Why Gen Z Loves the Heisei-Era Nostalgia They Never Experienced

Tamagotchi, purikura (print-sticker photo booths), loose socks, flip phones. For people who knew the Heisei era, these are keepsakes of memory; to Gen Z, they look new, a little inconvenient, with individuality in their colors and shapes. It’s a boom in which two ways of seeing overlap, not just old products re-released as they were.

People in their thirties and forties can now pick out, with their own adult money, the products they wanted as children but couldn’t buy. Younger generations enjoy the look and feel of an era they never knew as something fresh. “Nostalgic” and “new” living side by side in the same product is the strength of Heisei retro.

This two-layer structure suits sellers, too. The same product can be sold as a memory or as a new piece of stationery or a new goods item, and changing how you explain it changes who it reaches.

But try to squeeze words aimed at both into one message and it will reach neither. You have to decide which layer you’re speaking to on each sales floor and in each medium.

The conditions for this phenomenon are actually quite limited. The item had to be reasonably widespread back then, gone from daily life now, and distinctive in appearance. Without all three, it’s merely old.

Most home appliances of the time, for example, are nothing more than nostalgic even today. Purikura and flip phones are different: the form itself can be read as a sign of an era, so the meaning reaches even generations that never knew them.

With Tamagotchi, you feed a tiny being on a screen, play with it and watch it grow. Long after its launch it kept changing form, into handheld devices, cards, apps and character goods, and it grew into a series with cumulative shipments of 98.1 million units as of March 2025.

What this number shows is not one huge hit but a series of waves that kept coming. If it had ended with the first boom, the total wouldn’t have reached this level.

What happened between waves is hard to see from the outside. Continuing to release products even when they weren’t selling is what created the next wave.

Its popularity comes not only from looking at a finished character but from the way your care changes its appearance and story. A relationship of not just “I like it” but “I raised it” is born. That connects to today’s oshi-katsu of watching over a streamer or idol for a long time.

The difficulty with raising games is that you can’t leave them. A mechanism where its condition worsens if you don’t look after it creates devotion, but it also becomes a burden. Many people must have struggled back then because they couldn’t bring it to school.

The current series has more designs that let you recover even if you leave it alone, and more features for playing with several people. It is being remade into something you want to come back to, not something you feel obliged to keep up. That adjustment speaks to today’s oshi-katsu as well.

In the 1990s, print-sticker machines spread a game of writing on photos taken with friends and swapping them. When smartphones became common, taking photos became free. Even so, purikura kept polishing the whole sequence of the experience: how you look, the backgrounds, the doodles, the stickers.

The machines didn’t evolve only toward making photos look cleaner. How much to edit eye size and skin brightness is adjusted to whatever the standard of “cute” is at the time.

FURYU has been extending the sense of young women and the know-how in character expression that it gained from purikura into plush toys, figures, games and advertising. Changing its role from a company that sells machines to one that turns “cute” into products is the important point.

Why pay to take photos when you can take them on a smartphone? One answer is that proof you were there together remains as a physical object. Photos on a screen flow by, but a sticker stays stuck in a wallet or planner.

Another is that taking them is itself the play. You step into a small booth, strike poses and split up the doodling. The photo is the result; the point is the few minutes spent together.

The generation that watched Sailor Moon as children is now in their thirties and forties. As products that fit adult daily life increase, such as cosmetics, accessories, clothes and exhibitions, fans who had drifted away come back. This is a market that welcomes “returners” (demodori), which is different from gathering new fans.

The trigger for a return is usually chance: you spot it in a store, it floats past on social media, a friend mentions it. Because you can’t make that happen on purpose, it matters that the product is available to buy when someone comes across it.

What matters is that it isn’t just a children’s item at an adult price. The products that get chosen keep the memory intact while offering quality and design you can use now, reconciling a promise to your past self with your present life.

Returners want different things from new customers. They don’t need the work explained, but they’re sensitive to settings that differ from back then, or to careless handling. Because they know so much, they also decide quickly.

They are also the group with the greatest purchasing power. Now they can buy what they couldn’t as students. The length of time they waited turns directly into how strongly they are willing to pay. Whether a reissue succeeds depends on handling that with care.

Heisei-era music can’t be discussed without the Komuro family, the circle of artists produced by Tetsuya Komuro, as well as globe and Namie Amuro. But once works can no longer be found on streaming services or official accounts, fans can’t easily return to “the time that was there.” Digital seems always available, but the way in changes at the provider’s discretion.

The problem runs deeper when official information is closed after a retirement or a hiatus. Fans at the time can rely on memory, but people who learned about the artist later have no way to check.

Paper magazines and CDs stay in your hands, but streaming, convenient as it is, depends on services and contracts. To pass culture on to the next generation, we need a system for preserving it as well as for selling it. Official records, sorting out rights and even a place where fans can safely access the works all need to be designed.

Works disappear from streaming for reasons beyond popularity. There are many rights holders and renewing contracts takes effort. One of the people involved can’t be reached. The cost of the procedures doesn’t match the expected sales. Stopping for administrative reasons is probably more common.

What fans can do is limited, but it isn’t nothing: owning works as discs or books, buying what the official side releases. What makes it easier for someone to decide to preserve a work is, in the end, visible demand.

Simple nostalgia can’t explain why younger people are drawn to Heisei retro. Waiting for film to be developed, the effort of choosing a CD, a phone you decorated yourself: inefficient, perhaps, but they leave the trace of your own hands.

Inefficiency becomes valuable only when you have a choice. People used these things back then because there was no other way, and the inconvenience itself was never the good part.

This feeling shows up in oshi-katsu tools, too. A handmade fan (uchiwa) or a case you decorated yourself grows dearer than a ready-made one used as is. The more effort you put in, the more it becomes yours.

In a digital world where everything is neatly arranged, slightly rough photos and limited functions create a sense of being yourself instead. Inconvenience deepens the memory of taking part. The dividing line is whether a company can reproduce not just an old-fashioned look but its feel and its breathing room.

This market’s lifespan depends on how many people hold the memories. As today’s buyers grow older, Heisei retro will give way to the retro of another era.

That is why the question is whether a reissue can pass its meaning on to a generation that never knew the time, instead of ending as a temporary sales bump. Whether retro lasts is decided by whether it reached people who have no memories of it.