Japan's Lost Generation

Anime & Society Series Part Two

“The Commercial distribution of Anime in Japan and America; the ‘cultural filtering’ of Western commerce.”

In addition to the distribution methods detailed in part one of this series in which dedicated Anime fans worldwide access and distribute Japanese animation today via fansubs, the primary means of dissemination and accessibility to Japanese animation for western public consumption is via commercial distributors in the form of DVDs, cable television and the like.

In the Western world, like it or not, commercial market forces, often with the primary interest in maximizing profits, attempt to push products on the public which are calculated to appeal to the greatest common denominator. Often, this entails a 'dumbing down' of a concept to ensure maximum demand. The smarter creators of intellectual properties try to ‘layer’ their product with various aspects and nuances that will appeal to different groups of the audience for differing reasons while at the same time serve to keep them all loyal to the product. Niche and specialty markets do exist, and arguably Anime is one such niche market, however it is a multi-million dollar market with a potential audience of millions in America.

From concept to manga to anime; the bottom-up method of shaping a concept in Japan

As mentioned in part one, the birth of an anime series is often a long and careful road as Japanese distributors want to put their money on the winning horse if they can help it. What has developed over the decades is a vetting process for a concept which begins as a weekly comic strip in one of the highly cutthroat manga anthologies which account for 40% of the entire magazine and publishing market in Japan.

An artist’s work has to be really compelling if it's going to appeal week-after-week to the 5 million plus circulation in Japan for publications like Shonen Jump. If a manga is worth it's salt, it gets picked up as a compiled manga book and may even make the transition to a one-shot anime OVA (Original Video Animation), a mini series, or even a season run on national television in Japan. While it’s made to sound rather straightforward here, many manga fall by the wayside and never make it to screen. The most marketable concepts are what get the financial backing for production into anime.

What this system in Japan achieves is this: any anime that makes it to commercial distribution already has a grass roots appeal on the street by an established fan base that already followed the story as a weekly manga title. This means that any adjustments or social filtering of the commercial product is done while it is still in its manga run; a much cheaper endeavor for book publishers to change gears over what an animation house with dozens or hundreds of cell animators on staff could do mid-project. Therefore, the creator of the manga has a very quick feedback system with the fan base; if they don't like where he is taking the story, they stop reading and his work is pulled from publication.

Put simply, market forces are more a ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon rather than a ‘top-down’ one seen in the United States in Hollywood. Japanese artists have a finger on the pulse of Japanese society, or at least there readership, and thus are better able to create works that appeal to their target audience with much less guesswork and quicker adjustment when things don't work. In sociological terms, the anime has been already socially filtered by it's fan base, vetted for commercial viability by the manga publisher, and arrives on television screens relatively untouched as an anime.

The top-down method of Hollywood creative conceptualization

In contrast, Hollywood operates in a ‘top-down’ method of shaping its product for market. Hollywood concept creation appears to be an elite closed off system of scriptwriters, directors and studios all feeding off one another in a bubble oblivious to what the public might desire. Often the decision is made from the top to execute a safe yet clichéd story trope, fill it with big name movie stars to pull the audiences into the theater, and then, after the work is in a final cut, show it to advanced screening audiences and see what their reaction to the almost finished work might be. This bubble world of Hollywood feeding on itself might also explain why so often three comet-hitting-the earth type movies come out in one summer by three different Hollywood studios. The problem with this form of concept management is that, by the time it reaches an advance screening audience, the story is already solidified bases on what may have been an awkward untenable concept to begin with by Hollywood types out of touch with the audience.

Consider this: Hollywood spends millions of dollars advertising their movies to the public to try and woo them into the theater; In Japan the public pays every week for the 'advertising'—the manga— a market which earns about 6 billion US-dollars annually in domestic sales. Japanese fans know quite well what is due to come out on screen as anime and often flock to the theater with very little in the way of big budget advertising.

This top-down attitude by the media conglomerates in the United States means that when a western distributor acquires an anime series from a Japanese production company, rather than just dubbing in English voices and release the product in the US markets, there seems to be an overwhelming tendency to 'tinker' with the anime formula in order to make it 'salable' to Western audiences. These alterations done by US distributors are, in effect, a form of cultural filtering.

Next in part three: Studio Ghibli and Disney; The filtering process laid bare.

Anime & Society Series Part One

‘An old fan admits his hobby in order to make a cultural point’, or ‘The availability and distribution of anime and manga then and now’.

I admit it; I have watched anime, Japanese animation, and I will watch anime in the future.

Though I’m an adult and an academic, I see nothing wrong with the anime medium for both entertainment and anime as a focus of valid research. In this series of articles, I will take a look at anime in general and its academic usefulness as a window into society; both from the insider’s view of Japanese culture as provided by the Japanese creator of the anime, as well as what the eager consumption by Western audiences could mean about both Japanese society today and the young generation in the Western world.

I’ve been watching anime for almost twenty years—back when anime was an underground fandom in the United States. Back then, the only easy way you could watch ‘new anime’ is by going to your local comic book shop once a week with a group of fellow ‘otaku’ in order to see a badly fan-subtitled VHS tape; a tape that had already been copied several times with picture quality so poor that the VHS player’s tracking would go nuts. Ah, I remember those anime days of the 80's. I met a lot of nice people along the way; the whole affair really did have a sense of community back then.

And manga? Good luck finding original Japanese copies of manga, let alone translations! If you did find a manga at your local hobby store, they were priced at 20-30 dollars a pop!

In contrast, today you can walk into any video rental store in the US and find an entire wall of Anime to choose from, both atrocious and palatable. And you do even need to go into the outside world to forage for anime anymore; you can sit right in front of your cozy computer and retrieve anime through the internet— either through various online catalog stores or via more ‘gray’ means.

Fansub Anime Networks

Anime today is also provided by fan-sub groups who take it upon themselves to subtitle Anime and distribute it online for free. Often, such anime is subtitled by the fan group and is available online for downloading via peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Bitorrent or Kazaa in less than a week from its premiere airing on Japanese TV! And the level of sophistication and professional level of quality control many fansubs have reached in the larger fansub communities is amazing. This is one of the more gray areas of availability of anime in today’s society.

The grey area of Anime Fansubs

The reason this is a legal ‘grey area’ is though such a practice is in violation of copyright laws, there is often no distribution license in America yet for such Anime titles and the fan-subs do the translations and distribute the subtitled shows as a free service. And it could be argued that most of the core anime fans in the West will watch the fan-subs and then buy the commercial DVDs for a particular series when it becomes available in their country. Japanese Animation companies often seem to take no legal action as the efforts of the fansubs mostly come across as a form of free advertising; however, this could change in the future as media markets are becoming increasingly trans-national and globalized. Most of the bigger fan sub groups, aware of their precarious status, try their best to be ethical and will stop subbing anime that has been picked up by a US distributor. Because of this, the fan-sub internet sub-culture, many net’ savvy anime fans in the US and elsewhere in the West have instant fixes for their hobby today. Ah, I still think about those old shabby VHS anime tapes with stuttering screens from so many copies…now that was old school. Fans today complain about a title when it is not out in widescreen DVD format.

Manga Scanaltions

In recent years, something similar has developed for manga called ‘scanilations, a neologism that combines the term ‘scan’ from the scanning of the pages of a manga comic using a digital scanner and ‘translation’ for fans who provide Japanese to English translations of the manga. These files, often in the JPG format, are zipped into collections and are viewable on a computer by programs that perform as ‘comic book’ readers which display two Jpeg images side by side as they would appear in a real manga. The quality of scanilations tend to be uneven, and there are even groups who take the sources mangas and either are unable to translate Japanese or don’t acre to and create funny manga parodies with the English captions they insert into the mangas.

Images are the copyright of the Bleach creators.

Next in part two: Commercial distribution of Anime in America and the ‘cultural filtering’ of Western commerce.

Newstart NPO: the Hikikomori support industry in Japan

Here is an interesting new article I dug up on http://www.weekender.co.jp/ that details a nonprofit organization, or NPO, in Japan with express purpose of helping socially withdrawn kids.

Called the 'Newstart NPO' center, it's setup seems similar to the one in which I did my field research, although I'm sure their methods and philosophy are different from Takeyama Gakko where I performed my own research. To the right is an image of Newstart founder Noki Futagami taken from the source article.

The article, titled "Newstart NPO offers a way back into the world for lost generation of Japanese ‘hikikomori social withdrawal children" is by Ian Priestly, and offers a pretty good glimpse of the hikikomori support industry, though I wouldn't say I agree with all of the recycled media discourse on hikikomori contained in the article, it is still a useful resource.

For the brave or language fluent, here is the direct link to Newstart's website in Japan.

UPDATE: Here is an English link to Newstart's website, though not as comprehensive as the Japanese site, it's useful.

Ecto is blogging made easy

Well, I took the plunge and plopped down the shareware fee for Ecto 2. What is Ecto you ask? Here it is straight from the author's 'mouth' (and website http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/):

Ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, and more.

With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.

I've been using it for two weeks to write this blog, and let me tell you, it is so incredibly slick and intuitive that I spend most of my time actually writing up content rather than fiddling with tags and what not. Combined with Typepad, it makes blogging a breeze. I'll stop soap-boxing now, still recovering from Turkey Thursday and it occurred to me today that Ecto really is worth it's salt. If your are new to blogging or want to try it out and your hands dirty without too much investment, go check out Ecto, and then maybe Typepad for the server end and you are on your way.

End of heaping praise.

Hikikomori and Parasite Singles

Well, here's hoping everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a good one!

The issue of parasite singles became a watchword about the same time as hikikomori in Japan in the year 2000. It begs the question: are the two phenomenon related in some way?

According to media on the topic of parasite singles, they are young people, mostly women, who prefer the cozy nest of home to marriage, a choice which often results in a lower standard of living than at home with mom and dad. Might not a fair percentage of ‘parasite singles’ be in fact be misclassified female hikikomori?

Parasite singles, a word coined in 1999 in a book of the same name, Parasaito Shinguru no Jidai (Era of the “Parasite” Singles) by Yamada Masahiro, (Japanese site) is critical of the modern woman in Japan today. From the admiration of the Moga, or 'modern girl', in the 1920s in Japan to parasite single today, Japanese women, no matter what path they chose to forge for themselves, end up socially criticized.

On a less serious note, Japanese youth doubtful on their status can even take a test online to determine if they are indeed a Parasite Single. A bit odd don't you think?

It should not be surprising that experts in Japan proposed that the Parasite Single was unique to Japan; once again getting into the old Nihonjin-ron rub. However, research on youth in other countries, like the UK, may already be disproving this notion.

In addition, who can blame the young women in Japan? If we are to believe the media, their potential spouses have been spoiled from birth by mothers so while they may excel in academic pursuits, male suitors have come to expect such motherly papering from the opposite sex. Add to this, that living at home, those young women who choose to work can buy nice clothes and luxuries for themselves instead of using their wage to support themselves. After all, their parents provide them a nice life right?

More on female hikikomori.

When I did my field research on hikikomori at Takeyama Gakko, TG, conversations with the staff indicated they often encountered the following attitudes by Japanese families when it came to their children:

When young Japanese men refuse to go outside, be active, mingle with friends, or find a job, then Japanese parents become anxious and worried about their male child. In the longer term hikikomori cases, the fact that the young man doesn’t seek gainful employment upon reaching eighteen to twenty years of age really alarms parents as the young man is obviously not fulfilling his culturally defined role in Japanese society.

In contrast, interviews with the Takeyama staff about the 'female hikikomori' seem to indicate that parents with daughters are less likely to seek out intervention or aid for their hikikomori daughters as they may not see the behavior of a withdrawn girl as overly alarming. Neo-Confucian values still influence Post WWII society in Japan and the gender roles of men and women are still much more distinct in Japan today than in Western society; Shyness can be seen as a feminine trait in Japan, and a girl who hides in her room and refuses to leave the house is not necessarily acting too far outside of the expected social norms. It's when that child starts to get physical that parents seek help.

Hikikomori as a gendered issue.

Most of the literature cited on hikikomori, such as the BBC report, ‘the Missing Million’, which originally brought the issue to Western awareness, indicates that it’s one million boys who are the crux of this social crisis in Japan. If you read the BBC and other reportage that pick up the hikikomori issue, its young males who are cause for concern, why are they hiding in their rooms? Inquiring minds want to know.

My question is why no equal concern for young females? Can we seriously believe that only boys in Japan are becoming hikikomori? Are not the stresses of school the same for both genders of youth in Japan?

What else might be a trigger for social withdraw in Japanese society?

The Japanese Family.

How about the Confucian influence on social expectations by parents for their sons and daughters?

Ah, now here may be where the problem lies. Might the expectations parents hold for sons be different in such a way from those they hold for daughters? Could these expectations be different in Japanese society to the point that it skews the social perception of who is suffering from hikikomori and who is not?

According to media on the topic of parasite singles, they are young people, mostly women, who prefer the cozy nest of home to marriage, which often results in a lower standard of living. The issue of parasite singles became a watchword about the same time as hikikomori in Japan in the year 2000. It begs the question: are the two phenomenon related in some way?

Might not a fair percentage of ‘parasite singles’ be in fact be misclassified female hikikomori?

Research, research, research.

Okay folks, I'm going to upload the research paper I wrote last year that does a survey on hikikomori topic. It's in PDF format and around 800k; feel free to peruse and use for your own work and articles, I only ask that you properly cite me as it's author if you do choose to use my content in an article, web page, or what have you. Professional courtesy and all that.

Note that this paper was written purely with available resources here in Hawaii at the time, so I had not yet done my field research at the Takeyama Gakkoh hikikomori rehabilitation center in Japan.

Feedback is welcome either via my email or in the comments for this entry. I'll check back occasionally and respond to any questions.

Here's the link: Hikikomori: Investigations into the phenomenon of acute social withdrawal in contemporary Japan by Michael Dziesinski

I'm also going to post the link in my Typepad links on one side of my blog so it's always available.

Cheers,

Mike Dziesinski

The pseudonym game: names changed to protect the innocent.

Currently in my thesis work, I’m working on a thick description of the facility in which I conducted my field research in 2003-04. This is going to be a ‘case study’, if you will, that will try as best as possible to paint a picture of how hikikomori, those suffering social withdrawal, are rehabilitated; at least in this facility anyway.

Due to legal reasons and concerns by my university about protecting the anonymity of my interview subjects, I conducted my interviews with a coding system and will assign pseudonyms to the individuals when referring to them in my thesis or here in this blog; I’m going to fictionalize the names and places where I did my field research. However, the stories and experiences I relate from my field research will be true, even if the names are pseudonyms to protect the subjects’ privacy.

I do this because my University demands it, and because it wouldn’t be fair to the staff and kids at the center where I did my research. Also, in the course of my interviews, the knowledge that I wouldn’t be using their real identities made the subjects more likely to answer with sincere honne rather than the more guarded tatemae that is prevalent in Japanese culture.

I’m going to call the rehab center I did my research Takeyama Gakkoh, 竹山学校、or TG for short. For the curious, that’s ‘Bamboo Mountain School’. For the name of the proprietor and his wife, who helps him run Takeyama, let’s call them Mr. Kazu Ishida and Mrs. Mizuho Ishida. “Ishida’、石田、 is ‘rock field’, Kazu is a pretty common male name in Japan, and Mizu-ho is ‘water child’. For the rest of the staff and students there, I’ll name them as the need arises.

For those academics, even armchair ones, reading this entry I’m curious about your opinion on this choice to use pseudonyms for the location of my research. Input from veteran field researchers would be most welcome.

I have no problem with anonymity for my research subjects, that was always my intention from the beginning, but I am a bit torn in so far as fictionalizing the name and place (only) of where I conducted my research. It makes me feel that my thesis will be on less concrete foundations than if I provided a easily verifiable place where others can also go if they choose to conduct further research on the topic. However, I am cognizant of the fact that fictionalizing peoples names while keeping name and location where they live and work factual makes it very easy to trace them back and therefore jeopardizes the promise I made, not to mention the trust they placed in me as a researcher. What do you think?

Youth as a Mirror to Society

I feel that youth problems offer an excellent window into a society. Throughout childhood, kids are like sponges and just absorb what their parents, family, friends and culture throws at them. But in their teens, cognitive skills mature and they start to question what they are TOLD their world is about as opposed to what they OBSERVE firsthand in the world around them. It is here that the personal crisis comes in as they attempt o reconcile their own idealized worldview with how will have to behave if they are to be a successful member of their society.

‘Should I be honest and get stepped on, or do I hold my tongue and get that promotion at my job?’

This struggle, and the inventive ways in which young people rebel, reveal the flaws in their society. Flaws that most adults just accept as the ‘human condition’.

But not all is grim here at Japan's Lost Generation!

I also want to look at the ‘keitai tribe’ and ‘keitai culture’ from time to time. And just so you know, ‘keitai’ is Japanese for cell/mobile phone. Keitai Culture is pretty much composed of the mainstream youth in Japan. Sometimes, you can’t understand an issue without contrasts, and comparing these ultra-connected keitai teens with those in social isolation might help paint a bigger picture on what is going on in Japan. I’m also going to dip into J-POP, anime, Pop Culture, technology and whatever else ties in with the youth culture in Japan. Anything is fair game.

And don’t write off the hikikomori issue as one dimensional because, from all appearances in my field research, it is just the tip of a really rich research topic. The problems of hikikomori originate from the very family structure and educational system of today’s Japan.

Many of contemporary problems in Japan are complex and interwoven into the way Japanese society has developed in the fifty years since WWII. And it is not an isolated problem that can be neatly labeled, medicalized and put through a drug treatment regimen. The problems afflicting the youth of Japan today enables, in many different ways, a critical examination of Japanese society itself.

And not just in Japan…

And don’t think just because the media sells ‘hikikomori’ as a specific 'illness' limited to Japan, or even Asia that its unique there. This is the problem of nihonjinron that rears its head from time to time in Japan. The West has different names for behaviors associated with social withdraw to be sure, and even different approaches to 'treating' it. Contrary to the Japanese media's claims of cultural uniqueness, I wouldn’t be so confident as them as who's to say that some portion of Western kids aren't socially withdrawn with what could be termed 'hikikomori' as well?

On a number of occasions while riding on trains, I've overheard Japanese grandparents complaining about their grandchildren. The rants in Japan by the older set about their grandkids were amazingly similar to what I hear in the West: always playing video games, culinary expertise is limited to what can be made in a microwave, and so forth. If the kids have similar habits and pressures in two information-age consumer-based societies, doesn't it stand to reason that kids might react to adversity in similar ways? The difference is in how each society's public institutions and their elites label and define the child's behavior.

What’s on the horizon for Japan’s Lost Generation?

In the coming months, you are going to notice that a lot of the topics on this blog gravitate towards the issue of hikikomori. It’s because I’m writing, or rather attempting to write, my Master’s thesis on the topic in a frantic effort to graduate and start into a Sociology PhD next year in 2005.

That won’t always be the case though (the topic, not the frantic part). When I start my PhD Program, I’m going to take serious look into other youth social problems in contemporary Japan, at least those getting wide reportage in the Japanese Media, as I think I’ve found my calling. After my core courses of five semesters are out of the way, I’ll be going back to Japan again to do about a year and half to two years of field research. That’s the idea anyway…

Other ‘problems’ I plan to discuss here are ‘freeter’, Japanese young people who reject the salaryman life for dead end part jobs that barely pay the bills. Then there are the ‘parasite singles’, young adults, mostly women, who stay at home and live off their parents, sometimes as old as their 40’s or 50’s, rather than live on their own. There is also a rising number of young homeless out on the streets in Japan as well. Not to mention that bit in the news a few weeks ago about a suicide pact made over the Internet by some Japanese twenty-something’s. And I was just introduced to a new group called NEET (when I have more on them I’ll let you know).

What qualifies me to write about hikikomori?

For a first time reader to this blog, besides asking why in the world I would be interested in such a grim topic as the social problems of Japan, I'm sure some people will also wonder why I feel I can write with any authority on the topic of my blog. As an American, maybe I should focus a blog on politics (goodness knows, it's a mess right now), maybe I should track wonderful things lurking around the web, or even do something on computer stuff?

Well, to be honest, while I am interested in those kind of things as hobbies, and I am a regular lurker at those kinds of blogs, others do a much better job and I would be just one tiny voice in an already oversaturated forum. Admittedly, my blog may come across as dry for people seeking such fare, and I encourage them wholeheartedly to check out the blogs I have linked; I find them entertaining and informative— especially in so far as what the current buzz on the net is about on any diverse topic you might imagine.

What I will try to do on this blog is stay topical to what ever is in the Japanese news related to Japan’s Lost Generation. I’ll scour the Japanese news services daily and try to offer some analysis and linkages here as to how it pertains to social issues in Japan.

For example, as soon as I get some core writing out of the way, I’d like to take a look at the Internet Suicide Pact that occurred in Japan just a few weeks ago. While that news item is already a bit cold (no pun intended), once I catch up on other things for this blog, I’ll try my best to stay on top of news developments in addition to concentrating on my current focus with the hikikomori. Another news worthy topic that I’d like to discuss here is that of parasite singles. There’s a great deal of depth to that issue and it ties into the hikikomori as well.

Ok, my street creds:

I was a public middle school teacher in Japan for three years as a JET teacher from 1997 to 2000 where I lived in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Japan. This summer, I just returned from a year in Japan doing double duty on a study abroad program in Kobe while I also conducted field research on the topic of hikikomori in Tokyo in all my free time (more on that later). I actually stayed on the premises of a rehabilitation center for hikikomori youth near Tokyo for one week stints totaling about one and half months.

The last nine years of my life has been spent studying or living in Japan. At one time, I could tell you why I originally started studying Japanese culture and I could even give you a really insightful and long winded answer to that effect (as you can see, I’m still long winded). Today, I’m just not certain why I originally started (looking into Japan, that is). But I’m pretty sure part of the reason was, by studying Japan’s society and its differences I hoped to gain a better understanding of my own society (and myself along the way). I’m sure there was some youthful longing to travel in there somewhere too.

So, why am I still studying Japan today when China is such a hot button topic in academics, business and such? Part of it is momentum, nine years of cultural acquisition is a lot of experiences and lessons learned to just throw away, especially when it’s reached the point of being an asset. And Japanese language was hard enough, have you seen how involved Mandarin and Cantonese is? Not to mention the 20,000 Chinese characters you need to learn!

I might also point out that when I started studying Japan, it was an Asian Tiger Economy with the image that Japan was going to overtake the West, buy up all the best property overseas, make Hawaii one big golf course, and take away American autoworker’s jobs.

Besides, Japan has changed me so much on a personal level that I don’t quite ‘fit’ in my own culture anymore. Go overseas for three years, come back, and see what kind of reverse culture shock a three-year pop culture void does to you as opposed to everyone else in your country.

Monica Lewinsky who? Viagra what? Hanging Chads?

When I got back to the U.S. in 2000, the amount of cultural investment in topics like that due to media saturation in America made their significance to friends and family almost alien to me. But maybe it’s for the best, as I’m more detached from such sensationalism now…maybe.

What are hikikomori?

That’s a good question. If you look at all of the media articles about the topic both on and off the web, the first impression you get is that it is a uniquely Japanese problem. The second thing commonly reported is it involves Japanese youth who, for whatever reason, retreat from the pressures of the outside world into an almost hermit-like existence. And, because this is the media, and they need copy that sells, you hear of inexplicably weird or violent behaviors by the so-called ‘hikikomori’.

I aim to question the media’s notion of what hikikomori are, and perhaps even ‘deconstruct’ the public discourse in Japan on the topic. Ambitious yes, but it's the mountain I chose to climb, I got my Mount Fuji walking stick, and I’m raring to go!

What this blog is about.

My name is Mike. I’m currently struggling with my Master’s thesis on the hikikomori, social withdraw, in Japan. I’m hoping this blog will help me hash out my topic of interest and perhaps raise awareness on youth problems in Japan. If you have any insights or commentary on my regular ramblings. Feel free to comment.