Japan's Lost Generation

Wired Magazine OP-ED about Hikikomori possibly caught in the 3-11 earthquake.

Psychiatrist Paul Ballas has written an Op-Ed piece for the Wired science section of Wired Magazine Onine.

You can read it here: Op-Ed: Psychiatric Disorder Could Complicate Japan Quake Recovery

First, I want to state that I'm a long time reader of Wired Magazine. A great deal of the material they produce is at the very least, though provoking. Though the print magazine suffers the curse of any paper publication in this instant digital age with a lot of the print magazine material feeling dated when it hits your door. Still, it is a great tech industry magazine. Kudos.

As for the article itself, I think the comments do a fair job criticizing the relevancy of resurrecting the hikikomori topic in the aftermath of the 3-11 earthquake in Japan. So I won't say much more on that aspect of the article. My only complaint here is why revive the 'one million missing' hikikomori fallacy reported back in 2001? That alone shows poor background research into the issue.

My issue is with Ballas' framing of hikikomori as a mental health issue.

I admire Paul Ballas' work and efforts to understand individuals labeled as 'hikikomori', more people should look at this issue with a serious eye. However, I've always felt that hikikomori is a social issue amongst the younger generation, one that is a by-product of globalization clashing with young people transitioning into adulthood. Since hikikomori is a word coined in Japan, focus in the media has been on it as Japan-specific phenomena. However, a cursory search of the Internet reveals similar reclusive social withdrawal behavior in Korea, China, and even the United States.

The 'hikikomori' label has always seemed to me a catch-all term for people who have dropped out of society. To be sure, there are some youth with mental health problems, but there is tendency in the sphere of western medicine to medicalize any behaviors outside the societal norm as a mental illness. Add to that the trend for health care providers to to apply prescription drugs to solve the problem, and you have a mess. From my research the more successful approach to the acute social withdrawal is to remove the person from the stagnant home environment and put them into a group situation with peers in the same state. This type of socialization and reintroduction into greater society seems like a much more productive approach than labeling kids with some mental health condition and drugging them into a stupor.

I still maintain that the majority of youth so-labeled as hikikomori are not mentally ill but socially isolated and in need of a third party intervention to bring them back into functionality in everyday society.

~M.D.

A Hikikomori film- Left Handed, "Tobira no Muko"

English director Laurence Thrush and executive producer Takao Saiki released "Tobira no Muko" (Left handed) back in 2009 and the film now is due for an official release in Japan. The film stars a former hikikomori who attended Apple Tree school in Saitama prefecture for troubled youth unwilling or unable to attend school. The film depicts the main character's descent into social withdrawal and the various factors that contribute to his state as a hikikomori.

You can read about the film in greater detail on the English website for the film: Tobira no Muko

And here is a subtitled Youtube trailer for the film:

~M.D.

Finally! Master's Thesis is available with direct link.

Awesome news!

I'm happy to report that the UMI/Proquest Dissertation and Thesis service has finally listed my Master's so that it's publicly available via the internet:

"THE REHABILITATION OF JAPANESE YOUTH WITH ACUTE SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AT TAKEYAMA GAKKÔ, A HIKIKOMORI SUPPORT CENTER."

This should help those folks who often arrive at Japan's Lost Generation via google.com search or bing.com search on one of my older archived posts and then email me for more information and/or available research on hikikomori.

The links to useful research can be found on the right side of the blog under "My Published Research on Hikikomori", but here's a fast and easy direct link now to my thesis.

PS: thesis writing spammers who have been flooding my comments the past week hoping to link their questionable pre-written thesis sites should give up now. I filter comments. Normal comments get through, spam doesn't. Hmm. there's a potential paper right there...

~M. Dziesinski

Hikikomori as a Media Trope

I've known about the wiki project called tvtropes.org for a some time now. I find it interesting in that it is a collaborative cataloging of not just TV but general media "tropes".

Tropes being common themes or relatively predictable ideas introduced to an audience as a type of literary "short hand" as it may be assumed by the writer or producer that the reader/viewer is already familiar with it. There's a lot of interesting interlinked media tropes found at the site ( such as the internet and "rule #34").

I suppose the most extreme example of trope exploitation are types of entertainment that trade on a series of inside jokes on current cultural events such as animated show Family Guy:

or US animated show South Park's scathing skit on all the popular Internet fads of recent years in the US:

Remixed here

But even in other formats and genre of media, "tropes" can a be a handy storytelling device for a writer or producer as it adds an interesting wrinkle to the planned story-line.

Hikikomori and TV Tropes

Since hikikomori came to public attention in 1999 and 2000 due to a number of sensational news stories, hikikomori as a concept has crept into the media and popular entertainment discourse. As a result, hikikomori are increasingly showing up in fictional storylines and even as the main protagonists.

TV Tropes does a nice job of detailing hikikomori found in popular entertainment here.

Of course, originating as a Japanese phenomena, a fair amount of hikikomori "tropism" is found in Japanese forms of popular entertainment such as anime and manga.

A prime example being the manga and anime series N・H・Kにようこそ!, (Welcome to the N.H.K.) where the main protagonist is a hikikomori or NEET who believes that Japan's public broadcasting network's acronym, NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or 日本放送協会 in kanji) actually stands for "Nihon Hikikomori Kyōkai", or 日本引きこもり協会 in kanji. The protagonist believes NHK is an association that is part of a vast conspiracy to purposely create hikikomori through various moe anime programs designed to keep people at home:

Hikikomori as a Western Media Trope

However, the hikikomori trope does appear to be making the jump into western media via various documentaries, shorts, indy works like Hikikomori: Tokyo Plastic, and mainstream films like the anthology Tokyo!.

I wonder how long before we see a hikikomori as a trope on an American reality TV show or formula series in shades of Syfy's Warehouse 13 character Arthur "Artie" Nielsen or Fringe's character of Dr. Walter Bishop?

~M. Dziesinski

Scholarships and the JET Program: Thinking about cause and effect.

Yes, I was effusively gushing about my experiences in the last post, but if you think about it for a moment, it is a really rare opportunity to meet the Emperor and Empress of Japan, heads of state, and a honor to be affiliated with the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship.

To be slightly philosophical here, scholarships grant graduate students a chance to study and fulfill their personal dreams and goals in ways that might be otherwise difficult or impossible. I know personally there was a great deal of trepidation and anxiety in the year leading up to my planned transition to do my PhD field research in Japan. Now, with scholarship funding, I can completely focus on the issues and problems surrounding my research and make sure I get the very best data and insights possible. Further, in my meetings with alumni of the scholarship, some of them career professors and administrators at the University of Hawaii, and I can see how pivotal the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship was in their early academic careers.

This is not the first time that a funding opportunity has marked a major shift in my life path.

When I was in JET as a Japan Exchange Teacher in Imabari CIty in Ehime Prefecture from 1997-2000, I was often 'whelmed' by the hectic teaching schedule, culture shock, and craziness of fellow JET teachers (and a certain Wiccan ninja). As months wore to years, I began to see the positive impact my classroom time had with Japanese junior high school students. One thing that kept me going as a JET was my teaching.

Even today, I often think about the relationships and interactions with people in terms of a rock causing ripples in a pond and those ripples crossing, bouncing, and spreading to other shores. I find it as both a centering and grounding perspective:

What you say and do effects everyone around you, so you should think about the cause and effect of your actions (and even inaction is in its won way action). And really the thing you have the most control over in this lifetime is your own actions. Exploring cause and effect between individuals, groups, and societies is perhaps one of the main reasons I find personal satisfaction as a researcher in the social sciences.

When a instructor walks into a room full of receptive students and begins to teach, that experience and knowledge can last a lifetime.Those students in turn teach their children and may even become teachers themselves in due time. While reality does not always follow the ideal, I think life always offers potential to touch other peoples lives in a positive way and that is what keeps people connected and, well, 'human'.

~M. Dziesinski

I'm a 2009-2011 2009 Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Recipent!!!

*ahem* in my best Professor Farnsworth voice: "Good News everyone!"

I'm very excited to be able to officially announce that I am one of two annual scholarship recipients for the 2009 to 2011 Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation award at the University of Hawaii.

This is very generous two year scholarship with a great deal of prestige attached to it in Japan studies circles in Hawaii.

The history behind Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship dates back to 1959 when it was established in arrangements between the Japanese American community in Hawaii and the Imperial Household as a endowment to celebrate the wedding of then Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko. Over the past fifty years, 129 graduate students from Japan and Hawaii have become recipients of scholarship and have gone on to become notable scholars and professionals. Annually, two University of Hawaii graduate students and two graduate students from Japan are chosen as recipients. In addition to the incredible history attached to the scholarship for which I am now a proud recipient, scholars are also invited to the Japanese Imperial Palace for an audience with the Imperial Majesties during the period of their scholarship. From my understanding, the reason the name of the scholarship retains the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship even though they are now the Imperial Majesties of Japan is because the scholarship began as a wedding present.

This year, 2009, the scholarship fund is in its 50th year and as the scholarship was originally a wedding present, the Emperor and Empress of Japan are also celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. On the way back from a trip to visit Canada in July 14 to 16, the Imperial Majesties stopped in Honolulu, Hawaii for a reception. (Here is a very nice news series by local newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser that follows the Imperial visit to Hawaii.) During their visit, there were three days of events related to the 50th anniversary of the scholarship and I was able to attend all three days.

On July 14th there was a small gathering for scholars and, as I was one of the new scholars in attendance, I was asked by the local Honolulu media to do several short on-air interviews. I was really taken off guard as I had just arrived to the function in a two-piece suit in 90 degree weather and was immediately asked to do an interview. Despite five minutes of chatting with me, I can see why only nine seconds was used, as I was a bit flustered and could have used a comb! Ha Ha. Below are some links to the news items and videos.

It looks like KHNL channel 8 in Honolulu pulled the video already which is a shame as it was the longer interview with me:

http://www.khnl.com/global/story.asp?s=10735281

If you have the patience to watch the full news cast for those two days you'll also get related news stories about the Imperial Visit in Hawaii (note- steaming feeds not Mac OS X friendly):

http://archives.khnl.com/news/2009/07/090714.html

http://archives.khnl.com/news/2009/07/090715.html

KHON channel 2 in Honolulu still has a video up and also a nice explanation of the history of the scholarship:

http://www.khon2.com/news/local/story/Scholarship-Recipients-Explain-Impact-of-Japanese/5MDuobLgXUOFOqa2JX-HPA.cspx

The night of the 15th was the biggest event when a dinner banquet was held for Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and was attended by 1500 guests.

The really incredible part of that evening is that the Imperial Majesties met in a smaller reception with only the Crown Prince Akihito Scholars in attendance, which was about 60 or so individuals. While it should be expected for an event such as this, the amount of press and security was surreal. In contrast, even though my meeting with the the Imperial Majesties was brief they really do have an incredible aura of grace and calm surrounding them.

On July 16th, the Imperial Majesties departed for the Big Island and the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation held a day-long meeting in an academic conference format. Throughout the day, three panels filled with alumni scholars as presenters discussed the impact of the scholarship on their careers and personal lives. As the new scholar not yet starting my field research in Tokyo, I found it fascinating to listen to the details of their original scholarship research experiences as well as their current academic careers. And its a eclectic group: from NASA scientists to Noh performance professors.

~M. Dziesinski

Photos of neat otaku rooms, cluttered hikikomori rooms

In the otaku community a current fad is taking pictures of the layout of your room, often showing off very interesting shrines to particular anime or manga series. Here's a series of pictures at Otakool:

Danny Choo shows off an example (picture copyright Danny Choo of course)

In contrast, there is an interesting series of of photos of the rooms that hikikomori reside within. (also found over at www.dannychoo.com)

(These pictures are copyright the original poster Nocchi, I am posting them for a basis of comparison and discussion.)

And here is a link back to the original poster's website, Nocchi.

~M. Dziesinski

ICJS Wakai Project Youth Conference: Youth Work in Contemporary Japan

I've had a busy summer in 2009, I thought my blog might be a good forum to discuss some events I attended as it relates to the focus of this blog.

The big event in June was attending and presenting at my second conference on my Master's thesis research topic, hikikomori. (My thesis is now available via the Proquest service as a downloadable pdf. You can find more details in a earlier post on the subject here. If you are attending a university, your institution should have a subscription to the Proquest service and you can get free access that way.)

The first conference was the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (ASA) in Boston last summer in which I discuss and provide a free link to my paper as a PDF here. Actually the 2009 ASA Conference is being held in San Francisco August 8-11th. As much as I'd like to go this year as well, I've been pretty busy preparing for my dissertation research which starts in September, so I'll have to pass.

I was in Tokyo from June 25th to the 30th to present at Temple University's ICJS Wakai Project Youth Conference: Youth Work in Contemporary Japan. This is the third year the Temple University campus in Japan has held a Wakai Project Youth Conference. Last year the theme was youth and digital content this year its youth and work, which is my area of research interest, so I went ahead and applied to present.

A PDF of all the presentation abstracts and conference schedule is available here.

I was very excited to be able attend this conference and doubly so when I was selected to present on day two of the conference.

One reason was due to the fact that the presenters for day one of the conference were Mary Brinton (Harvard University), Genda Yuji (Tokyo University) and Kosugi Reiko (Japan Institute of Labor). As a researcher, I have cited their publications numerous times in my own papers and their work is who I go to first in order to get a solid quantitative picture of what's happening in Japan's contemporary labor markets. So you can imagine, it was really rewarding to hear them present in person about their research.

I should point out that a great deal of economic and labor related data on Freeters, NEET and hikikomori has been produced by the Japan Institute of Labor (JIL for short) over the last decade. The researchers there are primarily economists, but thier analysis on issues relating to Japanese youth labor and Japanese government policy is top notch. Even if you are a psychologist or anthropologist and looking at issues relating to specific populations of Freeter, NEET, Hikikomori, et.al., for which you intend to perform an ethnographic study on, it's constructive to understand the macro structural context of the national labor scene and Japanese labor policies in which these young Japanese find their lives situated within.

So, I found the Temple University conference very constructive on many levels.

Personally, it was the first time in five years that I had been in Tokyo, and was the first time in ten years that I actually stayed and explored Tokyo rather than just passing through to another destination. As with any big metropolis, some landmarks remain the same while the character of the areas around them morph into something totally new. Yoyogi, Akihabara (now nicknamed Akiba), Harajuku and Shinagawa to name a few areas that are familiar and yet, so very different from the late 1990s when I last lived in Tokyo.

Professionally, I met some fascinating people doing very intriguing research. I look forward to catching up with them when I set up shop in Tokyo in September. And so many anthropologists! Talk about culture clash. I had more than a few vigorous conversations about theoretical framing over beers. It was great fun. All in all, I was very fortunate to have gone to the conference.

I had heard that they may be interested in gathering all the presentations at the conference into an edited book. But that remains unconfirmed. In the meantime, here's an abstract of my presentation:

Building a Working Class Future: Rehabilitating Middle-class Hikikomori with Normalized Working-Class Expectations.

Michael DZIESINSKI

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Hikikomori are Japanese youth who shut out contact with society by hiding within parents’ homes for months or even years. During these long periods of isolation from traditional school and work environments, hikikomori lack the socialization needed for adulthood. Due to the established school-to-work system in Japan, youth with a history as hikikomori have limited options for reentry into society as middle-class adults. This paper is based upon primary field data collected over a ten-month period at a private rehabilitation institution for hikikomori in Tokyo, Japan. Over the three years of this program, hikikomori youth are exposed to daily social rehabilitation structured around an idealized working class norm of conduct through group participation, routinization, and repetition. This process of hikikomori rehabilitation also takes on the dimensions of gender and class socialization: the normalization of hikikomori youth with middle class backgrounds into a more viable adult gendered working class identity.

~M. Dziesinski

Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, Aversion, and Hikikomori at Anime Edit Part 2

Now that you have the background from part 1 of this discussion, let's continue with my analysis of hikikomori after a couple years of reflection on my field work in Tokyo.

In my usual overly verbose style I had this to say in the comments section of  March of 2009 Moritheil posted a blog article titled "Aversion and Hikikomori"  over on Anime Edit Blog:

"Having done ten months of research at a Tokyo rehab center for hikikomori I can tell you that there is nothing “cool” about youth who are actual hikky.

First the media scare on “Dangerous hikikomori youth” back in 1999 and 2000 and the recent the pop culture depictions have really distorted and glorified the whole hikikomori phenomenon.

The reasons or trigger that caused a youth to become hikikomori vary. They can be like ghosts, staying up all night and sleeping by day or they can seem completely normal except they won’t look at a person face-to-face. It can be heartbreaking to be around hikikomori who are recovering as you can sense their frustration and desire to be normal but they are locked into patterns of behavior that avoid contact.

The thing is, the label “hikikomori” was originally about the behavior of acute social withdrawal by Japanese youth, not the causes of it. The reason why a lot of Japanese may say hikikomori are unique to Japan is because of the different way such behavior is viewed in Japan by everyday people. In western societies there is a tendency to label a troubled person by a clinical condition such as depression, aspergers, agoraphobia, schizophrenia and so on. If a doctor diagnoses such a condition the parent will seek care at a hospital and or a drug regimen. In contrast, a youth in Japan suffering from any of those conditions or even bullying or stress from school who avoids social interaction will be viewed as a hikikomori.

Also hikikomori is not a black and white “condition”, perfectly fine people, even adults, may lose a job or have hard times and slip into being a NEET and then into a hikikomori.

As I do research on the topic, I’ve been contacted by people from all over the world expressing concern over hikikomori in their own country, including South Korea, Italy and most recently Poland. Because the word “hikikomori” is now so high profile I think people self-identify with being hikikomori rather than seek help and see if perhaps they might have medical or psychological condition."

moritheil asked me to elaborate and, well, I did....overmuch perhaps:

"Yes, what I found at my research site is that the rehab staff in the 1980s were treating youth with similar patterns of social withdrawal, but at that time, the kids were being called “school refusals”, tôhôkyohi. The more I’ve looked into trying to pin down a definitive pattern/cause for a static label hikikomori the more its like quicksand.

Hikikomori is different things to everyday Japanese- something to be slightly afraid of; its something else to Japanese clinics- who are medicalizing youth identified as hikikomori; and it is something again to youth who may view themselves as hikikomori- stuck and cornered in society, they may feel that a social moratorium as they see in the popular media depiction of what it is to be “hikikomori” might be an answer to their problems. It goes without saying that the label hikikomori internationally has its own flavors and permutations.

Of course as a social scientist, I’m sure a clinical psychologist might disagree with my interpretation of the situation with hikikomori, but in my own research experience, I found that the causes for a person to “become” hikikomori can vary. Hikikomori causation is a complex issue and is really hard to say in any absolute way that 50% of all hikikomori are depressive, 30% are avoidance behaviors, etc. In fact the staff at the rehab center would argue that the reasons for each hikikomori undergoing treatment there were unique. Further as a researcher, its impossible to quantify for various reasons (ever try to conduct a survey on people who hide from sight?).

As I said, some people have genuine chronic medical issues while others might just be stressed and initially seeking escape from daily pressures and family expectations- but they can all fall under the umbrella term of hikikomori- if they avoid social contact for six months or more. And there is a reason why the discourse on hikikomori focuses on the final behavior of social seclusion as it is easier to observe and identify than what spurred someone to become hikikomori in the first place.

You ask what might “drive one to become hikikomori”. Assuming the individual is rational as you say, I have seen several common ones (for people w/o preexisting health disorders). Let me go back to the 1980s to make my next point. When school refusals were identified within health circles, there were a steady number of cases to be sure, but when it hit the mass media (TV, newspapers, etc) there was a large spike in “school refusals”. The same thing happened after 1999, 2000 for hikikomori as the media raised public awareness via several sensational stories like the Osaka bus hijacking. Back then however, hikikomori were frightening and seen as mentally ill by the public (read/watch the BBC’s “Missing Million” to see what I mean). Thus reflecting the “public aversion to hikikomori aversion” you mention at the end of your article. (You may want to look into Japanese attitudes on mental and physical disability to see more about why this occurs in Japan)

Now, with hikikomori in pop culture and woven into stories as both protagonist and peripheral characters, being hikikomori might seem like a viable option for some people who can’t handle the daily strain of life. Becoming hikikomori can seem a viable choice for some people- the media has made them aware that this option, being hikikomori, is out there and exists, other people suffer from this condition…maybe I do too. Some people make the label “hikikomori” their own and choose to be hikky. Now, this is only one part of the hikikomori “population” and perhaps only a small portion, but I think it is important to consider as they may be the most vocal part of the hikikomori population, the rest avoiding social contact.

Here’s the catch: once many people decide to socially withdraw, become hikikomori, for whatever reason, be it serious emotional trauma or whimsy, certain patterns of behavior begin to settle into their lives. For one, they socially stagnate and may become night owls. Second, their lack of face-to-face interaction may mean they start to over-think the rare times they are confronted with another person. They may be fine in isolation for weeks or months but eventually something happens and they become trapped in hikikomori patterns and not sure how to break those behaviors.

Think about sensory deprivation chambers or the concerns space agencies have about the extreme isolation of a physically and mentally healthy astronaut in a small capsule that takes months to get to Mars. Humans are social creatures. The separation from groups of people and regular daily interaction will have its effects on any person’s psyche- no matter what the original reason a person may have undergone isolation. For individuals with pre-existing health conditions, like depression. Well, it would seem it just further complicates their situation in social isolation as a hikikomori."

~M. Dziesinski

Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, Aversion, and Hikikomori at Anime Edit Part 1

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

Image Sources: animecharactersdatabase.com

Whilst tweaking my Typepad account's new settings I noticed some hits to my site from Anime Edit Blog. I'm familiar with the blog from several years ago when I was more active blogging.

Back in March of 2009 Moritheil posted a blog entry titled "Aversion and Hikikomori" about how the humorous and often twisted anime series Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei , often abbreviated to SZS in internet discussions, portrays the hikikomori condition as a a type of extreme aversion via one of its characters,

Komori Kiri , 小森 霧, whose actual name itself is wordplay, 籠もりきり, on hikikomori, 引き籠もり. Most, if not all of SZS characters, have names that are Japanese word play on some eccentricity or neuroses and said characters are living embodiments of those quirks throughout each episode.

SZS often deals with serious or gloomy topics, which might be expected with the main character is named Mr. Despair, but it does add a touch of humor and parody to ordinarily heavy subject matter. Such as Mr. Despair's famous refrain: Zetsubou Shita!!!, "I am in despair!":

!

In any event, coming across moritheil's post crystalized some thoughts about the interaction between the mass media and the hikikomori phenomenon that I have been seeing develop over the last nine years. In 1999 and 2000 the initial coverage on hikikomori entailed shocking crimes or behaviors attributed to hikikomori. The net effect of this media coverage was a moral panic in the Japanese populace about hikikomori.

Over the years, as hikikomori have become used as characters in popular entertainment the meaning and context of what it is to be a hikikomori has been distorted and morphed through the lens of mass media in order to suit the purposes of popular culture consumption. In some depictions in popular entertainment the hikikomori image has been softened to invoke sympathy and in others, such as Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, played up to humorous effect.

In effect, while the hikikomori condition still exists as a serious problem for a notable number of Japanese people in 2009, nine years after it came to awareness in the public eye, it has also been effectively co-opted by the mass media into a "safe" consumable commodity. Its interesting that the reaction towards hikikomori in Japanese society loosely follows the arc of youth subcultures such as Mods and Punks detailed in the works of Tony Jefferson and Stuart Hall et. al, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (1991).

~M. Dziesinski

A very good Research Article on Hikikomori

For those who have asked about further research materials on hikikomori.

First off, I would refer you to the bibliography of my last paper titled "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori". I have always found looking at the Bib of a good paper great groundwork for further inquiry. If you would like to use the sources cited from my last published paper you can download a PDF here .

Also, here is an outstanding research articles on hikikomori.

This is an excellent piece by Andy Furlong from the University of Glasgow that manages to tie together hikikomori, freeters and the current labor market issues in Japan.

Sociological Review, Volume 56 Issue 2, Pages 309 - 325, Published Online: 18 Apr 2008

Title "The Japanese hikikomori phenomenon: acute social withdrawal among young people"

Abstract:

Although rare in the west, in Japan and in some other advanced countries on the Asian-Pacific rim, there is a popular perception that there has been a significant increase in the numbers of young people who withdraw socially for protracted periods of time (referred to by the Japanese term 'hikikomori'). This paper describes the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, considers evidence relating to its prevalence and examines views about the causes. I argue that the tendency to think of hikikomori as a homogeneous group characterised by psychological malaise is misleading and that withdrawal and disengagement can also be linked to changing opportunity structures. The collapse of the primary labour market for young people and the growing prevalence of a precarious secondary sector has led to a situation in which traditional and deep-rooted norms are undermined and young people forced to find new ways of navigating transitions within a highly pressured and rigid system. Under these circumstances, acute withdrawal often represents an anomic response to a situation where tradition no longer provides adequate clues to appropriate behaviour rather than as a malaise reducible to individual psychologies.

There are no direct PDF downloads I am aware of but it is available online via Wiley Inter-science for purchase. For those readers affiliated with a university or research institution you should be able to access a copy of the Journal Sociological Review for free via your library system.

Furlong is a good researcher and reaches a great many conclusions I did is, I admit much more sophisticated in his analysis. Also he had the advantage of research funding and many years of experience over me. I highly recommend his book:

Furlong, A. & Cartmel, F. 2006, Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives, 2nd edn, Open University Press, Buckingham, UK.

FYI, I will be posting citations on the blog in the American Sociological Association (ASA) citation style using my Sente 5 Database (would the good folks at Third Street Software please, please publish an official ASA Bibliography Format? All I can find is a user created one in the forums).

~M. Dziesinski

Asian Studies Master's Thesis on Hikikomori

Okay,

After several years of pain and suffering I finally finished my Master's Thesis on my hikikomori research done from 2003-2004. And for all those hours of work I got a nifty cap December 2008:

...And a second Master's Degree. Though I don't think you can put two "MA"s after your name in correspondence except for humorous effect:

Michael Dziesinski MA MA

Back on topic.

Yeah, I know, publishing four years later is a bit pitiful- but you try doing two graduate programs at the same time see how much that slows you down.

Here's the Abstract:

Hikikomori, coined by Tokyo Psychologist Saito Tamaki, describes a trend of Japanese youth, primarily male, who shut out contact with society by hiding within their parents’ homes for months or years at a time. In the process, these hermits become truants and school refusals, failing out of school and work through their long periods of seclusion. Further, reentry into society as middle-class adults is difficult for those with a history of acute social withdrawal. This study examines Takeyama, a private rehabilitation institution for hikikomori in Tokyo, Japan. Over the three years of Takeyama’s rehabilitation program, hikikomori youth are exposed to daily social rehabilitation structured around an idealized norm of conduct through group participation, routinization, and repetition. The process of hikikomori rehabilitation at Takeyama also takes on the dimensions of gender and class socialization: the normalization of hikikomori youth with middle class backgrounds into a viable adult gendered working class identity.

My Master's thesis on the subject is available via Proquest:

"THE REHABILITATION OF JAPANESE YOUTH WITH ACUTE SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AT TAKEYAMA GAKKÔ, A HIKIKOMORI SUPPORT CENTER."

It takes a few months to go up in their system (was posted in November) but I believe you will soon be able buy my thesis in PDF form online.

My information on this is a bit scanty at present as I'm waiting for a contact by Proquest on accessibility of my thesis. I will provide updates here as they become available. These things appear to take several months due to backlog.

~M. Dziesinski

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 adult masculine identity entwined with a working class future.

CItation:

Dziesinski, M. , 2008-07-31 "From Failed Sons to Working Men: Rehabilitating Hikikomori" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Sheraton Boston and the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA Online <APPLICATION/PDF>. 2008-12-16 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p242231_index.html

~M. Dziesinski

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

The story thus far:

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

Hikikomori Reasearch Update and Other Things

Greetings Fellow Travelers,

This poor poor blog has fallen into disuse over the past few years and for that I greatly apologize. Over that time I have received a fair number of emails expressing interest in my hikikomori topic and for updates of the blog.

I thank those people for your continuing interest. I have always known that my topic was very much a niche area, that my intermittent posts, and my verbose blog style meant I would have a very tiny readership...if at all.

I figured those with interest would stumble upon my blog and that's fine by me. However, I always meant for Japan's Lost Generation to be a sounding board for my research. As much of my research material was unpublished I thought it prudent to keep that close to the vest until such time I had some copyright protection.

This concern was borne out 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. They have obviously built on my work posted on my Lost Gen blog but make no reference to me. That kind of dampened my enthusiasm to continue posting my unpublished research on my blog.

That's fine I guess.

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. In part, it is due to others being more established in the field and finding it easy to dismiss the work of a graduate student. But when you find the core of your ideas in another person's work it can be a bit frustrating.

Again, live and learn.

Welcome to my 2009 blog, enjoy your stay.

~M. Dziesinski

Hikikomori are part of a spectrum of globalized youth Part Two

The more functional end of the spectrum

The other end of this spectrum of coping youth are freeters, NEETS and twixters who are more functional, if only marginally so.

The effects of economic globalization has shifted the daily realities for Japanese youth away from the traditional social values and ideologies of their parent's generation. Traditional normalcy is not sustainable, nor are upholding the expectations that a youth can reasonably take on their father's and mother's roles in society. In addition, national institutions like education, set up for creating productive citizens for a pre-globalized economy, have been slow to change. Institutional inertia means that youth who do not excel or have the family resources to supplement their education to be competitive post-graduation, are ill prepared for an adult working life. They end up in working class lives as flexible workers, as freeter- or worse.

I think the dilemma for these youth lies with socialized middle class expectations ingrained by society.

This conflicts with the reality of the career market for those not the top strata of a nation's social class along with specialized skill sets offered by university and the social capital affluent parents can offer. I see the problem for these youths as the confluence of a class squeeze on the societal level and an Durkheimian anomic response on an individual level. The Globalized structural changes taking place in Euope, Asia and the US since the 1980s has left an entire population of youths in the 20-30 age bracket who are unable to adapt.

Hikikomori are part of a spectrum of globalized youth Part One

The darker end of the spectrum

Over the last two years I've come to the conclusion that hikikomori are not a unique group but rather towards the less functional end of a spectrum of young people unable to cope and adapt to societal changes due to globalization. Beyond hikikomori, on the extreme end of this spectrum of youth feeling alienated and lacking purpose are those who opt out of life completely, youth who commit suicide.

From the LA Times 12/14/01, Japan's Suicide Epidemic:

Japan's economic deterioration is damaging a lot more than balance sheets and bank statements. Extreme stress and mental instability are at record highs. About 425,000 people were treated for stress-related mental disorders last year. In 1998, when the economy started tanking, suicides jumped 25% to more than 30,000 and haven't declined. Suicides directly attributed to employment, personal debt and the economy now number 8,500 annually, up fourfold from a decade ago. Because of population changes, the mortality rate per 100,000 people has eased slightly.

Mental health professionals say the actual number of stress-related illnesses may be much higher because psychological difficulties are often ignored or swept under the tatami mat in Japan, where depression is still viewed as a character flaw and treatment is inadequate.

"There's a very dark cloud hanging over Japanese society as more and more people lose their psychological signposts," said Dr. Yoshitomo Takahashi, a researcher with the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry. "Mental illness still carries a lot of shame, so most people are referred only at the terminal stage. This makes our job very difficult."

Countries around the world have for decades lived with high unemployment and the social, economic and political costs it engenders. But in Japan, workers saw a job as an entitlement, and for years that was the case until Japan's economy faltered.

Companies began pruning payrolls, and the pain now is jolting the core of Japanese society: breadwinners in their 40s and 50s. This generation sacrificed almost everything for the company and now feels betrayed, isolated and worthless at being let go.

"Japan is suddenly waking up from a 56-year dream," said Hirotake Araya, general manager of Tokyo Shoko Research, a private data-collection company. "The end of lifetime employment is very difficult to accept, particularly for middle-aged people.

More on the topic of contemporary suicide in Japan, here and here.

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/

Q & A Series PT IV: Buddhist Insight to Internet Suicide Pacts and the Hikikomori

Recently, I was asked a series of questions by a person researching the phenomenon of suicide in Japanese society. I'd like to share that discussion over the next several blog entries for the benefit of others. I'll call the individual 'E' in this blog.

Michael Dziesinski

--------------------

E's Question:
I am interested particularly in any Buddhist insight, as this is the my area of research. I am drawing my own conclusion on Buddhist influence on suicide, of course, but am interested in any connection you may see in your own work.

My Answer:

As for linkages with hikikomori, both groups on one level are obviously dissatisfied with their lot in life. In some cases, both are a cry for outside intervention.

My current thinking is that hikikomori are mentally healthy people who feel so pressured by society that they socially withdraw. ‘Socially’ is the key concept here: they are in duress and so they seek to remove themselves from the source of the pain. However, once they do so, they ‘wither on the vine’ developmentally due to the absence of social interaction. Drawn outside of their environment and with proper patience and care, they recover to become functional adults.

The point I’m making here is while some hikikomori may have at some point contemplated suicide, or even done so once trapped within their isolation, most seem to have a strong will to live and are normal mentally, they are just unsure how to ‘fix themselves’ and so are trapped in a catch-22 of isolation.

I do touch on the connection with Durkheim’s work on suicide and anomie in this post:
http://towakudai.blogs.com/my_weblog/2005/04/q_a_about_hikik_2.html

I think his theory may be one of the better tracks you can take on the rash of suicides in Japan’s media spotlight right now. Durkheim posits that in times of social upheaval with an underlying weak social order, such as drastic economic change, the number of suicides increases because to people lack the firm self-identity that society provides for us.

Buddhist influence, but more specifically, the warrior cult of the Bushidoh code’s seppuku / hara-kiri in the face of shame or dishonor in Japan may be responsible for romanticizing suicide in the modern day, and perhaps lowering the social barriers as a taboo act. The Buddhist concept of rinne, transmigration of the soul, may also play a part in such a decision of self-destruction, but I can’t say with any authority. I would guess that the historical context of suicide in Japanese culture plays some role in the contemporary internet suicide pacts.

I would also guess that these people in the internet suicide pacts are forming in-groups over a measurable period of time which in turn exchange ideas and plans on committing the act of suicide together. As an in-group, that the dynamic of the internet suicide pact is going to be typically Japanese in structure, re-enforcing and re-affirming in nature that ‘this is the right thing to do’.

To see where my reasoning is going here, I suggest you look into Japanese charismatic cults such as Aum Shinrikyo, Pana Wave or even the Japanese Red Army. Again this is conjecture, but you may find one or two charismatic figures at the center of each suicide pact that act as the catalyst for the rest of the group who follow them through to the ultimately grim conclusion.

Thank you again, and I look forward to hearing from you.
—E

Glad to be of service.

Michael Dziesinski