Movies such as All About Lily Chou-chou, Love & Pop, and Battle Royale all share the same concept in which the Japanese youth of this time (the late 90s-Early 2000s) were delinquents. Though they all approach it in different ways, it seems like there is a historical context behind having these kinds of movies during these times. What is the historical context behind this, and what other Japanese movies (that were produced during that time or were about that specific time) aside from the ones mentioned has this concept as well?
Thanks!
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/xj5y1v/japans_late_90s_early_2000s_juvenile_delinquency/
2 comments
Japan was pretty weird back in the 90s and early 2000s. You can find some nostalgia posts on here that talk about it all. It makes us old timers sad because Japan has kind of homogenized.
I’m not sure what was going on with the movie culture back then, but it was probably a phase, much like the US went through a HungerGames copycat phase or a Twilight phase if you were around a book store for that one.
I mean, that’s right after the bubble popped. Seems reasonable you’d have a lot of parents working their asses off doing unpaid overtime just to break even while their kids went unsupervised and saw that following the rules like their parents did wasn’t necessarily going to lead to stability or success. It probably bred a lot of cynicism.
But also you have to remember that pop entertainment media doesn’t necessarily reflect what actually happened in a society, but what consumers were thinking about happening. If you watched American movies from the 2000s and 2010s, you’d think the nation was battling a constant stream of eco super-villains who wanted to mass-murder the human population down to an arbitrarily-chosen smaller number. And though the notion is absurd, somehow those villains captured the public’s imagination.
See also 20th century cyberpunk imagining Japan as a wonderland of spandex-clad hacker ninjas sporting the latest cyber-tech.