"Things Were Better in the Showa Era" — Were They Really?

"Things were so much better in the Showa era, weren't they?" I heard someone say it again recently. Though really, I've been hearing it for years. On television, on the internet. Every time I see people nodding along, one question rises in my mind.

Do they really mean that?

The Hospital — A Clear Example

I was born in the Showa era, so you might as well hear me out. I'm not saying there was nothing good about it. There were things worth valuing — I'll grant that.

But "better than today"? That's where I'd ask you to pause.

Let me use hospitals as an example.

When you live with a serious illness and need to attend hospital regularly, you come to know the place in a way most people never do. It's not somewhere you visit once a year for a checkup. It's a place you go month after month, year after year — the same corridors, the same sounds, the same faces. Which means the environment matters to you in a way it simply doesn't for a casual visitor.

In the Showa era, you could smoke inside hospitals. Doctors smoked in their examination rooms. A patient comes in saying "Doctor, I've had this cough," and the doctor blows a lungful of smoke in their direction while saying, "Dear me, that is concerning." Why anyone thought adding smoke to a cough was acceptable, I genuinely cannot say — but it was normal.

Nurses — or "nursing ladies," as they were called then — were also wildly hit or miss. If you drew the short straw, you got shouted at for no apparent reason. A needle inserted with an audible click of the tongue. Bad enough for a one-time visit; when you're seeing the same person every month, being drained further by someone whose job it is to help you is another matter entirely.

The flip side: when you did get a kind nurse, it was something else. Being told "you must be in pain" — just those words — could carry you through the whole visit. The rarity made the kindness feel extraordinary. But of course, what you're really describing is a normal thing made rare — and that's nothing to celebrate.

Today's hospitals? No-smoking, of course, and kept clean by the people who work there quietly and persistently every day. When you're suffering, the least you can ask for is an environment that doesn't make things worse. On that single point, today's hospitals are incomparably better than Showa's. I can say that without hesitation — as someone who has been making that journey, month after month, through Heisei and Reiwa both.

On Children Being "Too Noisy"

Let me touch on one more thing: children. It might seem odd, coming from someone who has none, but hear me out.

In the Showa era, there were many children. More children means more crying and more noise — that was simply normal. If you transplanted the full volume of that era into today's society, people would still complain it was too loud. It's not that people have suddenly become quieter; it's that the shape of the population has changed.

I believe that crying and making noise is a child's job. So it doesn't bother me in the least. If anything, a child who is oddly quiet from the start seems slightly unsettling — you can't quite imagine what's going on inside.

Yet when a child makes noise, certain voices always appear: "The parents have no discipline," "It's the fault of relaxed education," "There's no moral grounding anymore." Everyone wants to draw a line between what schools are responsible for and what parents are responsible for. But whoever draws it, the line is never quite right — because every situation is too different.

And above all: no parent, of any species, starts out experienced. Birds, cats, people — the first time is always a process of feeling your way. It's entirely natural to change as you go. Looking for the correct answer from the very beginning is unreasonable. And if there were a perfect, universally applied method of raising children — everyone following the same script — you'd end up with rows and rows of identical people, and a profoundly dull world.

"Different" Looks Like "Better"

In the end, I think this is what "Showa was better" actually comes down to:

It was different. And different looks like better when you're looking at it from a distance.

Memories from childhood keep the good parts and let the rest fade. The nurse who shouted at you blurs; the smile of the kind nurse stays sharp. The smell of tobacco in the examination room gets converted into "the scent of that era," and nostalgia does the rest. That's just how human memory works.

Yes: there are things that genuinely felt better then, precisely because the times were different. I believe that.

But then, back to reality: would you actually want to go back to Showa right now? Back to examination rooms full of cigarette smoke? Back to hospitals where kindness was the exception, not the rule — and where you'd be going every single month?

I suspect most people's honest answer would be "well... not exactly."

"Showa was better" is a feeling about the past, not a fact about the present. And as a fact about the present — at least where hospitals are concerned — today is better. Of that, as someone who has been walking through those doors for years, I'm quite certain.