Japan's Lost Generation

A very good Research Article on Hikikomori

For those who have asked about further research materials on hikikomori.

First off, I would refer you to the bibliography of my last paper titled "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori". I have always found looking at the Bib of a good paper great groundwork for further inquiry. If you would like to use the sources cited from my last published paper you can download a PDF here .

Also, here is an outstanding research articles on hikikomori.

This is an excellent piece by Andy Furlong from the University of Glasgow that manages to tie together hikikomori, freeters and the current labor market issues in Japan.

Sociological Review, Volume 56 Issue 2, Pages 309 - 325, Published Online: 18 Apr 2008

Title "The Japanese hikikomori phenomenon: acute social withdrawal among young people"

Abstract:

Although rare in the west, in Japan and in some other advanced countries on the Asian-Pacific rim, there is a popular perception that there has been a significant increase in the numbers of young people who withdraw socially for protracted periods of time (referred to by the Japanese term 'hikikomori'). This paper describes the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, considers evidence relating to its prevalence and examines views about the causes. I argue that the tendency to think of hikikomori as a homogeneous group characterised by psychological malaise is misleading and that withdrawal and disengagement can also be linked to changing opportunity structures. The collapse of the primary labour market for young people and the growing prevalence of a precarious secondary sector has led to a situation in which traditional and deep-rooted norms are undermined and young people forced to find new ways of navigating transitions within a highly pressured and rigid system. Under these circumstances, acute withdrawal often represents an anomic response to a situation where tradition no longer provides adequate clues to appropriate behaviour rather than as a malaise reducible to individual psychologies.

There are no direct PDF downloads I am aware of but it is available online via Wiley Inter-science for purchase. For those readers affiliated with a university or research institution you should be able to access a copy of the Journal Sociological Review for free via your library system.

Furlong is a good researcher and reaches a great many conclusions I did is, I admit much more sophisticated in his analysis. Also he had the advantage of research funding and many years of experience over me. I highly recommend his book:

Furlong, A. & Cartmel, F. 2006, Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives, 2nd edn, Open University Press, Buckingham, UK.

FYI, I will be posting citations on the blog in the American Sociological Association (ASA) citation style using my Sente 5 Database (would the good folks at Third Street Software please, please publish an official ASA Bibliography Format? All I can find is a user created one in the forums).

~M. Dziesinski

Asian Studies Master's Thesis on Hikikomori

Okay,

After several years of pain and suffering I finally finished my Master's Thesis on my hikikomori research done from 2003-2004. And for all those hours of work I got a nifty cap December 2008:

...And a second Master's Degree. Though I don't think you can put two "MA"s after your name in correspondence except for humorous effect:

Michael Dziesinski MA MA

Back on topic.

Yeah, I know, publishing four years later is a bit pitiful- but you try doing two graduate programs at the same time see how much that slows you down.

Here's the Abstract:

Hikikomori, coined by Tokyo Psychologist Saito Tamaki, describes a trend of Japanese youth, primarily male, who shut out contact with society by hiding within their parents’ homes for months or years at a time. In the process, these hermits become truants and school refusals, failing out of school and work through their long periods of seclusion. Further, reentry into society as middle-class adults is difficult for those with a history of acute social withdrawal. This study examines Takeyama, a private rehabilitation institution for hikikomori in Tokyo, Japan. Over the three years of Takeyama’s rehabilitation program, hikikomori youth are exposed to daily social rehabilitation structured around an idealized norm of conduct through group participation, routinization, and repetition. The process of hikikomori rehabilitation at Takeyama also takes on the dimensions of gender and class socialization: the normalization of hikikomori youth with middle class backgrounds into a viable adult gendered working class identity.

My Master's thesis on the subject is available via Proquest:

"THE REHABILITATION OF JAPANESE YOUTH WITH ACUTE SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AT TAKEYAMA GAKKÔ, A HIKIKOMORI SUPPORT CENTER."

It takes a few months to go up in their system (was posted in November) but I believe you will soon be able buy my thesis in PDF form online.

My information on this is a bit scanty at present as I'm waiting for a contact by Proquest on accessibility of my thesis. I will provide updates here as they become available. These things appear to take several months due to backlog.

~M. Dziesinski

Major Update on my Hikikomori Research

All Academic, a service for papers presented at conferences, has a nice page that provides an abstract and downloadable PDF of the paper I presented at the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting(ASA) in Boston last summer.

Titled "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori", this paper is taken from data collected for my Asian Studies Master's thesis research from 2003-2004 at a hikikomori rehab center. Please consider this paper an update superior to my previous research provided on this blog.

Here is the abstract of my ASA Boston paper:

The label of hikikomori, coined by Tokyo Psychologist Saito Tamaki, describes an increasing trend of Japanese youth, primarily male, that shut out contact with society by hiding within their parents’ homes for months or even years at a time. In the process, these youth become truants, failing out of school and work through their long absences from the outside world. Reentry into society in middle class adult roles proves a difficult barrier for recovered hikikomori due to institutional features of Japanese society. This paper examines Takeyama, a private rehabilitation institution for hikikomori located in Tokyo Japan. Over the three-year span of Takeyama’s rehabilitation program, hikikomori youth from middle-class backgrounds are exposed to daily social rehabilitation structured around an idealized norm of conduct through group participation, routinization, and repetition. My central research question for this paper examines how the process of hikikomori rehabilitation observed at Takeyama involves gender and class socialization. Namely, the normalization of male hikikomori youth with middle class backgrounds into a viable adult masculine identity entwined with a working class future.

CItation:

Dziesinski, M. , 2008-07-31 "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Sheraton Boston and the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA Online <APPLICATION/PDF>. 2008-12-16 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p242231_index.html

~M. Dziesinski

The story thus far, or what the heck happened to this blog

The story thus far:

It began with a fatal hard drive crash a couple years back and the loss of all my archived material.   

I did manage to finally get logged back in after much email correspondence. But then the Qualifying Reviews for my PhD Sociology program at the University of Hawaii Manoa demanded all my time.

That finished and my brain completely fried, I thought I could get back to blogging. But soon after that the harrowing Damocles Sword of my Master's thesis deadline for my secondary degree in Asian Studies loomed. (Never co-enroll in two graduate degree programs if you want to retain your sanity) I found it difficult to find time for much besides panicked study.

Then over the summer of 2008 a paper submission for the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Boston was accepted for presentation, so I spent the summer preparing for that. (More on that paper soon).

During the Fall 2008 I was also busy with a great many things. Between applying for scholarship funding for my dissertation research starting the end of 2009 in Tokyo, Japan, I also managed to finish my Master's Thesis in Asian Studies and

But it never stops does it?

Currently I am preparing for my for my Comprehensive Exam which I plan to take the end of this Spring 2009 Term. I'll be busy with that this spring but now that my work on hikikomori is published I can post about it now.

Also as I start my research in Japan in the Fall I'll be using this blog as an anchor to friends and family ti let them know what I'm up to. Expect this blog to transform into current events on youth phenomena in Japan type at that point.

~M. Dziesinski

Hikikomori Reasearch Update and Other Things

Greetings Fellow Travelers,

This poor poor blog has fallen into disuse over the past few years and for that I greatly apologize. Over that time I have received a fair number of emails expressing interest in my hikikomori topic and for updates of the blog.

I thank those people for your continuing interest. I have always known that my topic was very much a niche area, that my intermittent posts, and my verbose blog style meant I would have a very tiny readership...if at all.

I figured those with interest would stumble upon my blog and that's fine by me. However, I always meant for Japan's Lost Generation to be a sounding board for my research. As much of my research material was unpublished I thought it prudent to keep that close to the vest until such time I had some copyright protection.

This concern was borne out by people who have contacted me directly in the last few years and then have subsequently released several publications that have come out in the interim of my blog's downtime. They have obviously built on my work posted on my Lost Gen blog but make no reference to me. That kind of dampened my enthusiasm to continue posting my unpublished research on my blog.

That's fine I guess.

In part, its my fault or not being quicker in getting my hikikomori work out there I have been lapped by others on the track, had I gotten my hikikomori work into an academic journal in 2005, I would have been one of the first in the English language academia to address the hikikomori issue in social science circles. In part, it is due to others being more established in the field and finding it easy to dismiss the work of a graduate student. But when you find the core of your ideas in another person's work it can be a bit frustrating.

Again, live and learn.

Welcome to my 2009 blog, enjoy your stay.

~M. Dziesinski

Hikikomori are part of a spectrum of globalized youth Part Two

The more functional end of the spectrum

The other end of this spectrum of coping youth are freeters, NEETS and twixters who are more functional, if only marginally so.

The effects of economic globalization has shifted the daily realities for Japanese youth away from the traditional social values and ideologies of their parent's generation. Traditional normalcy is not sustainable, nor are upholding the expectations that a youth can reasonably take on their father's and mother's roles in society. In addition, national institutions like education, set up for creating productive citizens for a pre-globalized economy, have been slow to change. Institutional inertia means that youth who do not excel or have the family resources to supplement their education to be competitive post-graduation, are ill prepared for an adult working life. They end up in working class lives as flexible workers, as freeter- or worse.

I think the dilemma for these youth lies with socialized middle class expectations ingrained by society.

This conflicts with the reality of the career market for those not the top strata of a nation's social class along with specialized skill sets offered by university and the social capital affluent parents can offer. I see the problem for these youths as the confluence of a class squeeze on the societal level and an Durkheimian anomic response on an individual level. The Globalized structural changes taking place in Euope, Asia and the US since the 1980s has left an entire population of youths in the 20-30 age bracket who are unable to adapt.

Hikikomori are part of a spectrum of globalized youth Part One

The darker end of the spectrum

Over the last two years I've come to the conclusion that hikikomori are not a unique group but rather towards the less functional end of a spectrum of young people unable to cope and adapt to societal changes due to globalization. Beyond hikikomori, on the extreme end of this spectrum of youth feeling alienated and lacking purpose are those who opt out of life completely, youth who commit suicide.

From the LA Times 12/14/01, Japan's Suicide Epidemic:

Japan's economic deterioration is damaging a lot more than balance sheets and bank statements. Extreme stress and mental instability are at record highs. About 425,000 people were treated for stress-related mental disorders last year. In 1998, when the economy started tanking, suicides jumped 25% to more than 30,000 and haven't declined. Suicides directly attributed to employment, personal debt and the economy now number 8,500 annually, up fourfold from a decade ago. Because of population changes, the mortality rate per 100,000 people has eased slightly.

Mental health professionals say the actual number of stress-related illnesses may be much higher because psychological difficulties are often ignored or swept under the tatami mat in Japan, where depression is still viewed as a character flaw and treatment is inadequate.

"There's a very dark cloud hanging over Japanese society as more and more people lose their psychological signposts," said Dr. Yoshitomo Takahashi, a researcher with the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry. "Mental illness still carries a lot of shame, so most people are referred only at the terminal stage. This makes our job very difficult."

Countries around the world have for decades lived with high unemployment and the social, economic and political costs it engenders. But in Japan, workers saw a job as an entitlement, and for years that was the case until Japan's economy faltered.

Companies began pruning payrolls, and the pain now is jolting the core of Japanese society: breadwinners in their 40s and 50s. This generation sacrificed almost everything for the company and now feels betrayed, isolated and worthless at being let go.

"Japan is suddenly waking up from a 56-year dream," said Hirotake Araya, general manager of Tokyo Shoko Research, a private data-collection company. "The end of lifetime employment is very difficult to accept, particularly for middle-aged people.

More on the topic of contemporary suicide in Japan, here and here.

Still Here

Hello all,

Spent the last few years neck deep in Sociology PhD coursework. Something had to give and so I put aside this blog for a time.

Where did I go?

I've gotten past my core courses these last two years and am now transitioning into my comprehensive reading phase of my degree at the University of Hawaii. Hopefully, I can get that sorted by the Spring 08 term. In the meantime, I'm furiously writing papers to submit for journal publication.

What about the blog?

The blogsphere has changed a great deal in the last two years. While I'm a regular reader of a great many blogs, I simply cannot hope to keep up with the 72 to 48 news cycle on the internet these days with my own blog. So I'm going to do my own thing. If you would like to read along on my ruminations and idle speculations, welcome and enjoy the ride.

Refocusing the blog's focus

Also, my blog's focus is a reflection of my academic research and that has not changed. It has expanded though, and I will be touching on various topics. Hikikomori are still an interest, but so are freeters, parasite singles. In fact the intersection of Japanese youth culture with a globalized Japan is all fair game.

I'll try not to write War and Peace every post and keep it succinct as possible, but I'm naturally verbose so it'll be a struggle.

What I would like to do is make my blog a spring board and resource for ideas on the topic of Japan's Lost Generation. I would like to keep it academic in nature, but I may dip into cultural observations to mix it up a bit.

It's been done

There are a few blogs out there on Hikikomori, Freeters, Japan's lost gen, etc, but many seem to be by journos and meant to provoke.

I'm going to try, try mind you, to be a bit different. I'd like to create an alternative discourse on the plight of these young people in Japan. Rather than just rely on second and third hand re-reportage on the topics, I think analysis of first person observations is more constructive.

Also, I'm seeing in my stratification research that while freeters have unique cultural features, it is not a unique condition for youth in advanced capitalist/ information and service based nations. There are NEET in the UK and twixters in the US that also are in a similar fix.

Feedback

I welcome comments, in fact I highly encourage them, but I can and will edit them if they are off topic, flammable, or ads. However, for the time being, I have no illusions— my blog will most likely get little or no attention in the blogsphere, kind of like that kid who is picked last during gym class.

Be that as it may, I'd like my blog to be a forum of discussion for Japan's lost generation. In that vein I'll be taking submissions and posting them. I'll hash out some rules later but for now keep 'em under 500 words. Just email them to me with "lost gen" in the start of the topic line of your email.

Till next time—
~Mike D.

Speaking of keitai products- why a commuter society like Japan values small items

My last post talked about the portability of Apple's new Mac mini and iPod shuffle. As I said in that post, I think that the 'pocket-ability' of the iPod shuffle in particular is going to make it a really big hit in Japan. Someone posted feedback to that entry a confirmation that it is already becoming hard to even buy an iPod shuffle as current demand is so high:

iPod shuffle is a hit. It's all but impossible to buy in Osaka right now.. much to my annoyance.

This ability to use something on the go by just throwing it in the pocket is highly appealing to the Japanese consumer market— especially amongst young people in Japan. This is due in part to the mobile lifestyle of Japanese today. Many people are forced to commute by train to work, shop, or just have fun.

In Tokyo, the travel times for such a trip can be an hour or more, especially if a salaryman has a family home in one of the bedroom communities outlying the Tokyo sprawl. Besides the possibility of having a more spacious home in the 'countryside', another appealing factor is the lower cost of a home or apartment the further you live from the core of central Tokyo.

These factors have pushed the working population, which power the national dynamo that is Tokyo—center of commerce, government, and culture— into long commutes.

So, you are on a train an hour, maybe two—each way—every day.

What do you do with yourself?

The answer for some is to doze off on the train. Check out this link to Masamana's site with a really humorous gallery of pictures with sleeping train commuters.

Others choose to read small manga or books on the train, which ties into the national popularity of manga I discussed in a previous post.

In the last few years, you'll now see another group of people looking at their very small, pocketable cell phones, keitai denwa, while they use their thumb to enter 'something' on the phone's keypad. It's really odd to watch this behavior on a train platform or in a train as they are SO absorbed in this activity

What exactly are they doing on their phones?

It has already become bad social form to talk on the cell phone in the often cramped train cars, so text messaging has evolved as one way to stay in touch while stuck on the train in Japan. And some rail companies are even installing detectors with lights that flash in a car when a cell signal is detected (next to a sign discouraging that cell use).

Other people use the Java based applet web-browsers to surf the internet on their cell phones in Japan. (Keitai, cell phones in Japan, have become the most conspicuous method of affordable access to the internet for most Japanese, almost a parallel to the development of affordable broadband in the Americas. To see more on this phenomena, please read my research on keitai.)

Still others are playing an arcade game on their mobile phone.

Even in the name used for cell phones in Japan, you can see the value placed on portability by the commuter culture of modern Japan. Denwa means telephone in Japanese. The word, as mentioned above, for a mobile phone in Japan is keitai denwa.

However, this is often shortened to just 'keitai. A word by itself means which means a small or pocketable object; easily carried. It is even rendered in Katakana, the Japanese script used for foreign words in a possible attempt to make it appear modern or chic. The fact that the word for a mobile phone in Japan has been reduced to just 'keitai' reveals this high value the youth culture in Japan places on mobility. No small wonder that so many features have been packed into these keitai phones putting them 2-3 years ahead of the technology available for mobile phones in the American market (though the different signal standards, like GSM, preferred by each mobile company may also have something to do with this in the U.S.). This value on mobility has also effected the evolution of the design for other electronic devices such as handheld portable game systems which explains the current buzz about the new Sony Playstation Portable, the PSP.

For the enterprising soul in Japan, it's become quite simple really:

If it's keitai sized, it's marketable in Japan.

To see this in action, check out this link to Akihabara News with the current popularity of keitai plants:

My response to Delphiki's article on Hikikomori

In trying to fix the problem with Google's image servers hammering my bandwith I came across a trackback on a blog named Delphiki.

The trackback in question linked to my two part article on hikikomori not being violent.

Here is the original blog entry on the Delphiki site about hikikomori.

I chewed over what he had to say for awhile and wrote response to his article in the comments. It is so long winded that I decided it should probably also post it here as a blog entry:

First, I want to say thank you for posting an article on the hikikomori. It’s always good in my opinion to get the word out and encourage discussion and thought on this topic. Your analysis of the causes and behavior patterns of hikikomori, due in part to Japanese cultural influences, are pretty accurate based upon my own ten months of field research in Japan on this topic.

However, I have to disagree with the violence part as well as the million strong hikikomori army you read about in the various articles online. For the violence, you provided links to my site, Japan’s Lost Generation, to my articles ‘Hikikomori are not Violent’ where I argue the opposite. In my interviews of support staff at a hikikomori rehab center in Tokyo, they firmly state that hikikomori violence appears to be rare. In the cases that it does occur, the hikikomori is often ALSO afflicted with mental illness. What I found in the field is that most hikikomori are socially crippled rather than mentally ill; contrary to what the BBC was reporting in 2000 with the ‘Japan’s Missing Million’ article. I would say that 80% of the hikikomori at the rehab center where I worked were re-socialized and functional within six months to one year of admittance.

On the one million hikikomori— I found that that estimate actually came originally from Doctor Saito Tamaki, the man who coined the word ‘hikikomori’ and subsequently published a dozen books on the subject since the mid 1990s. From there, that one million figure was quoted, re-quoted, and spread through the various media treatments on hikikomori reportage as it makes great headlines.

I think it's suspect.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, in a survey done in 2000 on hikikomori, estimates the number is closer to 50,000 individuals; that is still quite a lot, but not 20% of the entire nation’s 13-18 year old Japanese male population that the one million figure would account for (see my paper on my blog for more depth on this).

Your economic look at the effect of one million people missing from the workforce is prescient and I came to the same conclusion in my literary review I wrote on hikikomori back in 2002. For IF the one million Japanese people were NOT to join the workforce in the next ten years, and considering the graying of the Japanese population…well you’re right on that time bomb.

But maybe for different reasons.

I’ve found that the hikikomori are actually the most extreme subset of a larger group called freeta (which also includes a group called ‘parasite singles’); young people who live at home well into their thirties and refuse to work in demanding career path jobs at corporations, but instead prefer low-pay positions as clerks in convenience stores and the like. So your worry about the Japanese economy may be right, but because of the growing numbers of freeta (of which the hikikomori is a very small percentage).

Sorry to be so long-winded but this is a topic very near and dear to my heart.

Again, great post!

Michael Dziesinski
http://towakudai.blogs.com/