Editorial essay · Images are AI-created illustrations, not documentary photographs.

The last day of the bubble

On 29 December 1989, the Nikkei 225 closed at 38,915 points. Tokyo land was so expensive that people joked the grounds of the Imperial Palace were worth more than all of California. Within three years the index had lost more than half its value. It would not regain that peak for more than three decades.

What followed is usually called the Lost Decade, though many in Japan would say it lasted longer. Banks carried bad loans they could not admit to. Companies stopped hiring. A generation graduated into a job market that had quietly closed. The period is remembered in economics textbooks as a cautionary tale about asset bubbles and slow repair.

It is remembered differently by anyone who watched Japanese animation in those years. The nineties produced some of the most influential anime ever made, and almost none of them are cheerful. They are full of broken cities, exhausted heroes, unstable identities and characters who cannot afford dinner. They were not documentaries about a recession. They were made inside its weather.

A boy who will not get in the robot

For decades the giant robot genre had been a fantasy of competence. A young pilot climbed into a machine and saved the world. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, which began broadcasting in October 1995, the young pilot does not want to climb in. Shinji Ikari is fourteen, frightened, neglected by his father and asked to carry a weight no adult around him is willing to share.

Its director, Hideaki Anno, has spoken publicly about the depression he went through in the years before the series. That history is often used to explain its darkness. But the show also caught something general. A society that had promised security in exchange for effort could no longer keep the promise. The adults in Evangelion are busy, damaged and evasive. The young are left to make sense of it.

Many viewers who were teenagers then remember the series less as science fiction than as recognition. It said out loud that the systems around them might not know what they were doing.

Bell peppers and beef, without the beef

Cowboy Bebop is cooler on the surface: jazz, cigarettes, spaceships named after old cars. Look a little closer and it is a show about being broke. Its crew of bounty hunters is constantly hungry. A running joke involves a dish of bell peppers and beef that arrives with no beef in it, because nobody can afford the meat. They chase rewards they almost never collect.

The characters are also people whose pasts have closed behind them. Spike cannot return to the syndicate. Jet left the police. Faye has lost her memories. Each is drifting through a solar system that has no particular use for them. The show treats that drift with style rather than despair, which may be why it still feels so modern.

It is easy to hear the connection to a generation of young Japanese who could not find the stable jobs their parents had expected. They called themselves freeters, part time workers moving between temporary positions. Bebop made the gig economy look almost glamorous, years before it had a name.

Selves that come apart

Another thread runs through the decade: anxiety about identity. In Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, a pop idol leaves her group to become an actress and finds her sense of who she is dissolving between the stage, the screen and an obsessive fan's website. In Ghost in the Shell, a cyborg officer wonders whether anything of her own remains inside a body made by a company. In Serial Experiments Lain, a quiet girl discovers that the network may hold a version of her more real than the one at home.

These stories anticipate the internet age with uncanny accuracy, and that is usually why they are celebrated. But they also belong to a moment when the old structures that told people who they were, the company for life, the steady promotion, were losing their hold. If work no longer defines you, and the future no longer seems guaranteed, the question of identity becomes urgent.

We have written before about Kon's editing and about how Perfect Blue already happened. Seen alongside its decade, it reads less as prophecy than as a report from inside a shaken society.

Why hard times make strange art

It would be too neat to say that recessions produce great art. Plenty of difficult periods produce very little, and the nineties anime boom had other causes: cheaper production, late night broadcasting slots, the home video market, a generation of animators trained in the eighties now ready to lead. Correlation is not destiny.

Still, there is a pattern worth noticing. When an economy is booming, culture tends to celebrate arrival: the city of the future, the successful hero, the shining product. When the boom ends, the questions change. What was it for? Who was left out? What do we do now that the promise has broken? Those questions are uncomfortable, and uncomfortable questions often make for lasting work.

A slower economy also changes who has time. Young people with insecure jobs and no clear path have hours that the boom would have claimed. Some of those hours went into drawing, writing and watching. The audience for difficult art was being formed at the same time as the art.

The view from a different decade

It is impossible to watch these films from Jakarta in 2026 without thinking of our own circumstances. Indonesia is not Japan, and this is not 1992. The comparison is imperfect, and it should stay that way. But the mood of a period in which people wait and see, unsure what the next years will bring, is something many viewers here will recognise.

If the nineties anime teach anything, it is that such moods do not only produce fear. They also produce honesty. Characters admit they are tired. Heroes refuse to be heroes. Stories stop pretending that the adults have everything under control. There can be a strange relief in that honesty. It makes room for a different kind of courage, smaller and more personal.

Perhaps the stories of this decade, here, are being made right now in rented rooms and small studios by people with too much time and too little certainty. We will know in about thirty years.

After the credits

Evangelion ends, in its television version, with a boy sitting on a chair in an empty space, surrounded by the people he knows, being told that he can choose to exist differently. Many viewers found it baffling. Some found it unbearable. Others found it the most hopeful thing they had seen.

That last reading may be the right one for difficult years. When the large promises fail, the small ones become visible: the decision to keep going, the friend who stays, the meal shared even without the beef. The Lost Decade gave us a shelf of stories about exactly that. They are worth watching again, not as warnings, but as company.