05 January 2005

Hikikomori: Some diagrams for your edification

Today, rather than write too much (and maybe bore you), I'm going to post two diagrams I made explaining the causes and development of hikikomori. As usual, if you use them in your own works please be courteous enough to properly cite them as originating from me.

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Jan 5, 2005 3:03:02 PM | Hikikomori, Social Theory, Sociology

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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Saitoh coined the word ‘hikikomori’ and the ensuing media frenzy that things changed dramatically for the socially withdrawn youth and the families of these children; before then, the public had no idea, but after 'hikikomori' became a household word, parents of hikikomori children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issue, it might be blamed on the fact that parents were too ashamed to come forward and seek help for their socially withdrawn child due to all of the new publicity attached to the phenomenon.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 Sadatsugu Kudo, who deals with these youth on a daily basis and who runs Tame Juku for socially withdrawn children in Tokyo, believes that it is erroneous for people to associate the hikikomori phenomenon with cases of crime or mental illness, “ ....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behavior I EVER observed at Takeyama Gakkoh was very late at light, like two or three in the morning, where a socially withdrawn student would pound their fist or foot on the wall or floor for a stretch of time....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>
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Searching for hikikomori in Japanese- what's it look like? <p> Note the graphic appearing in this entry to your right displays the two ways of rendering 'hikikomori', social withdraw, in Japanese. I have included it so if you ever have the desire to brave the world of Japanese web sites searching on the topic of hikikomori, you know what you are looking for (as for the rest of the web page in Japanese, well, you.... *GRIN*).... The top version uses the verb 'hiku', to pull, rendered with the kanji or Chinese ideogram for it, combined with 'komoru', to retire, in the cursive script of Hiragana. (Hikikomori is Lit. 'to pull within and retire'.)... The second version is the entire word rendered in the cursive Hiragana script of Japanese.... The bottom line is the word 'hikikomori' in Romaji, Japanese written in the Roman Alphabet, hyphenated to denote the break point of each syllabic character of the Hiragana in the line just above it. Note the graphic appearing in this entry to your right displays the two ways of rendering 'hikikomori', social withdraw, in Japanese. I have included it so if you ever have the desire to brave the world of Japanese web sites searching on the topic of hikikomori, you know what you are looking for (as for the rest of the web page in Japanese, well, you. </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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