Slashdot Mirror
Why Are Japanese Men Refusing To Leave Their Rooms?
fantomas writes "The BBC reports on the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori: young people, mainly men, who are holed up in rooms in their parents' houses, refusing to go out and engage with society. 'A conservative estimate of the number of people now affected is 200,000, but a 2010 survey for the Japanese Cabinet Office came back with a much higher figure - 700,000. Since sufferers are by definition hidden away, Saito himself places the figure higher still, at around one million. The average age of hikikomori also seems to have risen over the last two decades. Before it was 21 — now it is 32.' Why is this happening? And is it a global phenomenon or something purely due to Japanese culture? (We're all familiar with the standing slashdot joke of the geek in their mom's basement, for example.)"
The Internet can provide you with almost everything you need to survive. When people become disillusioned with life they get consumed by the Internet and find it more home than reality ever was.
How do I know this? I am one of those people.
Porn, probably.
And why not? They're living in Schoolgirl Tentacle Porn Central.
I hear ya. I had a 26 year old step-daughter who did get a the job at Starbucks...and got fired for bad attendance within the month. Back to Facebook and Angry Birds, full-time.
Funny, a week after I booted her useless ass out she had a new job at a book store, and within the month had graduated from couch surfing to her own cozy efficiency.
Parents shouldn't whine about their sweet, precious babies laying around their house. They need to put a boot in their ass.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
If I had mod points you'd get them. This is the kind of interesting stuff that keep me visiting /.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Japan being the last civilised country where possession of child porn is legal.
Maybe they're just not foolish enough to have fallen for the group think we have, which is what you accuse them of. Here, an X rated comic strip is considered child porn. A teenager sexting their SO can get them twenty years in prison and permanent listing on the perv roll.
Every society makes choices on what is the acceptable ways to express individuality. Japan, historically, has been fairly excessive that way in comparison to the rest of the world, but that's the way Japanese (historically) roll; to excess. Go was invented in China. Japan raised it to an art including endowing universities to teach it. The Samurai raised warfare to an art. They even raised serving tea to an art.
After all this time since they opened up to the west, many of us can't even begin to understand them. That's pretty amazing in itself.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Vitamin D deficiency related to depression can be a downward spiral if people then spend more and more time indoors, like in Japan. See my many posts on halth issues and autism including about Mark Hyman and mitochondrial dysfunction and John Cannell. Also look into unschooling for interest-lead learning.
Search also on "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction" for the pitfalls of 21st century living.
And, from a positive psychology point of view, try to help him build on his strengths, whatever those are.
Politically, lobby for a "basic income" for all. The fact is, most of us will soon be "unemployable" relative to AI, robotics, and other automation (see Marshall Brain), breaking the income-through jobs link that previously undergird the right to consume.
Sounds like a tough situation though. Good luck. Your son is lucky to have a caring involved father like you!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Parents coddle adult kids. The kids have never been encouraged to fend for themselves, and this is the natural result.
No, the problem is parents do not ALLOW their children to fend for themselves. "For oneself" implies a definition of self that has not been set up for inevitable failure.
Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure. Now the child feels like a loser no matter what he does -- program computers and he is shamed before his family, do what his father wants instead and he is shamed before himself.
Withdrawal is a rational short-term reaction, when one is set up failure by one's family and society. Unfortunately, withdrawal for more than a modest period of time becomes its own self-reinforcing barrier to success.
It may look like coddling from a superficial point of view. From within the closed walls of the family, it is incessant brutal emotional abuse. The hints are there in TFA. The children are physically abusive? That kind of behavior is taught by the parents. There is a partial confession at the end of the article:
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
Parents coddle adult kids. The kids have never been encouraged to fend for themselves, and this is the natural result.
That's some fine knee-jerk thinking there. Preconceived-notion: parents should be hash with their kids. Random fact: some kids somewhere are having a poor outcome. Conclusion: the only possible explanation is that their parents haven't been harsh enough with them. Never mind that Japanese society is a harsh environment with strict social rules about everything that the kids would have been exposed to from a young age. Never mind that the psychologists don't actually know what the problem is. Truthiness forever!
Nope it isn't uncommon for parents to try to drag their kids out. the kids well sometimes fight tooth and nail to stay in there. believe me, there is an INTENSE social pressure to live up to society's demands and the parents experience it as well as the kids. in fact I think it's these kids attempting to avoid this social pressure. Japanese culture is merciless to those who make mistakes or otherwise don't live up to the standards of society.
I think what's happening is that people find more interesting conversations on the internet than they can find among the people around them, and it makes the people around them far less interesting by comparison. I honestly don't know anybody besides my wife in meatspace that I would have a conversation with out of anything but politeness. Almost everybody simply regurgitates what they see on cable TV, or talks about their offspring.
As an American shut-in, when I first discovered the term "hikikomori", I was extremely disturbed but also felt an intense sense of vindication. It isn't just me: many other people feel it too. That sense of realizing how unfair and how grindingly hopeless and purposeless participation in the current socio-economic scam really is.
I don't want to spend my whole life working some shitty job to barely pay rent all while knowing perfectly well that there is absolutely no reason I must do so but that the powerful members of society (a class of individual which is powerful through no other reason than that there has always been such a class) have arranged for this situation. There is more than enough "wealth", there is more than enough resources (food, water, energy) and space (stand on Zanzibar indeed) and labor (technology is a wonderful thing, and 3D printing and robots are perfectly capable of serving my minimal needs and wants if only they would / could be designed so instead of for fabricating ever more useless crap to be sold by the rich and powerful...) to provide everything I've ever wanted and yet I still have to spend almost all of my time either working a dead-end meaningless job for cash for rent and food (did you know that Americans throw away enough food to end world hunger?) or asleep to recover and do it again tomorrow.
The only way to win such a "game" is to not play it.
Escape into fantasy, into an inner universe that isn't so wretchedly repulsive, soul-crushingly grinding, spitefully vicious -- is the only way to stay alive. What if we treated all illnesses the way we treat mental distress? What if we punished the wicked wealthy for hoarding and perpetuating the horror in which we now find ourselves? What if we did magically solve the waste of energy which is leading us into crisis?
The problem isn't resources, it's the evil of those who have the resources. This isn't an immutable property of human nature -- and yet nothing is being done to solve this problem.
So I refuse to participate in a situation that is not only apathetic toward my well-being, but actively, maliciously, greedily abusive of me.
The state of the world is so because of mere history, nothing is being done about it by those who have the power to do so because it is not in their short-term interest.
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, godlike technology.
Right there you're claiming that 50% of the human population is insane. Presumably, you don't count yourself among them.
It goes both ways. I'm sure the term "insane" here means "uncorrelated to all the psychological patterns known to me." It may be perfectly normal for that other 50%, though.
Clearly not, since you don't respect women.
What is respect, though? Isn't leaving them alone, after acknowledging that he cannot work with them, not a sign of respect? I may respect you, and you may respect me, but we may never travel together - maybe just because we are going in opposite directions; because our goals and our ideals are incompatible. But if I take a whip and start beating you, in attempt to teach you the proper behavior as I understand it, then it wouldn't be respectful at all. Leaving other people alone is the highest form of respect, since it acknowledges that they are right on their own, and they require no "help" to get better.