I've been prepping my dissertation prospectus for my Sociology PhD at the University of Hawaii over the summer. Got to have it done by the second week of Fall term classes so I can gain the coveted "All But Dissertation", or ABD status.
With ABD status, I can register for the all-important SOC 800 course, which counts as full time registration status but only costs the equivalent to one credit hour, roughly $500 as a in-state resident. Compare that to about $6,000 for a full load of 8 credit hours. Now, when a graduate student is "ABD" they are generally in the field doing dissertation research and need to pay for those expenses. Without ABD status, trying to do your field work and paying an additional $6000 a semester to your university to retain your full-time student status- even though you are elsewhere- is, well, kind of a hardship.
That's why getting ABD status is so important. Lower overhead expenses in the field. And to get ABD, I need to defend my dissertation proposal in first two weeks of upcoming fall term at UH. I guess a graduate student really doesn't have summers free. Should have learned that in the last six years.
In any case, I have my comps material as theoretical reference, a fairly clear thesis (more on that later), good research location planned, and a general idea (such as here, here, and here) on how to write a prospectus. But its not just the proposal for the dissertation itself, I also have to formulate consent forms and provide my qualitative interview guides to address the concerns of properly protecting human subjects.
Despite all the guides I have on the process, I feel like I'm missing something but can't quite figure out what.
Maybe it's my brain....
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Updated 8-13-09
PS: to those thesis writing services trying to spam comments to this post and get their sites linked to my post, don't bother---
Your sites are an insult to those of us who work so very hard to learn our craft and become professionals. Besides, its kinda, what's the word, oh yeah, unethical to buy a prewritten thesis or dissertation. It's also amazingly stupid to expect your graduate committee to green light a thesis found from the bottom of a box of crackerjacks. They know your writing style, warts and all. If you aren't expelled immediately from your graduate program, you will have lied your way into an academic career. Way to start your pursuit of the acquisition of knowledge for the betterment of mankind.
~M. Dziesinski
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
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
Hello all,
Spent the last few years neck deep in Sociology PhD coursework. Something had to give and so I put aside this blog for a time.
Where did I go?
I've gotten past my core courses these last two years and am now transitioning into my comprehensive reading phase of my degree at the University of Hawaii. Hopefully, I can get that sorted by the Spring 08 term. In the meantime, I'm furiously writing papers to submit for journal publication.
What about the blog?
The blogsphere has changed a great deal in the last two years. While I'm a regular reader of a great many blogs, I simply cannot hope to keep up with the 72 to 48 news cycle on the internet these days with my own blog. So I'm going to do my own thing. If you would like to read along on my ruminations and idle speculations, welcome and enjoy the ride.
Refocusing the blog's focus
Also, my blog's focus is a reflection of my academic research and that has not changed. It has expanded though, and I will be touching on various topics. Hikikomori are still an interest, but so are freeters, parasite singles. In fact the intersection of Japanese youth culture with a globalized Japan is all fair game.
I'll try not to write War and Peace every post and keep it succinct as possible, but I'm naturally verbose so it'll be a struggle.
What I would like to do is make my blog a spring board and resource for ideas on the topic of Japan's Lost Generation. I would like to keep it academic in nature, but I may dip into cultural observations to mix it up a bit.
It's been done
There are a few blogs out there on Hikikomori, Freeters, Japan's lost gen, etc, but many seem to be by journos and meant to provoke.
I'm going to try, try mind you, to be a bit different. I'd like to create an alternative discourse on the plight of these young people in Japan. Rather than just rely on second and third hand re-reportage on the topics, I think analysis of first person observations is more constructive.
Also, I'm seeing in my stratification research that while freeters have unique cultural features, it is not a unique condition for youth in advanced capitalist/ information and service based nations. There are NEET in the UK and twixters in the US that also are in a similar fix.
Feedback
I welcome comments, in fact I highly encourage them, but I can and will edit them if they are off topic, flammable, or ads. However, for the time being, I have no illusions— my blog will most likely get little or no attention in the blogsphere, kind of like that kid who is picked last during gym class.
Be that as it may, I'd like my blog to be a forum of discussion for Japan's lost generation. In that vein I'll be taking submissions and posting them. I'll hash out some rules later but for now keep 'em under 500 words. Just email them to me with "lost gen" in the start of the topic line of your email.
Till next time—
~Mike D.
...Those were the words I saw on a letter mailed to me last week from the University of Hawaii's Sociology Department.
YAY!
I'm just finishing up my Masters in Japanese Studies and to get this news is most welcome.
Let me tell you, I've worked hard for three long years to get into the PhD.
It's strange though; instead of feeling like I won the lottery, it's more like getting a transfer to a new department.
I thought I'd be more ecstatic; that the world would glow with strange colors and be transcendentally brighter or something, but I guess that only happens in movies and with Psychoactives.
Don't get me wrong— I am looking forward to being in the Sociology department as it opens up some exciting doors for research in Japan. I'm already thinking to make Freeta the focus of my PhD dissertation (which includes hikikomori and Parasite singles). But, right now at the cusp of summer here in Hawaii it's just not real yet. (Have I ever mentioned what a beautiful place Hawaii is?)
I guess it goes back to that old adage that the wanting is sometimes more desirable than the having.
That lottery jackpot sure would be nice though...
I must apologize for the long absence on my blog, but as of Feb 14th I became a published author and had to set up up a website for it. My book, Secrets of Japan, is horror roleplaying set in modern day Japan, blending H.P Lovecraft's mythos with traditional Japanese supernatural beasts such as Tengu, Oni and Kitsune. Hence the month long blog vacation while I furiously built my book's website. Also, due to the book's success, I've been asked to write some articles for other books and publications.
If you'd like to see what I've been doing: http://www.secretsofjapan.com
It's very different from what I do here on the blog, but then I wrote this book four years ago through a small publishing company, so it took considerable time before it saw the light of day. I was in a different head space four years ago, but I do enjoy fiction writing so I'd like to publish some genre fiction as my next project after my thesis.
In the coming weeks as I get over the fact I've finally gotten a book out after waiting four years, I'll get back to the business of Japan's Lost Generation. I've seen the latest media blitz on the so-called 'internet suicide epidemic' in Japan, and I'd like to deconstruct this phenom; right off the bat, I'll say how remarkably similar the media buzz on this 'epidemic' is to the hikikomori problem back in 2000-2001.
Public attention to the previously hidden hikikomori problem is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Bringing public attention to social withdraw in Japan has been a mixed blessing according to those I interviewed at Takeyama Gakkoh.
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. Back then, social withdraw was a problem within families.
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. Perhaps letting the problem fester in the home longer than they would have years previous.
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, “ . . . true hikikomori by definition do not have the wherewithal to venture into the world to commit crime”. And despite these high visibility incidents attributed to shut-ins, some experts point out that violent outbursts by hikikomori “are rare. Hikikomori are more likely to suffer from lethargy or suicidal depression”.
My field observations agree with these conclusions. 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. This I view as a cry for help or frustration at their predicament, not some urge to 'hurt someone'.
Sorry to rant so, but these two misconceptions about socially withdrawn youth in Japan really get under my skin.
Hikikomori are not violent and it is highly doubtful they are one million strong.
[Again, if you want a detailed argument on these issues, please download my research paper on the topic in PDF form. ]
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?
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. ]
During the holiday break, I was checking links to my blog, I have noticed that many who first across the topic of hikikomori on the internet hit upon the BBC report, “Japan's Missing Million” as well as other news items that came out in 2000 and 2001.
I must admit that, among other things, the BBC report was one of the first articles that encouraged me to do research on hikikomori—but not for the reasons you might at first believe.
What drew me to the hikikomori topic is that something was fishy about the BBC report and those other news items by the western press stationed in Japan in 2000. There are two ‘facts’ on hikikomori that this BBC report and others in the western media appear to be simply regurgitating what was being said about hikikomori in the Japanese media of the time:
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1) That hikikomori are violent.
2) That there are a vast number of young hermits, over one million, hiding in their rooms in Japan in a mounting crisis.
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After my field research at Takeyama Gakkoh it became apparent that accepting both of these discursive beliefs on the issue of hikikomori, if not outright fallacies, are at face value very dangerous. To believe these two items as fact distorts the situation surrounding hikikomori and puts one at a great disadvantage when trying to understand what is really going on in Japan with it’s youth. And people, believing this hype, are less likely to venture forward to help these poor souls.
Here's why:
1) Associating violence with hikikomori is the fault of the mass media;
Violence and its shock value sells papers— aberrant cases of a FEW individuals who might have been classified hikikomori but were more likely mentally disturbed hit the headlines, from there the association between violence and social withdraw became forever linked in the minds of the Japanese public.
2) All of the reportage on 'Japan's missing million' in the various English language articles on the topic of Hikikomori cite the same source, one single person as the quote for this 1,000,000 statistic, that of Dr. Tamaki Saitoh. He is the very psychologist who 'coined' the word 'hikikomori' and subsequently made a career out of publishing one book after another on the topic.
As a researcher, I give him every benefit of the doubt and have spent two years of my life trying to verify his 'definition of 'hikikomori' through direct, in the field and on the ground, field research at a location that treats socially withdrawn 'hikikomori youths'.
However, after looking at statistics put out in the year 2000 by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Labor, the cynical side of me questions Dr. Saitoh's motivations for quoting such a large figure of one million as the number of hikikomori today in Japan. I have serious doubts that this is anywhere near an accurate accounting, as according to Ministry stats as well as other health officials, the population of hikikomori is probably closer to 50,000 young men—and even if you double that to include the number of young women being mis-identified as Parasite Singles, that's 100,000 Japanese youth. 1/10th of Saitoh's estimates and nowhere near the epidemic portrayed in the press!
[I'm not going to belabor the point too much more here. but if you want a detailed breakdown of the statistics, please download my research paper on the topic in PDF form. Discussion begins on page 8 of the paper dealing with the problem of the 'one million missing' estimate by Dr. Saitoh.]
Well, I took the plunge and plopped down the shareware fee for Ecto 2. What is Ecto you ask? Here it is straight from the author's 'mouth' (and website http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/):
Ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, and more.
With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.
I've been using it for two weeks to write this blog, and let me tell you, it is so incredibly slick and intuitive that I spend most of my time actually writing up content rather than fiddling with tags and what not. Combined with Typepad, it makes blogging a breeze. I'll stop soap-boxing now, still recovering from Turkey Thursday and it occurred to me today that Ecto really is worth it's salt. If your are new to blogging or want to try it out and your hands dirty without too much investment, go check out Ecto, and then maybe Typepad for the server end and you are on your way.
End of heaping praise.
In the coming months, you are going to notice that a lot of the topics on this blog gravitate towards the issue of hikikomori. It’s because I’m writing, or rather attempting to write, my Master’s thesis on the topic in a frantic effort to graduate and start into a Sociology PhD next year in 2005.
That won’t always be the case though (the topic, not the frantic part). When I start my PhD Program, I’m going to take serious look into other youth social problems in contemporary Japan, at least those getting wide reportage in the Japanese Media, as I think I’ve found my calling. After my core courses of five semesters are out of the way, I’ll be going back to Japan again to do about a year and half to two years of field research. That’s the idea anyway…
Other ‘problems’ I plan to discuss here are ‘freeter’, Japanese young people who reject the salaryman life for dead end part jobs that barely pay the bills. Then there are the ‘parasite singles’, young adults, mostly women, who stay at home and live off their parents, sometimes as old as their 40’s or 50’s, rather than live on their own. There is also a rising number of young homeless out on the streets in Japan as well. Not to mention that bit in the news a few weeks ago about a suicide pact made over the Internet by some Japanese twenty-something’s. And I was just introduced to a new group called NEET (when I have more on them I’ll let you know).
For a first time reader to this blog, besides asking why in the world I would be interested in such a grim topic as the social problems of Japan, I'm sure some people will also wonder why I feel I can write with any authority on the topic of my blog. As an American, maybe I should focus a blog on politics (goodness knows, it's a mess right now), maybe I should track wonderful things lurking around the web, or even do something on computer stuff?
Well, to be honest, while I am interested in those kind of things as hobbies, and I am a regular lurker at those kinds of blogs, others do a much better job and I would be just one tiny voice in an already oversaturated forum. Admittedly, my blog may come across as dry for people seeking such fare, and I encourage them wholeheartedly to check out the blogs I have linked; I find them entertaining and informative— especially in so far as what the current buzz on the net is about on any diverse topic you might imagine.
What I will try to do on this blog is stay topical to what ever is in the Japanese news related to Japan’s Lost Generation. I’ll scour the Japanese news services daily and try to offer some analysis and linkages here as to how it pertains to social issues in Japan.
For example, as soon as I get some core writing out of the way, I’d like to take a look at the Internet Suicide Pact that occurred in Japan just a few weeks ago. While that news item is already a bit cold (no pun intended), once I catch up on other things for this blog, I’ll try my best to stay on top of news developments in addition to concentrating on my current focus with the hikikomori. Another news worthy topic that I’d like to discuss here is that of parasite singles. There’s a great deal of depth to that issue and it ties into the hikikomori as well.
Ok, my street creds:
I was a public middle school teacher in Japan for three years as a JET teacher from 1997 to 2000 where I lived in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Japan. This summer, I just returned from a year in Japan doing double duty on a study abroad program in Kobe while I also conducted field research on the topic of hikikomori in Tokyo in all my free time (more on that later). I actually stayed on the premises of a rehabilitation center for hikikomori youth near Tokyo for one week stints totaling about one and half months.
The last nine years of my life has been spent studying or living in Japan. At one time, I could tell you why I originally started studying Japanese culture and I could even give you a really insightful and long winded answer to that effect (as you can see, I’m still long winded). Today, I’m just not certain why I originally started (looking into Japan, that is). But I’m pretty sure part of the reason was, by studying Japan’s society and its differences I hoped to gain a better understanding of my own society (and myself along the way). I’m sure there was some youthful longing to travel in there somewhere too.
So, why am I still studying Japan today when China is such a hot button topic in academics, business and such? Part of it is momentum, nine years of cultural acquisition is a lot of experiences and lessons learned to just throw away, especially when it’s reached the point of being an asset. And Japanese language was hard enough, have you seen how involved Mandarin and Cantonese is? Not to mention the 20,000 Chinese characters you need to learn!
I might also point out that when I started studying Japan, it was an Asian Tiger Economy with the image that Japan was going to overtake the West, buy up all the best property overseas, make Hawaii one big golf course, and take away American autoworker’s jobs.
Besides, Japan has changed me so much on a personal level that I don’t quite ‘fit’ in my own culture anymore. Go overseas for three years, come back, and see what kind of reverse culture shock a three-year pop culture void does to you as opposed to everyone else in your country. 
Monica Lewinsky who? Viagra what? Hanging Chads?
When I got back to the U.S. in 2000, the amount of cultural investment in topics like that due to media saturation in America made their significance to friends and family almost alien to me. But maybe it’s for the best, as I’m more detached from such sensationalism now…maybe.
I'm a University of Hawaii PhD in Sociology discussing youth issues in Japanese society in this blog.
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