08 January 2009

The story thus far, or what the heck happened to this blog

The story thus far:

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It began with a fatal hard drive crash a couple years back and the loss of all my archived material.   

I did manage to finally get logged back in after much email correspondence. But then the Qualifying Reviews for my PhD Sociology program at the University of Hawaii Manoa demanded all my time.

That finished and my brain completely fried, I thought I could get back to blogging. But soon after that the harrowing Damocles Sword of my Master's thesis deadline for my secondary degree in Asian Studies loomed. (Never co-enroll in two graduate degree programs if you want to retain your sanity) I found it difficult to find time for much besides panicked study.

Then over the summer of 2008 a paper submission for the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Boston was accepted for presentation, so I spent the summer preparing for that. (More on that paper soon).

During the Fall 2008 I was also busy with a great many things. Between applying for scholarship funding for my dissertation research starting the end of 2009 in Tokyo, Japan, I also managed to finish my Master's Thesis in Asian Studies and

But it never stops does it?

Currently I am preparing for my for my Comprehensive Exam which I plan to take the end of this Spring 2009 Term. I'll be busy with that this spring but now that my work on hikikomori is published I can post about it now.

Also as I start my research in Japan in the Fall I'll be using this blog as an anchor to friends and family ti let them know what I'm up to. Expect this blog to transform into current events on youth phenomena in Japan type at that point.

~M. Dziesinski

Jan 8, 2009 10:35:40 PM | Hikikomori, Japanese Culture, Science, Social Theory, Sociology

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Hikikomori Reasearch Update and Other Things This concern was borne out by by people who have contacted me directly in the last few years and then have subsequently released several publications that have come out in the interim of my blog's downtime. ... In part, its my fault or not being quicker in getting my hikikomori work out there I have been lapped by others on the track, had I gotten my hikikomori work into an academic journal in 2005, I would have been one of the first in the English language academia to address the hikikomori issue in social science circles.
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Major Update on my Hikikomori Research All Academic, a service for papers presented at conferences, has a nice page that provides an abstract and downloadable PDF of the paper I presented at the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting(ASA) in Boston last summer. Titled "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori", this paper is taken from data collected for my Asian Studies Master's thesis research from 2003-2004 at a hikikomori rehab center. Please consider this paper an update superior to my previous research provided on this blog. Here is the abstract of my ASA Boston paper: The label of hikikomori, coined by Tokyo Psychologist Saito Tamaki, describes an increasing trend of Japanese youth, primarily male, that shut out contact with society by hiding within their parents’ homes for months or even years at a time. In the process, these youth become truants, failing out of school and work through their long absences from the outside world. Reentry into society in middle class adult roles proves a difficult barrier for recovered hikikomori due to institutional features of Japanese society. This paper examines Takeyama, a private rehabilitation institution for hikikomori located in Tokyo Japan. Over the three-year span of Takeyama’s rehabilitation program, hikikomori youth from middle-class backgrounds are exposed to daily social rehabilitation structured around an idealized norm of conduct through group participation, routinization, and repetition. My central research question for this paper examines how the process of hikikomori rehabilitation observed at Takeyama involves gender and class socialization. Namely, the normalization of male hikikomori youth with middle class backgrounds into a viable...

Michael Dziesinski

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

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