Japan's Lost Generation

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/

'You have been accepted into the PhD program for Sociology'

...Those were the words I saw on a letter mailed to me last week from the University of Hawaii's Sociology Department.

YAY!

Do the Badger Dance!

I'm just finishing up my Masters in Japanese Studies and to get this news is most welcome.

Let me tell you, I've worked hard for three long years to get into the PhD.

It's strange though; instead of feeling like I won the lottery, it's more like getting a transfer to a new department.

I thought I'd be more ecstatic; that the world would glow with strange colors and be transcendentally brighter or something, but I guess that only happens in movies and with Psychoactives.

Don't get me wrong— I am looking forward to being in the Sociology department as it opens up some exciting doors for research in Japan. I'm already thinking to make Freeta the focus of my PhD dissertation (which includes hikikomori and Parasite singles). But, right now at the cusp of summer here in Hawaii it's just not real yet. (Have I ever mentioned what a beautiful place Hawaii is?)

I guess it goes back to that old adage that the wanting is sometimes more desirable than the having.

That lottery jackpot sure would be nice though...