As a gathering place for many young workers, many people in Nakano Ward, including the Original Owner, worked in other wards during the day and returned to Nakano Ward to rest at night. Therefore, the streets were relatively quiet during the day, and the level of prosperity couldn't compare to areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya.
Even so, the street scene before him still gave him a small shock.
Even though it was currently 1999, the street scene looked almost no different from how it would look twenty-odd years later!
For a moment, he even thought he hadn't actually transmigrated, until he saw the button-style mobile phones in the hands of passersby, which possessed a strong sense of the era, pulling him back to reality.
However, recalling the massive, ever-changing transformations in his hometown over the decades, and then looking at the landscape here that remained largely unchanged twenty-odd years later, he gained a more intuitive understanding of Japan's economic stagnation.
"Is this the 'Lost Thirty Years'?"
He sighed slightly and continued on his way.
Entering Nakano Station, he took the JR Chuo-Sobu Line toward Akihabara Station. As soon as he entered the train car, a sense of the era even stronger than before immediately hit him—
First, the most eye-catching thing was undoubtedly the Japanese-style'Shamate'—three girls with wheat-colored skin, brownish-blonde hair, heavy colorful makeup on their faces, wearing low-rise hot pants paired with super-thick platform shoes and loose socks bunched at their calves, while covered in various small accessories. Their appearance was very impactful.
To be more formal, it would be more appropriate to call them 'Gyaru'.
Gyaru culture began developing in the nineties and reached its peak under the lead of the famous diva and first-generation Gyaru icon, Namie Amuro. By now, the Gyaru style seemed to have developed several different sub-genres, but the details were completely outside his scope of knowledge.
In contrast to the Gyaru style, the 'Yankee' (delinquent) style was also popular among young males at this time—
The upper body was a student uniform, while the lower body consisted of 'Bontan' (baggy trousers) with exaggeratedly wide legs that swept the ground. The clothes and pants were covered in chuunibyou-inducing text like [Unrivaled Under Heaven], and their hair was styled into various bizarre shapes.
The Gyaru style and the Yankee style were both popular elements used by young people at the time to express youth, rebellion, individuality, and fashion. They were the two great 'Crouching Dragon and Fledgling Phoenix' of the Japanese Shamate world.
It was a bit of a pity that in this train car, there were only Gyaru girls and no sign of any Yankees, so he couldn't witness the Yankees' style with his own eyes for the time being.
That being said, although the Gyaru girls' outfits screamed youthful rebellion, their behavior on the train was very well-mannered.
The three of them sat together, mostly quietly looking down at the fashion magazines in their hands, occasionally whispering and discussing in low voices. They were perfectly well-behaved.
On the contrary, the middle-aged man in a suit who had just gotten off the train was quite unsightly, shouting and cursing into his button-style mobile phone despite the poor signal in the train.
In comparison, the Gyaru girls' behavior was much more pleasant and likeable.
Besides the conspicuous Gyaru, there were many other interesting elements in the train—
In May 1998, the world's first MP3 player, the MP-Man F10, went on sale in Akihabara, but the high price of 40,000 yen deterred countless people, making it popular only within geek circles.
But coming into this year, as other companies entered the market, MP3 players of various brands were released one after another. While the performance of MP3 players further improved, the originally high prices were also driven down, with the average price dropping to around 20,000 yen.
Although this price still couldn't be called cheap, it barely reached a'somewhat acceptable' level for students and young office workers.
So on the trains nowadays, one could start to see young people holding MP3 players, wearing headphones, either spacing out or slightly nodding their heads, immersed in a music world that belonged only to them.
Only, unlike the exquisite and compact MP3 players in his memory, the body of today's MP3 players was as large as a palm.
On the other side, Nintendo's legendary handheld, the Game Boy, which had been on sale since 1989, finally saw the release of its mid-generation upgrade, the Game Boy Color, last year after nine years.
Compared to the Game Boy, the Game Boy Color improved battery life and featured a color screen. Upon its release, it achieved unexpected success and became the world's best-selling handheld that year.
At this moment on the train, there happened to be a child sitting next to his mother, looking down and playing with a handheld game console.
He discreetly leaned over to glance at the game screen. It turned out to be the color version of Tetris. Seeing this, he couldn't help but smile knowingly.
The GB series of handhelds were, for him, the 'most familiar strangers'.
Because he had never touched an authentic GB series handheld, but when he was a child, he had saved up his allowance to secretly buy a pirated handheld and loved it dearly until his father discovered and destroyed it in a storm of rage.
It was only after growing up that he learned that the pirated game console from his childhood was exactly a clone of the GB series handhelds.
Not only that, there were also quite a few 'phubbers' reading books in the train.
But unlike the situation described in 'Yi Lin' (Readers' Digest), most people were reading manga magazines, novels, fashion magazines, and other entertainment publications. A small number of older men held newspapers in their hands.
The scene within just one train car displayed enough of the era's spirit to make his eyes wander, but it also finally gave him a true sense of reality regarding the matter of 'transmigration'.
This was the end of the twentieth century, the Japan of 1999.