04 January 2005

Hikikomori are NOT Violent PART II: Blame the Press!

As discussed in my previous post, here are two incorrect assumptions about hikikomori:

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1) That hikikomori are violent.

2) That there are a vast number, one million, young hermits hiding in their rooms in Japan in a mounting crisis.

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And yet, BOTH of these misrepresentations of violent hikikomori and being one million strong continue to float around the net and in the mass media.

I really wish that someone in the media would actually do some research rather than rehashing inaccurate statements on hikikomori made over five years ago.

Do you know why both of these fallacies continue to be propagated as discourse?

Because sensationalism sells so much better to put forth an idea. And lets be honest, youth who are secluded in their homes are hardly going to be able speak out against whatever the press decides to report about them. We have the roar of the information overload of the press on one side and an empty field with chirping crickets on the other. Whose side of the story are we going to hear the loudest ad nauseam?

What's in a name?

For the time being, let's assume that the hikikomori prognosis of social withdraw has a kernel of commonsense truth and condition is, in some respects, legitimate. By living within the assumed 'definition' of hikikomori it will allow an understanding of the mindset of those imposing the classification.

How many hikikomori did you say?

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When the hikikomori problem was first widely publicized, demographics of hikikomori victims suggested it to be a youth based 'illness' which also appears to primarily afflict young males. Several media resources (Asahi Shimbun, BBC, Japan Times, et al.) were forwarding psychiatrist Tamaki Saito's theoretical estimates that between 500,000 to over 1,000,000 Japanese male youths aged fourteen to twenty years were suffering from the hikikomori condition as evidenced by their dropping out of active participation in society and sequestering themselves into the social safety of isolation in their rooms. According BBC's Phil Rees who uses Saito's estimates, one in ten Japanese youth today suffer from the hikikomori syndrome.

Media sources seem to be improperly analyzing the data and the scope of the problem, for if the variously quoted Saitoh statistics of 500,000 to 1.2 million male hikikomori shut-ins from the 14-20 age group is reasonably correct (Larimer 2001, Rees 2002, Secher 2002, Tolbert 2001), then the pervasiveness of hikikomori phenomenon in the Japanese population is disquieting.

Population census data collected by the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunication (2000) provides an illustrated population pyramid. Adding up all the males in the 14-20-age bracket elicits a total population of roughly 4.2 million males in that combined gender and age demographic in Japan. What this means, is if over 1 million Japanese aged 14-20 indeed suffer from being hikikomori, then 20 percent of all adolescent males in Japan, and approximately 1 percent of the population, are abstaining from participation in Japanese social institutions!

If Saitoh's number of 500,000 is even a remotely accurate appraisal, then Japanese society as a whole is in dire peril in the coming decades for as Saitoh points out:

“I think it is dangerous for Japanese society because such people never work or pay tax,” he said. “We might be able to rescue some, but half a million will stay withdrawn from society for 20 or 30 years. We could end up supporting them for half a century.” (Watts 2000)

If the outside observer were to accept Saitoh's assessment on the scope of the hikikomori problem in Japan today, it would mean that a notable proportion of the next generation of the Japanese workforce has already dropped out of the system and Japan can expect serious labor shortages as well as verging on a welfare state in order to support a half million non-productive members of society over the next fifty years.

May question to you, the reader of this blog, is does this socio-economic apocalypse of Japan as predicted by Saitoh sit right with you?

I sure have problems with it.


[Again, if you want a detailed argument on these two issues, please download my research paper on the topic in PDF form. ]

Jan 4, 2005 4:08:46 AM | Hikikomori, Rant

The comments to this entry are closed.

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Hikikomori are not Violent! Part I <p> During the holiday break, I was checking links to my blog, I have noticed that many who first across the topic of hikikomori hit upon the BBC report, “Japan's Missing Million” as well as other news items that came out in 2000 and 2001.... The term of 'hikikomori' in the public eye is inextricably intertwined with violent behavior, owing to the various high profile cases of violence and murder attributed to hikikomori in recent years.... The recent spate of media reports in the newspapers involving violent attacks attributed to hikikomori may be the primary reason for any public awareness of the social withdrawal problem. Japanese have come to attach 'hikikomori' to gruesomely violent incidents recently occurring in Japan, which only serves to further stigmatize the rest of the hikikomori: In 1988 and 1989 there was the “Otaku Murders” of Tsumoto Miyazaki. On May 3rd 2000, the hijacking of a bus in Saga Prefecture where the 17 year-old 'hikikomori' held a 6 year-old hostage. Another 17 year-old, in a dispute about a haircut, clubbed members of his high school baseball team with a baseball bat and later went home and killed his mother with the same weapon because she would not give him spending money. In 1990, a 27-year-old man kidnapped a 9-year old girl; the girl had lived in his room for 10 years—unknown by his mother or through her abject denial of the situation (Asahi Shimbun 2000, Larimer 2000, Rees 2002, Reuters 2001, Tolbert 2002).... In fact, many of the symptoms ascribed to hikikomori are not culturally unique to Japan or its education system at all, but rather fit the description of clinical depression found in other affluent media-saturated societies such the United States (Fox 2001).... the vast majority shut themselves up at home for six months or more without showing any other signs of neurological or psychiatric disorder“ (Tolbert 2002). </p>
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Hikikomori are NOT Violent PART III: <p> Several of the senior staffers, who have been doing their job for almost two decades, say that they began to get their first cases more than ten years ago—long before it was called 'hikikomori' in 1998 or there about.... In fact, some of the Takeyama staff believe that social withdraw is nothing new and may go back fifty years into Japan’s past (probably coinciding with the pressures of the Post WWII school system put in place in Japan during the occupation). It wasn't until Dr. Tamaki Saitoh coined the word ‘hikikomori’ and the ensuing media frenzy that things changed dramatically for the socially withdrawn youth and the families of these children; before then, the public had no idea, but after 'hikikomori' became a household word, parents of hikikomori children became ashamed of their children and sought to hide them from public scrutiny.... If the spate of violence by so-called 'hikikomori' could be attributed to anything in the years immediately after the new high profile of the 'hikikomori' issue, it might be blamed on the fact that parents were too ashamed to come forward and seek help for their socially withdrawn child due to all of the new publicity attached to the phenomenon. And so, tensions within such families reached a boiling point and sometimes escalated into physical confrontations between parent and child. According to one leader in the hikikomori support industry, a Mr. Sadatsugu Kudo, who deals with these youth on a daily basis and who runs Tame Juku for socially withdrawn children in Tokyo, believes that it is erroneous for people to associate the hikikomori phenomenon with cases of crime or mental illness, “ .... And despite these high visibility incidents attributed to shut-ins, some experts point out that violent outbursts by hikikomori ”are rare.... The only aggressive behavior I EVER observed at Takeyama Gakkoh was very late at light, like two or three in the morning, where a socially withdrawn student would pound their fist or foot on the wall or floor for a stretch of time.... Sorry to rant so, but these two misconceptions about socially withdrawn youth in Japan really get under my skin. </p>

Michael Dziesinski

I'm a University of Hawaii PhD in Sociology discussing youth issues in Japanese society in this blog.

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