I clicked the headline expecting a chuckle and left with an unexpectedly warmed heart.
> “We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” [...] “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”
> Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
there's so much more I want to comment on--it's not screen-based, increased cross-generational interaction, strengthening community, elders having their stories known--but what I love is that these effects will compound into even greater benefits for the community.
This brings back something we've mostly lost in modern times. Elders had respect because they knew a lot and had contributed a lot, and everyone knew that. But that's not scalable, and we migrate a lot more now.
This is an engaging way that brings that back - rather than focusing on fantasy heroes, show kids real life role models.
It used to be that elders were few and far between, as the population pyramid was, well, a pyramid.
The other day I joked in conversation that I raise my daughters to disrespect the elderly - particularly my generation in the future - as considering the fertility rates (worse than in Japan) in the region, there will be plenty of elderly compared to younger generations.
I'm only half joking really. My own parents are reaching the age at which they would use some help every now and then. I have two siblings, so it doesn't take huge individual effort from any of us.
Meanwhile I'm the only one there who has children and most likely that will remain the case. Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?
> Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?
Absolutely not, but hopefully your siblings will have been positive enough presences in your children's lives that they will want to of their own accord.
Worth noting that the relations to elder is really getting rocky, and people are rethinking them in both directions.
We can't hide from the influence the elder generations had on the current situation. Japan is a developed nation with a crazy low crime rate and incredible infrastructure thanks to them. It's also a social mess and the poster child of stagnation thanks to them.
This whole trading card game surfaces both sides of the coin, with what these people are bringing to the community and also why small kids shouldn't look to much upon them as it's a recipe for trouble.
Japan always does the hard thing. If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves (they are not afraid). The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority. The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere . Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).
The rules are very open and clear. The deincentives for misconduct are strong.
The newspapers focus are different. More fun or actionable news.
People just think they are built different, that is not the case. They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.
> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other
This is the exact opposite of my experience (and all my Japanese friends). They will stare at the person misbehaving but will absolutely not challenge him. Their culture is "avoid the problem/confronting at all costs".
> The police acts swiftly
They are considered tax thieves, even by Japanese people. Also, talk to some foreign women that got sexually harassed or even raped how the police helped them. In fact, I don't have proof, but I sincerely believe that if the police was trained well, crime rate would increase because they would find more crimes.
> healthy food
Are we talking about deep-fried food? Or perhaps over-salted dishes? Oh, no, you meant the sugar they add in basically all their cooking? Time where they mostly ate fish and rice is over. They barely eat enough vegetables. And fruits are for the well-off only.
It's a country that I love and have spent quite some time there—and more to come—but your observations are exactly the opposite of what I saw.
What they do correctly is the low unemployment rate, though I think it's starting to rise with younger people. People don't need to commit violent crimes to feed themselves if any work lets them afford necessities.
I think they are opposite because when I say police acts swiftly, you turn around and say that they are tax thieves. They can both be true?
Healthy food. Yes they eat healthy and their BMI shows it. I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis. Proof is in the pudding (BMI). Yes it is getting worse and I hope American tariffs will help in this regard. Again, healthy living AND getting worse can both be true, especially with people that are friendly with cultures they want to know more about (many, but still a small subset).
Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids. But the narrative that is pushed heavily in media is the equal sign between poor and criminal, instead of the correlation, which again is reductive. Why? Is there anger? What food do trigger it? What mindset?
My grandparents where very poor (as in oat porridge for weeks poor). They would never hurt a fly. In certain minds that would have been a weakness, in certain minds it’s self sacrifice and equal strength.
Most want to be the wolf among the sheep. It is US greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".
> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis
I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.
> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids
I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.
> They would never hurt a fly.
Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.
> But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy.
Petty or to-some-extent violent criminals. White collar criminals, the worse kind of criminal, usually come from good/rich/powerful families (I'm generally speaking, not talking about Japan specifically)
If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.
As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.
This is about as deep of analysis of Japan as the Ghibli AI avatars are "art".
> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves
This is just straight up fan-fiction, and absolutely not how the society here operates. You will get stared at. People will move aside, maybe. That's the extent of reaction from the public you can expect.
> The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere .
The "small offices"/kobans are more than useless for any actual "crime". They're quite useful in reporting that you lost a wallet/keys, but good luck when having any actual problems that need to be reported. Goes doubly so for areas where there's elevated chance of actual crimes happening — interacting with cops in Kabukicho has to be one of the least useful activities on the planet.
> The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority.
And this is... a good thing? We have wildly different moral systems if you think that.
> Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).
"Green tea and healthy food" is, frankly, an even stupider argument than "they're built different". Yes, it's the diet that makes the society more conformist, sure, why not.
There's many great, and many not-so-great things about Japan — why do these arguments online always just start with the most basic, surface level, inane pseudoanalysis?
Because it’s not that it is used to attack people that are different, but it is used to deincentive bad behaviour, but by conflating the two you end up in a bad place, where incentives are…misaligned.
It seems to me Japan does just fine by having rules and sticking to their culture.
Many people admire Japanese culture. But they wouldn't have anything to admire had Japanese people not conserving and caring greatly about their culture and sticking to their rules and ways of life.
I probably won't be integrating in the Japanese culture, but I admire and respect it and the fact they still have that culture.
It's even less that we move around a lot more; technology advanced with the personal computer and Internet such that kids see adults not knowing things about the world that they already do. What is decades of personal lived experience wisdom when there's tiktok and YouTube and chatbots?
In the US we are at all time lows for internal migration. Or at least very close to them, I haven’t checked those stats in a couple years since this last came up on HN.
We used to (as a population) migrate to opportunity far more than we do now.
For many reasons there is simply far less community engagement and integration going on. Fewer people put down strong “roots” in their communities these days.
Thats surprising, I thought moving was less common than now. In either case, is it possible that the single households is the other factor, people choosing more instead of interacting with whoever is around?
When? In my grandparents generation (born late 1800s to early 1900s) moving to either try to start a farm in the US or to leave a failing farm for a job in town at the local whatever factory was very common.
Post WW2 for the boomers was loaded with people flooding to all kinds of industrial boom cities.
After that it was hollowing out of the rust belt and moving out of cities to suburbs due to the lead/crime epidemic.
Then rich cities boomed back with millennials in a continuous feedback loop where the successful ones became more desirable as money brought attractions/activities/restaurants, draining the failing ones even more.
Then 2020 was the brief mega disruption where people thought the internet might catch on and they found out the vast majority of white collar jobs can be done from home so the fanned out to all of the nice and cheap suburbs, mountain towns, etc. Now the Internet fad has worn off so that’s reversing a bit.
Moving in the US has been very common until this brief lull where you could change jobs without relocating thanks to remote work.
Unfortunately we’re going backwards so it wouldn’t surprise me if constant relocation resumes.
The main factor that you fail to mention is living cost, and not the internet, which made it possible and desirable to frequently move in search of opportunity.
It didn't mean there weren't people that lived long-term in communities. However, it did mean that you could find more lucrative opportunities in different places while also affording to move and live there.
That began to slowly change in the 60's, beginning with the death of single occupancy residences and a lack of funding/investment in affordable housing for a significant portion of income brackets.
The last 30ish years helped cement that for lots of reasons, but the ability to work remotely via the internet isn't particularly new nor causative for that change.
I've been taught to respect the elders. But now I've seen that there are enough of them which aren't honest, good people, but only know how to present themselves in a positive light, while looking down on the ones they live with.
I now stand neutral against them: they may be good, they may not be. There's nothing in their age which makes them deserve more respect than the one younger people deserve.
So do you respect 12-year-olds as much as you respect 25-year-olds? Do you respect the opinions on work and adult responsibilities of a 23-year-old as much as those of a 35-year-old? Do you trust the professional judgment of a junior engineer as much as that of a senior engineer?
Older people, in general, know more and have better judgment than younger people.
I hope the people don't get too much pressure to up their stats.
>The rarity of a card isn’t based on fantasy stats — it’s tied to real-world contributions. The more actively the ojisan engages in volunteer work or community service, the higher the chances of their card being upgraded to a shiny version with a glossy laminated effect.
I'm a bit reminded of the cards Harry and Ron find in their chocolate frog packaging, each of which features a picture of a famous wizard, some historical, some contemporary like Albus Dumbledore. The kids had a chance of actually meeting some of the heroes pictured on their cards.
“Good morning! Are you up?” asks the fisherman in the video, to which the user replies “Yes, thanks to you. Are you on your ship?” “Yeah, I got up at 3, so I’m already on the sea,” he replies, before adding “I caught a really big fish.”
I’m not sure how much demand there is for this product, but that really brought a smile to my face.
I found Wakie[1] in 2015 while on a project in London. Every morning at a specific time you set, a stranger (real person and no AI) would call you and talk to you briefly, waking you up. I used it for about a month.
I don’t speak Japanese but I would pay for this. Trying to get up and run before 6 is a chore. Having a fisherman wake up call would be awesome and motivating. Especially for someone who loves fishing.
But AI is like video games, it can’t emulate sacrifice and other deep human dynamics because there’s no stake. If you die you restore from last save point. For AI you have infinite no-memory interactions, which changes the dynamic. In other words, your actions don’t have lasting consequences.
The few games that succeed in building something deeper (for me RDR2 but you take your pick) have to carve out sacrifice and character out of the player’s time, which is finite.
I still remember decades and decades ago hearing about vending machines in Japan. Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there. This was sometime in the 1990s, before even Starbucks was a huge thing. Everyone I knew thought the idea of cold coffee was ridiculous, a quirk of the Japanese that would never catch on.
I feel the Japanese have been pretty good at exporting culture, but it has a lot of misses among the few hits. I wonder if this is something that would catch on outside of Japan.
David Lynch's Twin Peaks commercials for Georgia coffee, featuring almost the entire cast in character and a running subplot of a missing Japanese woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxNvhN7UUE
> There's an old tradition of American stars appearing in Japanese television commercials, [...] before downing what appears to be about a four ounce can of Suntory Iced Rainbow Blend coffee.
Was this tradition referenced or inspired by Bill Murray's "Suntory Time" scene in "Lost in Translation" (2003)?
> Anyone who has seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation must wonder for at least a second if there is truth in Bill Murray’s character of a famous American actor in Japan to film a commercial. Well, there definitely is. Huge American and European stars have been hawking products in Japanese commercials for decades.
And vending machines with hot drinks and soups, my favorite being cream of corn soup...which I have yet to see stateside.
Another thing Japan had before the US was texting on your phone. I was living in Japan at the time and recall telling my American friend who worked as a Manager at ATT about texting and she thought it was the dumbest thing she had ever heard of.
First trip to Japan, I selected what I thought was a local cherry Coke equivalent from the vending machine. I was more than a little surprised to get a can that was a) hot, and b) contained not cherry-flavored cola, but chunky sweet red bean soup (oshikuro).
I was living in Australia in 2000 and texting was more common than calling because it was cheaper to text than call. But in the US it was the opposite. You had unlimited calling, but plans around that time had a different pricing scheme for texting (can't remember the exact details) so could be one reason why it took the US a bit longer to finally pick up texting. I remember it was about a year or 2 later that I felt texting started to become more common in the US.
Yeah, I lived in Europe in 1999 and 2000 and then moved to the US. In the EU you could text people from different countries and it would often work.
Then I moved to the US and the shock of not being able to text between networks was really something. That and writing cheques. I'd never written a cheque in Australia or Europe but you sort of had to in the US while electronic payments between banks were sorted in Australia in the 1990s.
These days it seems when a technology appears it generally spreads more quickly.
> And vending machines with hot drinks and soups, my favorite being cream of corn soup...which I have yet to see stateside.
Its a cultural thing I am sure. As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene. I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable. Stale bread, wilted vegetables, low quality meats, cheese, etc, sloppy prep. Who cares, ship it.
On the other hand, I can see food vendors in Japan guarding their reputation with attention to their craft ensuring quality.
> As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene.
The grandparent post is talking about canned food/drink that's heated in the machine. Vending machines with freshish prepared food do exist, but they're kinda pointless given the existence of...
> I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable
Convenience store food in Japan is fantastic: food from 7/11, Lawson, Family Mart, etc. is probably unironically better than the median restaurant in the U.S.
The foods sold in vending machines make sense though - everyone's already used to instant or canned soup, so throwing it into a vending machine and warming it up makes sense. You're not getting fine dining from the vending machines, you're just getting a quick and tasty snack (although there is also a culture of niche vending machines with serious meals that require cooking at home, which is another story). Just swap out the corn potage with something Americans would already be familiar with, like Campbell's chicken noodle soup in a single-portion can with a twist cap instead of needing a can opener, and it could work.
I think some Americans might object more to the idea of microplastics leaching into your food, or high amounts of preservatives, though. And the ubiquity of vending machines in Japan makes it possible to build a habit around vending machine food, whereas in the US they're fewer and far between, so you couldn't really depend on them.
> The foods sold in vending machines make sense though - everyone's already used to instant or canned soup, so throwing it into a vending machine and warming it up makes sense.
The US used to have much more diverse vending machine offerings, including prepared hot foods and drinks, but they started to disappear in the 1970s, though you could find stragglers into the 1990s in older institutional settings (e.g. government buildings), especially for drinks--coffee, hot cocoa, etc. As previously mentioned, I think they fell out of favor because they began to be considered very poor quality (it's a death spiral if turnover doesn't happen fast enough), perhaps as compared to increasingly popular drive-thru alternatives. I guess in a way it was a result of our car culture. Like with the demise of cafeterias generally[1], Americans preferred to jump in their car rather than choosing from what was available within walking distance.
[1] A wall of vending machines selling sandwiches, salads, soups, and hot drinks constituted a "cafeteria" in many buildings.
People always forget something, when talking about Japanese vending machines: vandalism. Vandalism is relatively uncommon in Japan, whereas it's sadly endemic in most Western societies.
Emoji is a Japanese thing too. It's why a lot of the early emoji are kind of odd from a western point of view, like the naruto fish cake, Japanese top secret emoji and hot bath symbol.
Better than that is the Japanese 'Boss', which even comes in a very-Japanese steel tin. Great coffee that you can now get at most Australian servos, convenience stores, etc.
As a New Zealander who's been to Australia + a small handful of other countries I can vouch for Australia having a uniquely good convenience store dairy based drink industry. OAK is another old faithful brand I miss in NZ. Also Hungry Jacks (Burger King) there uses cream instead of milk in the soft serve and it's noticeably better.
The $1 coffee from 7-11 was my go-to drink in Australia. Came with the added bonus of annoying the hipster coffee snobs in melbourne when I was walking down the street holding a 7-11 cup. Damn fine coffee.
I am not a coffee hipster (as will probably become evident by my next statement) but I do like good cafe coffee here in Melbourne and I completely agree. I don’t make it my daily driver, but 7/11 and even McCafe coffee is quite decent here IMO
7-11 has surprisingly good coffee in the US too, or at least Texas. There was a 7-11 on the corner of the block I use to live on and drive past to get to Starbucks until I was running late once and decided to just grab the first coffee available. Now if I just want plain brewed coffee I'll find a 7-11. And if I'm wanting something more Starbuck-ish but don't want to deal with the morning rush, I'll go to a 7-11 and mix little over half a cup of the brew coffee then top it off with their hot chocolate.
Iced coffee in Australia seems to automatically imply sweet with lots of milk (or even ice cream). This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.
_Most_ of the coffee sold in cans in Japan is also sweetened. Not all, you can usually find a can or two that are just black and unsweetened, but a majority of the cans will be sweet to some degree.
I agree completely, most iced coffee here from supermarkets is hyper sweetened rubbish that barely tastes like coffee at all. You have to go for “double” or “triple” espresso options to get a proper taste of coffee, otherwise you’re just drinking sweet milk (and not even in the guilty pleasure Vietnamese iced coffee way)
As previously mentioned Boss does do a decent black iced coffee though, and there are a few niche brands around putting out less sweet varieties
> This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.
Same reaction I had the first time I ordered a cappuccino there. I learned to order Flat Whites cause I kept forgetting to tell them to not put chocolate powder on top...why anyone thought that would be a great idea is beyond my comprehension. The Flat White on the hand easily makes up for their cappuccino faux pas
> Everyone I knew thought the idea of cold coffee was ridiculous, a quirk of the Japanese that would never catch on.
Iced coffee has been around for centuries and is very common in warmer countries (and was before the 90s). アイスコーヒー is closer to cold brew than the milkshake-esque thing we call iced coffee.
it may well be "cold brew", a coffee specialty that is some work to make at home and that has a very distinguished taste and contrast coffee that was brewed hot and then cooled down.
> Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there.
They're everywhere!
In rural Hokkaido, some people even have them outside their home's driveway for people walking by. They have various teas (green, hojicha, jasmine, etc.), Coke and Pepsi products, Pocari Sweat (like Gatorade), iced coffees, and sometimes even hot teas and hot coffees that are heated on demand. They're super convenient and something I miss having in America (we seemed to have more of them here in the 90's and early 2000's).
The only problem is that in Japan there can sometimes be absolutely zero public garbage (or, more correctly, recycling) bins in sight. You have to carry your trash with you, which is a bit annoying and mildly gross if it spills.
The bins near vending machines are almost always _only_ for cans/plastic bottles.
That accounts for ~80% of the garbage you'll produce, but sometimes you'll have a onigiri wrapper, or a dirty tissue that'd be nice to get rid of, and finding a place to do that can be more difficult (ironically, especially so in heavily touristy areas).
Pocari Sweat is so good. I always grab a bottle anytime we go to the japanese store outside chicago. I assumed it was a fake anime product like the way they always turn pepsi into bepsi or something, but no it's real and it's delicious.
> You have to carry your trash with you, which is a bit annoying and mildly gross if it spills.
True, but it also means that most people are used to this and don’t even question it. Which means no overflowing garbage bins or the need to service them in the middle of nowhere.
Town celebrates its own via a medium that the youth seek out on their own. The youth then forge closer connections with their elders. Everyone is happy, everyone wins.
Putting on my Product Manager hat, the best product launches often focus on a single well-defined persona, as this one apparently did. Now that this is proven to work, they can expand to middle-aged women, older people, younger people, animals and what have you. But I think that this is a great start.
Except humanity for the last 1000 years as alway done that to put white men in charge, in 2025 perhaps we can change how it's done and make everybody equal?
That's a needlessly uncharitable interpretation, but it is an interesting point.
I think that increased rates of low (and high) grade neurodivergence in men, and society expecting eccentric behavior from men, especially as they age, results in in the sort of characters that make something like this work. Umarells in Italy come to mind.
There's quite a few assumptions in your comment; one, that men have higher grades of neurodivergece than women (whereas it can also be underdiagnosis or masking through higher societal expectations on women). Women are eccentric too.
In Japan, men commit suicide at roughly twice the rate of women. The age group with the highest rate of suicide was 50-59. I can't find good data, but loneliness and not feeling valued by a community is very likely a significant contributor here.
Women are important but if the problem you're trying to solve is deaths of despair, then focusing on men makes sense.
Suicide among men is ~4x higher in Canada and the USA in some demographics, too. In some cases, such as men 80+, the rate is 6.5x higher in Canada. This is crazy sad. It doesn't mean other things affecting women aren't sad. It just means this is sad.
Well, evidenced by the fact that these aren't even white men, and we have no evidence that anybody in the community in question are actually offended or feeling disempowered except for righteous social justice warriors like yourself, this comes off as screeching from someone who just wants to push their agenda.
And before you call me a sexist MAGA patriarchal asshole, not only am I liberal, but I actually live in Japan and interact with the local culture here all day every day. I speak the local langauge, am married to a local, have local friends and in fact talk about and interact with ojisans on a very regular basis, because it is a cultural touchpoint that is relevant here. Do you?
I am sick and tired of annoying people like you co-opting every discussion to push a specific victim-mindset zero-sum world view, reducing everything to your race and sex struggle without actually lifting a finger to, say, do things that actually affect outcomes in society besides pissing people off—unlike the people who set up this lighthearted card game, which is demonstrably bringing a community together. Not everywhere is the USA, let alone your toxic online ragebait bubble. What you are doing is repelling people from your cause more than helping it, myself included.
Please do some soul searching and if you really feel a need to irritate people, I would appreciate you do it somewhere else. I hope that your implication that Japanese culture is inferior because it doesn't kowtow to your cultural expectations, has made you feel good today.
And Japanese people are well aware of this, there is definitely a common youth cultural appreciation of goofy middle-aged men here beyond what I was used to growing up in the USA.
The whole thing was an idea of a woman, Eri Miyahara, 45-year-old secretariat head of the Saidosho regional community council, I bet she have her reasons to focus on men, I suspect it's the perceived loneliness of the selected ones.
I remember as a young kid living in Norway, there'd be the "russefeiring"[0] around May where students finishing their final semester will don a brightly colored overall and cause mayhem in the town. I remember getting shot a lot with water guns. Anyway, one thing that is pretty fun about that tradition is that the students print cards for themselves with a picture and fun facts etc and hand them out to all the little kids, and we'd trade them between ourselves to have the whole collection of students.
This is a superb idea. I had seen random cat gacha but not trading cards of random dudes.
Most efforts at custom TCGs seem to go nowhere at all because of the absence of any practical trading meta game, so bootstrapping that with local interest is a very neat marketing move that aligns very well with the desired community engagement.
The result is that whole idea is greater than the sum of its parts.
i needed an "oh, that's really nice" story today. this delivered.
in every way, this seems well-intentioned, quirky, cute, fun, and positive. unless there's some subtext i'm missing, this is just a good and nice thing happening that's great for everyone involved.
Men statistically have fewer social connections and suffer more from loneliness as they get older, so if the goal is to remedy that, it makes sense to start with men first.
If one house is on fire and you spray water on it to put out the fire, do you feel obligated to spray water on every other house too so that the other houses don't feel discriminated against?
It’s funny to me that the honest intent of my comment was merely “that’s neat, it would be cool to expand it to other members of the community” and people go straight to discrimination & indignation. Is it so hard to just express that it’d be cool to take a neat thing and expand it?
Seriously, I think the subtext is that people in the West equate Japanese = sexist (and therefore are an inferior people) and that the choice of focusing on ojisans, is a sexist decision made to degrade women.
When in reality it probably is just a light-hearted decision since old men are goofy, a lot of visible local businesses in rural Japan tend to be run by men, and the concept provoked a laugh.
> Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
Kids involved in community seems to be the best result
The whole point of this is that we've reached breaking point with the ridiculous attempt to replace everything with a digital experience. It is fitting that Japan, which was arguably the place where the digital revolution really took off, should be the first place where it is rejected.
As I understand things, in Japanese the terms "onii-san", "ojisan" and "ojii-san" literally translate as "older brother", "uncle" and "grandpa" respectively - and are widely used for people who aren't relatives.
So while the colloquial use of ojisan roughly lines up with "middle-aged man" it's not a perfect mapping.
Ojisan age bracket can be pretty wide, but 81 sounds to me more like an ojiichan. That said, if they're running a business and are still somewhat lively they can possibly still pass as ojisan in context.
Oniisan is much younger usually; usually I don't hear ojiisan so much as ojiichan (as well as ojisan rather than ojichan), my wife is Japanese and it rubs her weird to hear the opposite honorific in these cases.
“Middle-aged” is a wrong in this case translation of “ojisan”, lit “uncle” but colloquially can mean “old man” in an endearing or mean way depending on context
Well, if the edges are the Japanese life expectancy of 84 and 0, then 80 does fall somewhere in the middle. So there should be some four-year-olds in this deck, too.
I think AR or augmented reality games like this trading cards is the future of gaming, but this one is offline AR rather than online.
One of the best game I ever played is the text based souvenir game shopping game on Windows 3. I can't recall the name of the game now since it's more than 30 years ago, but it's about shopping souvenirs using London Underground Tube. You have a semi realistic time constraints like train schedules, your flight schedules and of course list of souvenirs items to shop. This is totally offline since there is no Internet available at the time but it's very engaging nonetheless.
My proposal for the modern version of the game is to use real-time train schedules (with delays, ticket discounts, etc) that are available publicly on the Internet for many metropolitan cities in the world for examples Tokyo, London and Berlin [1],[2],[3].
Imagine you can have a real-world realistic in-app in-game items purchases feature that you personally can buy in the game and delivered to you or anyone you fancy of giving souvenirs except that you only virtually went there.
[1] A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system (2023 - 103 comments):
> Seeing this, the game’s creator decided to take it to the next level. New rules were introduced, allowing the cards to be used in actual battles. The objective isn’t to defeat the opponent’s card but to outplay it based on the characters’ skills and abilities.
Anyone have an idea of how the gameplay works? How do you "outplay" your opponent?
“Japan has always had deep subcultures around games, cards, and character design — but what’s new is how global social platforms amplify them. It feels like TikTok is acting as a cross-cultural layer over local fandoms. Could this become a driver for new forms of cross-border cultural products?”
This sounds like something straight out of the Yakuza video game series. Which, incidentally, is a series largely focused on middle aged men - I would love a set of these cards with Kiryu, Majima, Saejima, Akiyama, Ichiban, Nanba, Adachi, etc...
I feel like this is the kind of stuff that will be common with AI.
Imagine having a whatsapp family group and a bot auto-generates this type of games for you based on your group.
It's a privacy nightmare but it will be fun for sure.
I clicked the headline expecting a chuckle and left with an unexpectedly warmed heart.
> “We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” [...] “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.” > Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
there's so much more I want to comment on--it's not screen-based, increased cross-generational interaction, strengthening community, elders having their stories known--but what I love is that these effects will compound into even greater benefits for the community.
This brings back something we've mostly lost in modern times. Elders had respect because they knew a lot and had contributed a lot, and everyone knew that. But that's not scalable, and we migrate a lot more now.
This is an engaging way that brings that back - rather than focusing on fantasy heroes, show kids real life role models.
It used to be that elders were few and far between, as the population pyramid was, well, a pyramid.
The other day I joked in conversation that I raise my daughters to disrespect the elderly - particularly my generation in the future - as considering the fertility rates (worse than in Japan) in the region, there will be plenty of elderly compared to younger generations.
I'm only half joking really. My own parents are reaching the age at which they would use some help every now and then. I have two siblings, so it doesn't take huge individual effort from any of us.
Meanwhile I'm the only one there who has children and most likely that will remain the case. Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?
You can teach them whatever you want, but the model of the world you give them is also what they will pass on to their kids.
"Family is a burden, and screw old people" doesn't seem that conducive to a good society.
I get the sneaking suspicion that this might be a case of Poe's law.
> Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?
Absolutely not, but hopefully your siblings will have been positive enough presences in your children's lives that they will want to of their own accord.
Worth noting that the relations to elder is really getting rocky, and people are rethinking them in both directions.
We can't hide from the influence the elder generations had on the current situation. Japan is a developed nation with a crazy low crime rate and incredible infrastructure thanks to them. It's also a social mess and the poster child of stagnation thanks to them.
This whole trading card game surfaces both sides of the coin, with what these people are bringing to the community and also why small kids shouldn't look to much upon them as it's a recipe for trouble.
Japan always does the hard thing. If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves (they are not afraid). The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority. The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere . Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).
The rules are very open and clear. The deincentives for misconduct are strong.
The newspapers focus are different. More fun or actionable news.
People just think they are built different, that is not the case. They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.
> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other
This is the exact opposite of my experience (and all my Japanese friends). They will stare at the person misbehaving but will absolutely not challenge him. Their culture is "avoid the problem/confronting at all costs".
> The police acts swiftly
They are considered tax thieves, even by Japanese people. Also, talk to some foreign women that got sexually harassed or even raped how the police helped them. In fact, I don't have proof, but I sincerely believe that if the police was trained well, crime rate would increase because they would find more crimes.
> healthy food
Are we talking about deep-fried food? Or perhaps over-salted dishes? Oh, no, you meant the sugar they add in basically all their cooking? Time where they mostly ate fish and rice is over. They barely eat enough vegetables. And fruits are for the well-off only.
It's a country that I love and have spent quite some time there—and more to come—but your observations are exactly the opposite of what I saw.
What they do correctly is the low unemployment rate, though I think it's starting to rise with younger people. People don't need to commit violent crimes to feed themselves if any work lets them afford necessities.
I think they are opposite because when I say police acts swiftly, you turn around and say that they are tax thieves. They can both be true?
Healthy food. Yes they eat healthy and their BMI shows it. I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis. Proof is in the pudding (BMI). Yes it is getting worse and I hope American tariffs will help in this regard. Again, healthy living AND getting worse can both be true, especially with people that are friendly with cultures they want to know more about (many, but still a small subset).
Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids. But the narrative that is pushed heavily in media is the equal sign between poor and criminal, instead of the correlation, which again is reductive. Why? Is there anger? What food do trigger it? What mindset?
My grandparents where very poor (as in oat porridge for weeks poor). They would never hurt a fly. In certain minds that would have been a weakness, in certain minds it’s self sacrifice and equal strength.
Most want to be the wolf among the sheep. It is US greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.
> police acts swiftly
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".
> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis
I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.
> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids
I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.
> They would never hurt a fly.
Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.
> But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy.
Petty or to-some-extent violent criminals. White collar criminals, the worse kind of criminal, usually come from good/rich/powerful families (I'm generally speaking, not talking about Japan specifically)
Which is why I initially mentioned violent crime. The one people tend to care about the most.
If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.
As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.
Japan is also full of Japanese people.
Reductive
So?
This is about as deep of analysis of Japan as the Ghibli AI avatars are "art".
> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves
This is just straight up fan-fiction, and absolutely not how the society here operates. You will get stared at. People will move aside, maybe. That's the extent of reaction from the public you can expect.
> The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere .
The "small offices"/kobans are more than useless for any actual "crime". They're quite useful in reporting that you lost a wallet/keys, but good luck when having any actual problems that need to be reported. Goes doubly so for areas where there's elevated chance of actual crimes happening — interacting with cops in Kabukicho has to be one of the least useful activities on the planet.
> The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority.
And this is... a good thing? We have wildly different moral systems if you think that.
> Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).
"Green tea and healthy food" is, frankly, an even stupider argument than "they're built different". Yes, it's the diet that makes the society more conformist, sure, why not.
There's many great, and many not-so-great things about Japan — why do these arguments online always just start with the most basic, surface level, inane pseudoanalysis?
>They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.
Aren't rules part of the culture? The culture helps strengthening the rules while the rules help strengthening the culture.
Yes, but it is sometimes used to dismiss any actionable insights that can be used in politics.
”Would never work here, the culture is different!”
Maybe Im just ranting…
出る釘は打たれる。
It is a way of dismissing clear rules.
Because it’s not that it is used to attack people that are different, but it is used to deincentive bad behaviour, but by conflating the two you end up in a bad place, where incentives are…misaligned.
It seems to me Japan does just fine by having rules and sticking to their culture.
Many people admire Japanese culture. But they wouldn't have anything to admire had Japanese people not conserving and caring greatly about their culture and sticking to their rules and ways of life.
I probably won't be integrating in the Japanese culture, but I admire and respect it and the fact they still have that culture.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down (Google Translate.)
It's even less that we move around a lot more; technology advanced with the personal computer and Internet such that kids see adults not knowing things about the world that they already do. What is decades of personal lived experience wisdom when there's tiktok and YouTube and chatbots?
>kids see adults not knowing things about the world that they already do
In the age where anyone can find anything online, experience is more valuable than it ever was. Technology won't replace that.
In the US we are at all time lows for internal migration. Or at least very close to them, I haven’t checked those stats in a couple years since this last came up on HN.
We used to (as a population) migrate to opportunity far more than we do now.
For many reasons there is simply far less community engagement and integration going on. Fewer people put down strong “roots” in their communities these days.
Thats surprising, I thought moving was less common than now. In either case, is it possible that the single households is the other factor, people choosing more instead of interacting with whoever is around?
It might be who’s migrating. Possibly the coastal PMC workers sloshing back and forth while blue collar workers have less mobility than the 60s?
When? In my grandparents generation (born late 1800s to early 1900s) moving to either try to start a farm in the US or to leave a failing farm for a job in town at the local whatever factory was very common.
Post WW2 for the boomers was loaded with people flooding to all kinds of industrial boom cities.
After that it was hollowing out of the rust belt and moving out of cities to suburbs due to the lead/crime epidemic.
Then rich cities boomed back with millennials in a continuous feedback loop where the successful ones became more desirable as money brought attractions/activities/restaurants, draining the failing ones even more.
Then 2020 was the brief mega disruption where people thought the internet might catch on and they found out the vast majority of white collar jobs can be done from home so the fanned out to all of the nice and cheap suburbs, mountain towns, etc. Now the Internet fad has worn off so that’s reversing a bit.
Moving in the US has been very common until this brief lull where you could change jobs without relocating thanks to remote work.
Unfortunately we’re going backwards so it wouldn’t surprise me if constant relocation resumes.
The main factor that you fail to mention is living cost, and not the internet, which made it possible and desirable to frequently move in search of opportunity.
It didn't mean there weren't people that lived long-term in communities. However, it did mean that you could find more lucrative opportunities in different places while also affording to move and live there.
That began to slowly change in the 60's, beginning with the death of single occupancy residences and a lack of funding/investment in affordable housing for a significant portion of income brackets.
The last 30ish years helped cement that for lots of reasons, but the ability to work remotely via the internet isn't particularly new nor causative for that change.
I've been taught to respect the elders. But now I've seen that there are enough of them which aren't honest, good people, but only know how to present themselves in a positive light, while looking down on the ones they live with.
I now stand neutral against them: they may be good, they may not be. There's nothing in their age which makes them deserve more respect than the one younger people deserve.
So do you respect 12-year-olds as much as you respect 25-year-olds? Do you respect the opinions on work and adult responsibilities of a 23-year-old as much as those of a 35-year-old? Do you trust the professional judgment of a junior engineer as much as that of a senior engineer?
Older people, in general, know more and have better judgment than younger people.
Apparently there are trading cards for everything now: https://divorceddads.shop/
I hope the people don't get too much pressure to up their stats.
>The rarity of a card isn’t based on fantasy stats — it’s tied to real-world contributions. The more actively the ojisan engages in volunteer work or community service, the higher the chances of their card being upgraded to a shiny version with a glossy laminated effect.
I'm a bit reminded of the cards Harry and Ron find in their chocolate frog packaging, each of which features a picture of a famous wizard, some historical, some contemporary like Albus Dumbledore. The kids had a chance of actually meeting some of the heroes pictured on their cards.
Reminds me of the fisherman call where you could sign up to have a professional fisherman give you a wake up call. https://soranews24.com/2017/05/12/japanese-fishermen-start-m...
I found Wakie[1] in 2015 while on a project in London. Every morning at a specific time you set, a stranger (real person and no AI) would call you and talk to you briefly, waking you up. I used it for about a month.
1. https://wakie.com
I don’t speak Japanese but I would pay for this. Trying to get up and run before 6 is a chore. Having a fisherman wake up call would be awesome and motivating. Especially for someone who loves fishing.
I would prefer this very much to Jocko Willink
I want a wake up call from David Goggins.
I want one from Walton Goggins.
I think literally and figuratively it would involve a bathtub full of icewater.
Last year it was a real fisherman.
Next year it will be an AI.
But AI is like video games, it can’t emulate sacrifice and other deep human dynamics because there’s no stake. If you die you restore from last save point. For AI you have infinite no-memory interactions, which changes the dynamic. In other words, your actions don’t have lasting consequences.
The few games that succeed in building something deeper (for me RDR2 but you take your pick) have to carve out sacrifice and character out of the player’s time, which is finite.
Given Japan's extreme conservatism, I doubt it.
Japan has an exception to copyright law allowing for analysis, which has been (ab)used to train AIs to generate Studio Ghibli style content.
Check out their robots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_robotics
Female companion robot as early as 2005.
I still remember decades and decades ago hearing about vending machines in Japan. Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there. This was sometime in the 1990s, before even Starbucks was a huge thing. Everyone I knew thought the idea of cold coffee was ridiculous, a quirk of the Japanese that would never catch on.
I feel the Japanese have been pretty good at exporting culture, but it has a lot of misses among the few hits. I wonder if this is something that would catch on outside of Japan.
> Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there.
The actor Tommy Lee Jones has some amusing commercials for canned coffee:
* https://www.brandinginasia.com/the-tuesday-take-suntory-boss...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_Coffee
The premise is that he is an alien in disguise evaluating human society, so some of the situations shown are quite whimsical.
David Lynch's Twin Peaks commercials for Georgia coffee, featuring almost the entire cast in character and a running subplot of a missing Japanese woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxNvhN7UUE
This is incredible! Thanks for posting.
> There's an old tradition of American stars appearing in Japanese television commercials, [...] before downing what appears to be about a four ounce can of Suntory Iced Rainbow Blend coffee.
Was this tradition referenced or inspired by Bill Murray's "Suntory Time" scene in "Lost in Translation" (2003)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiQnH450hPM
Westerners in Japan has been a thing for decades:
> Anyone who has seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation must wonder for at least a second if there is truth in Bill Murray’s character of a famous American actor in Japan to film a commercial. Well, there definitely is. Huge American and European stars have been hawking products in Japanese commercials for decades.
* https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/western-entertainers-who-...
* https://www.goretro.com/2015/08/sake-to-me-western-celebs-in...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase)
She was referencing the ones done by her father: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/akira-kurosawa-francis-ford-cop...
> Was this tradition referenced or inspired by []
referenced. Here's a couple suntory commercials dating much older:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyN-aHtAVzs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goUBezKpNmU
One of my favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgEM8VjHD_0
Andy Warhol for TDK
And vending machines with hot drinks and soups, my favorite being cream of corn soup...which I have yet to see stateside.
Another thing Japan had before the US was texting on your phone. I was living in Japan at the time and recall telling my American friend who worked as a Manager at ATT about texting and she thought it was the dumbest thing she had ever heard of.
First trip to Japan, I selected what I thought was a local cherry Coke equivalent from the vending machine. I was more than a little surprised to get a can that was a) hot, and b) contained not cherry-flavored cola, but chunky sweet red bean soup (oshikuro).
oh noooo
I was living in Australia in 2000 and texting was more common than calling because it was cheaper to text than call. But in the US it was the opposite. You had unlimited calling, but plans around that time had a different pricing scheme for texting (can't remember the exact details) so could be one reason why it took the US a bit longer to finally pick up texting. I remember it was about a year or 2 later that I felt texting started to become more common in the US.
Yeah, I lived in Europe in 1999 and 2000 and then moved to the US. In the EU you could text people from different countries and it would often work.
Then I moved to the US and the shock of not being able to text between networks was really something. That and writing cheques. I'd never written a cheque in Australia or Europe but you sort of had to in the US while electronic payments between banks were sorted in Australia in the 1990s.
These days it seems when a technology appears it generally spreads more quickly.
Texting in network was a fixed rate per text (later unlimited) and then texting out of network was crazy like 10 cents a message.
You thought blue bubble was bad, it literally cost you money to talk to people who chose another carrier.
The texting culture had funny side effects then because of it. You would get roasted for multiple messages when one would suffice. :)
> And vending machines with hot drinks and soups, my favorite being cream of corn soup...which I have yet to see stateside.
Its a cultural thing I am sure. As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene. I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable. Stale bread, wilted vegetables, low quality meats, cheese, etc, sloppy prep. Who cares, ship it.
On the other hand, I can see food vendors in Japan guarding their reputation with attention to their craft ensuring quality.
> As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene.
The grandparent post is talking about canned food/drink that's heated in the machine. Vending machines with freshish prepared food do exist, but they're kinda pointless given the existence of...
> I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable
Convenience store food in Japan is fantastic: food from 7/11, Lawson, Family Mart, etc. is probably unironically better than the median restaurant in the U.S.
The foods sold in vending machines make sense though - everyone's already used to instant or canned soup, so throwing it into a vending machine and warming it up makes sense. You're not getting fine dining from the vending machines, you're just getting a quick and tasty snack (although there is also a culture of niche vending machines with serious meals that require cooking at home, which is another story). Just swap out the corn potage with something Americans would already be familiar with, like Campbell's chicken noodle soup in a single-portion can with a twist cap instead of needing a can opener, and it could work.
I think some Americans might object more to the idea of microplastics leaching into your food, or high amounts of preservatives, though. And the ubiquity of vending machines in Japan makes it possible to build a habit around vending machine food, whereas in the US they're fewer and far between, so you couldn't really depend on them.
> The foods sold in vending machines make sense though - everyone's already used to instant or canned soup, so throwing it into a vending machine and warming it up makes sense.
The US used to have much more diverse vending machine offerings, including prepared hot foods and drinks, but they started to disappear in the 1970s, though you could find stragglers into the 1990s in older institutional settings (e.g. government buildings), especially for drinks--coffee, hot cocoa, etc. As previously mentioned, I think they fell out of favor because they began to be considered very poor quality (it's a death spiral if turnover doesn't happen fast enough), perhaps as compared to increasingly popular drive-thru alternatives. I guess in a way it was a result of our car culture. Like with the demise of cafeterias generally[1], Americans preferred to jump in their car rather than choosing from what was available within walking distance.
[1] A wall of vending machines selling sandwiches, salads, soups, and hot drinks constituted a "cafeteria" in many buildings.
People always forget something, when talking about Japanese vending machines: vandalism. Vandalism is relatively uncommon in Japan, whereas it's sadly endemic in most Western societies.
Emoji is a Japanese thing too. It's why a lot of the early emoji are kind of odd from a western point of view, like the naruto fish cake, Japanese top secret emoji and hot bath symbol.
There's also the Moyai statue in Shibuya that gave us an emoji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyai_statue#Shibuya_Station_m...
Kinkos in the 90s (back when it was a by-the-hour computer lab) had vending machines with hot chicken soup.
We had hot chicken soup from a dispenser at school (~2000) too, but it was gash made from powder.
was it just broth? the vending machine at my college, had that where it'd have coffee, cocoa, or chicken broth.
I've seen vending machines in the USA dispense hot soup, it was at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
No idea if they had cream of corn.
Yeah! The hot corn liquid from a vending machine was maybe the weirdest thing I had when I visited.
Emoji also caught on, I'm told.
Iced Coffee has been very popular in Australia (and especially South Australia) since the 70s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_Union_Iced_Coffee
(I'm assuming this is an equivalent product; I don't drink coffee personally.)
Better than that is the Japanese 'Boss', which even comes in a very-Japanese steel tin. Great coffee that you can now get at most Australian servos, convenience stores, etc.
https://suntorybosscoffee.com
It's made in the Japanese iced style, which is easy to mimic at home and really does make a nice iced coffee.
1. Get your standard filter/drip machine. Nothing fancy.
2. Double the amount of coffee you normally use. You want it coming out strong.
3. Fill the receiving jug with ice.
4. Drip directly on to ice.
As a New Zealander who's been to Australia + a small handful of other countries I can vouch for Australia having a uniquely good convenience store dairy based drink industry. OAK is another old faithful brand I miss in NZ. Also Hungry Jacks (Burger King) there uses cream instead of milk in the soft serve and it's noticeably better.
The $1 coffee from 7-11 was my go-to drink in Australia. Came with the added bonus of annoying the hipster coffee snobs in melbourne when I was walking down the street holding a 7-11 cup. Damn fine coffee.
I am not a coffee hipster (as will probably become evident by my next statement) but I do like good cafe coffee here in Melbourne and I completely agree. I don’t make it my daily driver, but 7/11 and even McCafe coffee is quite decent here IMO
7-11 has surprisingly good coffee in the US too, or at least Texas. There was a 7-11 on the corner of the block I use to live on and drive past to get to Starbucks until I was running late once and decided to just grab the first coffee available. Now if I just want plain brewed coffee I'll find a 7-11. And if I'm wanting something more Starbuck-ish but don't want to deal with the morning rush, I'll go to a 7-11 and mix little over half a cup of the brew coffee then top it off with their hot chocolate.
Iced coffee in Australia seems to automatically imply sweet with lots of milk (or even ice cream). This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.
_Most_ of the coffee sold in cans in Japan is also sweetened. Not all, you can usually find a can or two that are just black and unsweetened, but a majority of the cans will be sweet to some degree.
I agree completely, most iced coffee here from supermarkets is hyper sweetened rubbish that barely tastes like coffee at all. You have to go for “double” or “triple” espresso options to get a proper taste of coffee, otherwise you’re just drinking sweet milk (and not even in the guilty pleasure Vietnamese iced coffee way)
As previously mentioned Boss does do a decent black iced coffee though, and there are a few niche brands around putting out less sweet varieties
> This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.
Same reaction I had the first time I ordered a cappuccino there. I learned to order Flat Whites cause I kept forgetting to tell them to not put chocolate powder on top...why anyone thought that would be a great idea is beyond my comprehension. The Flat White on the hand easily makes up for their cappuccino faux pas
> Everyone I knew thought the idea of cold coffee was ridiculous, a quirk of the Japanese that would never catch on.
Iced coffee has been around for centuries and is very common in warmer countries (and was before the 90s). アイスコーヒー is closer to cold brew than the milkshake-esque thing we call iced coffee.
> I wonder if this is something that would catch on outside of Japan.
Cynically, only if someone sees a business / money making opportunity.
I dream about being able to get a cold can of Boss Coffee every day outside my house.
it may well be "cold brew", a coffee specialty that is some work to make at home and that has a very distinguished taste and contrast coffee that was brewed hot and then cooled down.
Japanese vending machines are an act of engineering beauty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AJnGjMAObA
These is easily one of the most heartwarming videos on YouTube.
> Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there.
They're everywhere!
In rural Hokkaido, some people even have them outside their home's driveway for people walking by. They have various teas (green, hojicha, jasmine, etc.), Coke and Pepsi products, Pocari Sweat (like Gatorade), iced coffees, and sometimes even hot teas and hot coffees that are heated on demand. They're super convenient and something I miss having in America (we seemed to have more of them here in the 90's and early 2000's).
The only problem is that in Japan there can sometimes be absolutely zero public garbage (or, more correctly, recycling) bins in sight. You have to carry your trash with you, which is a bit annoying and mildly gross if it spills.
I found they did have bins, but they were either at the vending machine or in the entrance of any store. And there are a lot of convenience stores!
The bins near vending machines are almost always _only_ for cans/plastic bottles.
That accounts for ~80% of the garbage you'll produce, but sometimes you'll have a onigiri wrapper, or a dirty tissue that'd be nice to get rid of, and finding a place to do that can be more difficult (ironically, especially so in heavily touristy areas).
There was a story of someone finding one in the middle of a hike, and following a long cable to an actual settlement.
Pocari Sweat is so good. I always grab a bottle anytime we go to the japanese store outside chicago. I assumed it was a fake anime product like the way they always turn pepsi into bepsi or something, but no it's real and it's delicious.
Pocari Sweat is great. I live in Osaka now and it's hard to resist constantly drinking the stuff. Aquarius also.
TIL there was a real-world inspiration for Tropic Thunder's Booty Sweat.
> You have to carry your trash with you, which is a bit annoying and mildly gross if it spills.
True, but it also means that most people are used to this and don’t even question it. Which means no overflowing garbage bins or the need to service them in the middle of nowhere.
That's awesome.
Town celebrates its own via a medium that the youth seek out on their own. The youth then forge closer connections with their elders. Everyone is happy, everyone wins.
Except that women are totally absent?? does nobody on HN even realize that?
Putting on my Product Manager hat, the best product launches often focus on a single well-defined persona, as this one apparently did. Now that this is proven to work, they can expand to middle-aged women, older people, younger people, animals and what have you. But I think that this is a great start.
Except humanity for the last 1000 years as alway done that to put white men in charge, in 2025 perhaps we can change how it's done and make everybody equal?
I'm sorry, white men?
The bar in this medium is pretty low. Pokemon is about capturing animals in the wild and making them fight in captivity.
The "why just men?" question is probably worth raising locally, but I'm not going to shame them from the other side of the planet for it.
That's a needlessly uncharitable interpretation, but it is an interesting point.
I think that increased rates of low (and high) grade neurodivergence in men, and society expecting eccentric behavior from men, especially as they age, results in in the sort of characters that make something like this work. Umarells in Italy come to mind.
There's quite a few assumptions in your comment; one, that men have higher grades of neurodivergece than women (whereas it can also be underdiagnosis or masking through higher societal expectations on women). Women are eccentric too.
Men are more dissimilar from one another, generally, than women are from one another. Sorry.
In Japan, men commit suicide at roughly twice the rate of women. The age group with the highest rate of suicide was 50-59. I can't find good data, but loneliness and not feeling valued by a community is very likely a significant contributor here.
Women are important but if the problem you're trying to solve is deaths of despair, then focusing on men makes sense.
That isn't even only Japan. On a global scale men are 1.7 times more likely, in the US 3.6 times, Europe 4.0.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid...
There are so few resources about the topic for men compared to women that comlaining about it is just sad.
Suicide among men is ~4x higher in Canada and the USA in some demographics, too. In some cases, such as men 80+, the rate is 6.5x higher in Canada. This is crazy sad. It doesn't mean other things affecting women aren't sad. It just means this is sad.
what does this has to do with the game? and why having BOTH men and women in the game would change anything to this?
You're trying to justify something which is unjustifiable in 2025
Except that’s not in any way their motivation, so this is a completely unrelated comment.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
So "always putting white men first above all the other people in society" is "good" ?
Well, evidenced by the fact that these aren't even white men, and we have no evidence that anybody in the community in question are actually offended or feeling disempowered except for righteous social justice warriors like yourself, this comes off as screeching from someone who just wants to push their agenda.
And before you call me a sexist MAGA patriarchal asshole, not only am I liberal, but I actually live in Japan and interact with the local culture here all day every day. I speak the local langauge, am married to a local, have local friends and in fact talk about and interact with ojisans on a very regular basis, because it is a cultural touchpoint that is relevant here. Do you?
I am sick and tired of annoying people like you co-opting every discussion to push a specific victim-mindset zero-sum world view, reducing everything to your race and sex struggle without actually lifting a finger to, say, do things that actually affect outcomes in society besides pissing people off—unlike the people who set up this lighthearted card game, which is demonstrably bringing a community together. Not everywhere is the USA, let alone your toxic online ragebait bubble. What you are doing is repelling people from your cause more than helping it, myself included.
Please do some soul searching and if you really feel a need to irritate people, I would appreciate you do it somewhere else. I hope that your implication that Japanese culture is inferior because it doesn't kowtow to your cultural expectations, has made you feel good today.
In fairness older men are goofy, women not so much
And Japanese people are well aware of this, there is definitely a common youth cultural appreciation of goofy middle-aged men here beyond what I was used to growing up in the USA.
"obachan" expansion potential
An obvious choice for an early expansion pack.
Like Pokemon adding a girl player character in 2nd Gen.
The whole thing was an idea of a woman, Eri Miyahara, 45-year-old secretariat head of the Saidosho regional community council, I bet she have her reasons to focus on men, I suspect it's the perceived loneliness of the selected ones.
Hey, what about the women?
Totally. And also lgbtqia+ community and people of color. /s
Original video and articles (in Japanese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m21OBCVPWo
https://www.fnn.jp/articles/-/842101
https://www.fnn.jp/articles/-/838709
The comment here are a perfect example of how this could not exist in the west without some shitstorm trying to destroy it.
I guess continuing to ignore 3/4:1 male suicide rates is one "solution" to mitigate demographic aging..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid...
I remember as a young kid living in Norway, there'd be the "russefeiring"[0] around May where students finishing their final semester will don a brightly colored overall and cause mayhem in the town. I remember getting shot a lot with water guns. Anyway, one thing that is pretty fun about that tradition is that the students print cards for themselves with a picture and fun facts etc and hand them out to all the little kids, and we'd trade them between ourselves to have the whole collection of students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring
Reminds me of "Divorced Dads" playing cards
Yep, I totally expected this article to be about Divorced Dads inexplicably catching on with Japanese youth.
We're looking for house! Come on, house!
Holographic white Oakley's... not bad, it pairs with day drinking.
I wonder which one came first
Haha yep!
This is a superb idea. I had seen random cat gacha but not trading cards of random dudes.
Most efforts at custom TCGs seem to go nowhere at all because of the absence of any practical trading meta game, so bootstrapping that with local interest is a very neat marketing move that aligns very well with the desired community engagement.
The result is that whole idea is greater than the sum of its parts.
i needed an "oh, that's really nice" story today. this delivered.
in every way, this seems well-intentioned, quirky, cute, fun, and positive. unless there's some subtext i'm missing, this is just a good and nice thing happening that's great for everyone involved.
nice to have a story like that these days.
That’s neat. I hope they expand it to include middle aged women in the community too.
Trading cards skew toward boys, and boys are more likely to look up to men. Of course, I wouldn't rule out old babaa cards either.
Men statistically have fewer social connections and suffer more from loneliness as they get older, so if the goal is to remedy that, it makes sense to start with men first.
Is this true in Japan, too?
I don't have hard data but from my personal anecdote, I would say yes.
I suspect it's worse in Japan.
I see no particular reason to discriminate even from the get-go. Nor was addressing loneliness even the goal.
If one house is on fire and you spray water on it to put out the fire, do you feel obligated to spray water on every other house too so that the other houses don't feel discriminated against?
In the current political climate, yes.
If you’re the fire department, acting on the governments behalf? Yes.
Fire departments spray water on not burning houses?
Yes. It is done when they think the neighbouring structure is at risk of catching fire.
That would still be prioritizing structures based on risk. Not just spraying random other houses in town because they feel left out.
You could apply the same logic to "Women in X" groups. It's not discrimination as much as it is support.
It’s funny to me that the honest intent of my comment was merely “that’s neat, it would be cool to expand it to other members of the community” and people go straight to discrimination & indignation. Is it so hard to just express that it’d be cool to take a neat thing and expand it?
Seriously, I think the subtext is that people in the West equate Japanese = sexist (and therefore are an inferior people) and that the choice of focusing on ojisans, is a sexist decision made to degrade women.
When in reality it probably is just a light-hearted decision since old men are goofy, a lot of visible local businesses in rural Japan tend to be run by men, and the concept provoked a laugh.
If anyone makes a similar comment in the reverse situation they’re dogpiled with “bUt WhAt AbOuT tHe MeNz?” comments.
>Is it so hard to just express that it’d be cool to take a neat thing and expand it?
If people feel the need to do such a thing, they will do it without being asked.
> I hope they expand it to include middle aged women in the community too.
Neighborhood MILFs and Cougars?
>Neighborhood MILFs and Cougars?
If they do that, some angry commenter on HN will shout about objectifying women.
As they should?
Only if they also complain about all the other objectifications often glorified.
> Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
Kids involved in community seems to be the best result
"Rural Japan" checks notes. Pop 1.7M
This can only end one way...
In an animated tv show depicting middle-aged man battles by community-service-dance-off. May include flashing images.
My prediction is isekai.
Middle aged man with lousy card stats gets isekaied, and ends up with ridiculous stats hidden on the back of his card.
Wow this is so heartwarming. Actually celebrating "common humans" is so underrated. And kids doing this no less is even more amazing!
The whole point of this is that we've reached breaking point with the ridiculous attempt to replace everything with a digital experience. It is fitting that Japan, which was arguably the place where the digital revolution really took off, should be the first place where it is rejected.
Ages 74, 81, and 68. Are these middle aged?
As I understand things, in Japanese the terms "onii-san", "ojisan" and "ojii-san" literally translate as "older brother", "uncle" and "grandpa" respectively - and are widely used for people who aren't relatives.
So while the colloquial use of ojisan roughly lines up with "middle-aged man" it's not a perfect mapping.
Ojisan age bracket can be pretty wide, but 81 sounds to me more like an ojiichan. That said, if they're running a business and are still somewhat lively they can possibly still pass as ojisan in context.
Oniisan is much younger usually; usually I don't hear ojiisan so much as ojiichan (as well as ojisan rather than ojichan), my wife is Japanese and it rubs her weird to hear the opposite honorific in these cases.
“Middle-aged” is a wrong in this case translation of “ojisan”, lit “uncle” but colloquially can mean “old man” in an endearing or mean way depending on context
In Japan, yes
Well, if the edges are the Japanese life expectancy of 84 and 0, then 80 does fall somewhere in the middle. So there should be some four-year-olds in this deck, too.
Erm, are there some for middle aged women to?
Three months after loosing my Mum one realises and appreciates what a huge amount she did for so many people.
Ojisan as in O.G.san as in Old Gangster san?
I think AR or augmented reality games like this trading cards is the future of gaming, but this one is offline AR rather than online.
One of the best game I ever played is the text based souvenir game shopping game on Windows 3. I can't recall the name of the game now since it's more than 30 years ago, but it's about shopping souvenirs using London Underground Tube. You have a semi realistic time constraints like train schedules, your flight schedules and of course list of souvenirs items to shop. This is totally offline since there is no Internet available at the time but it's very engaging nonetheless.
My proposal for the modern version of the game is to use real-time train schedules (with delays, ticket discounts, etc) that are available publicly on the Internet for many metropolitan cities in the world for examples Tokyo, London and Berlin [1],[2],[3].
Imagine you can have a real-world realistic in-app in-game items purchases feature that you personally can buy in the game and delivered to you or anyone you fancy of giving souvenirs except that you only virtually went there.
[1] A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system (2023 - 103 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37829061
[2] Live map of London's Underground system:
https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/
[3] Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin (2020 - 102 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647227
[4] Berlin train info:
https://www.vbb.de/fahrinfo
Ngl that kind of pulls the fun out of it
The Oregon Graduate Institute (or maybe just the CS&E dept.) once made trading cards of the professors, to promote STEM to area children.
Feels like a portal to the alternate universe we could have with modern technology but no mass media.
s/mass/social/g
Why only men? Women don't exist in any important role in their society?
I share your sentiment, I don’t believe that important women don’t exist there. Surely there has been some kind of bias here. Does anyone else agree?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618143
Trading cards cather to young boys. They look up to men.
Reminds me of this old SNL skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzo73jYl3Ew
> Seeing this, the game’s creator decided to take it to the next level. New rules were introduced, allowing the cards to be used in actual battles. The objective isn’t to defeat the opponent’s card but to outplay it based on the characters’ skills and abilities.
Anyone have an idea of how the gameplay works? How do you "outplay" your opponent?
Fantastic idea. Curious if this works in my town as well
You can try it.
Reminds me of divorced dads card game https://www.youtube.com/@AudioOpera
Thank you! I knew it reminded me of something!
This is unexpectedly brilliant and heart warming. Thank you for sharing.
Apparently the "fat Steve" minecraft toy is sold out everywhere.
https://shop.mattel.com/products/minecraft-steve-large-scale...
“Japan has always had deep subcultures around games, cards, and character design — but what’s new is how global social platforms amplify them. It feels like TikTok is acting as a cross-cultural layer over local fandoms. Could this become a driver for new forms of cross-border cultural products?”
Interesting translation issue where they use the dictionary definition of "ossan" (middle aged guy) but then they're all senior citizens.
This sounds like something straight out of the Yakuza video game series. Which, incidentally, is a series largely focused on middle aged men - I would love a set of these cards with Kiryu, Majima, Saejima, Akiyama, Ichiban, Nanba, Adachi, etc...
I thought the same thing. The sujimon in the Like a Dragon games are conceptually pretty similar (except it's various Yakuza mobs you're collecting).
Need a Nancy card so badly...
MY TIME HAS FINALLY COME
Wait I'm actually elderly
I NEED TO GO TO JAPAN NOW.
This is a stupid idea that couldn't possibly work. But it did?
I like the idea. On one hand it promotes usung heroes, people who did good for their community. On the other hand it helps establishing role models.
It's better if kids have these people as role models than random rock stars or movie stars.
I would add some obasan - the female counterpart of "ojisan"
All they need now is some irl sujimon!
Makes you think, if your life was reduced to a trading card, would anyone want it? For most, probably not.
These aren't middle-aged men, they're straight-up old.
"Ojisan" means something like "gramps". Though given how youth-oriented Japanese culture is, I suppose it could refer to any man 35 or older.
Ojisan (おじさん) is roughly "uncle." Ojiisan (おじいさん) is grandpa.
Same with obasan (おばさん) for aunt and obaasan (おばあさん) for grandma.
Creativity thrives in Japan. I wonder why this country seems so prolific in that regards.
Japanese websites have a great aversion to even 2005 level Web homogeneity, let alone the modern tailstraps.
This such a genius idea to get the kids to learn about the people in their community.
I feel like this is the kind of stuff that will be common with AI. Imagine having a whatsapp family group and a bot auto-generates this type of games for you based on your group.
It's a privacy nightmare but it will be fun for sure.
The whole point of this is that it’s people thinking about people, not some AI bullshit.
AI can facilitate the creation part and become invisible. It will still be p2p.