarrassed and crushed repeatedly, and teased by our friends each time, we gradually acquired the “ability to hide our wild nature with intelligence (manners)” and slowly grew into adults.

However, in today’s Reiwa era, that is not permitted.

A failure in the Reiwa era does not become a funny story.
The “wild” nature carelessly exposed is visualized in a single screenshot and released into the sea of the internet as a “digital tattoo” that never disappears. Once branded as a “creep,” their place in society vanishes in an instant.

Please don’t misunderstand me; by “wild,” I don’t mean violent behavior or the kind of pushiness that ignores the other person—actions that deserve to be excluded—but rather the human energy that makes us feel drawn to someone or wish to touch them, transcending logic. Now, even putting that into words is being sanitized as a “risk.”

They in the Reiwa era have survived and grown up in an environment where failure is not allowed. And when heading to the battlefield of matchmaking, hasn’t a manual become essential to hide their wild nature and act with intelligence?

That is likely the same for the women as well. They must study the manual thoroughly to avoid being “deducted points” and approach as a perfect human being.

Originally, it is natural for a “good wife” to one person to be a “bad wife” to another, but in current matchmaking, if you don’t play the role of the average good person found in the manual, you won’t be considered.

From the outside, it feels like they are being asked to erase not just their wild nature, but their individuality as well.

Even if they successfully match, neither side knows when it is safe to take off the manual. The fear that if they try to take it off, they will be blocked immediately. That fear pushes them even deeper into the manual.

Watching such a scene, I suddenly remembered an old movie: the Sylvester Stallone film “Demolition Man.”

The setting is a future city in 2032 where all crime and impropriety have been eradicated. There, not only is violence strictly managed, but even excessive salt intake and foul language are monitored, and if violated, a fine ticket is immediately spat out by a machine.

In this thoroughly “sanitized” world, physical contact between living human beings is considered an “unclean and high-risk act.” Even intimacy between men and women is conducted through headsets that digitally synchronize their brainwaves, and direct contact is shunned as a barbaric relic of the past.

I cannot forget the look of “disgust, as if looking at something filthy” that the woman of the future gave the protagonist—who came from a barbaric past—when he threw away his headset and invited her to “love each other in the flesh.”

Perhaps the young people today who cannot take off their matchmaking manuals harbor the same fear.

Perhaps we in the Showa era were lucky.
The "barely non-fatal wounds" we experienced were rites of passage that allowed us to move on to the next stage. However, for them in the Reiwa era, failure is akin to literal "death."

I wonder myself what right I have to talk so arrogantly about the Showa era.
Yet, holding onto the memories of a "wild era where clumsiness was forgiven" that we can never return to, I can only watch the front lines of this overly sanitized world of matchmaking.