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uniqueness, I wouldn’t be so confident as them as who's to say that some portion of Western kids aren't socially withdrawn with what could be termed 'hikikomori' as well?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.