Japan’s Lost Generation

via Tiny Fragments of Y2K

While writing my latest piece, I was getting a little dark, so I wrote a note about the Japanese word “木漏れ日 komorebi” to take my mind off it. Then Stephan Kunze told me about a 2004 Japanese album with the same title.

The artist is Yuichiro Fujimoto, a Japanese photographer and part-time musician. He was born in 1981, which places him near the younger end of Japan’s Lost Generation, also known as the “就職氷河期世代 employment ice age generation,” usually defined in Japan as people born from 1970 to 1982.

They were the first generation to be pushed out of the corporate society that postwar Japan had built. Many were forced into precarious jobs, and even when the economy recovered a little, companies mostly hired the next wave of younger graduates instead of bringing them back in.

I also feel that this generation was, in some strange way, released from that old corporate collectivism. The people I have met from this age group often seem individualistic, tough, and not especially ashamed of struggling. Maybe because the yen was still strong then, I also feel like there were more backpackers among them.

I did not really know Y2K Japan. I only imagine it from fragments. A recession had already arrived, but traces of wealth were still everywhere. Serious incidents, including terrorism, were happening, yet the fragments I know from that era sometimes feel strangely peaceful. I wonder what it felt like to be young and broke in that kind of atmosphere. Some of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpieces were also born in this period.

The ending of Kunze’s article, written in 2024, feels like a line from a Haruki Murakami novel.

I reached out to the hotmail address listed on his Tumblr to see if I can get more information, and to find out if he’s still making music. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t receive an answer.

A German journalist writes in 2024 about a small Japanese indie work made in 2004, and in 2026 I am reading it and listening to it in Japan. I really love these winding little miracles of indie culture.

Thank you as always, Stephan. Maybe because I was weak then, I ended up tearing up when I first listened to it at midnight 🐈