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.)"
Maybe they are the human versions of the "beautiful ones" from John Calhoun's mice experiments with overpopulation?
It's the best fictional account of the issue I've seen.
Duh.
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.
Why is everyone expecting that everyone wants to socialise???
Seriously. There are so many assholes out there in the meat space, sometimes even more than on Reddit or YouTube comments. So many stupid, brain dead people. So many judging people judging others for superficial stuff.
I'm asexual, rarely meet people who interest me and share my hobbies and my interests.
Movies are all shit nowadays. So why should I socialise more than the minimum (food shopping, deliveries/postal service) ???
I got mugged by a New York housecat once.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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.
"It's similar to why adult domestic house cats are pretty much adult kittens who would die in the wild."
Nonsense. I've seen far too many of them go feral and survive long enough to have offspring afterwards (in the case they weren't neutered before going feral). And it's not just because someone is feeding them.
Some of them have trouble as they weren't taught effective hunting by their mothers, but lots of them can and do fend for themselves just fine. Yes, they get picked off by coyotes (or coy-dogs) and such, but so do a lot of wild small predators.
Basement-dwellers? Survive outside mommy's care? I call bullshit.
FWIW, you had me until you said "survive long enough to have offspring afterwards".
This is really about porn and video games... these two things can by themselves provide the brain with enough entertainment, reward, and pleasure to make the real world unnecessary.
First, there is a trauma: he fails to live up to parents expectations regarding education or career, has a heartbreak, loses his job, or whatever. Then he consoles himself with porn and video games. They feel good and he doesn't have to worry about his problems for a little while. If this goes on for long enough and he doesn't receive the right kind of social support, he may become addicted to both and lose the drive to do anything else.
What really happens is he becomes trapped by the dopamine pathways (reward system) in his brain. He is incapacitated by fear and social anxiety when dealing with others because his brain's reward system has been overpowered by the artificial stimulation of porn and video games. The dopamine normally produced by his brain during social interactions doesn't have nature's intended positive reinforcement effects for him because his dopamine tolerance is so high thanks to his addictions.
He becomes further and further withdrawn and does the only thing he knows how to do to feel "normal:" feed his addiction.
This has become a serious issue for young men in other parts of the world as well. It is ultimately made possible by technology, in particular the Internet.
Parents coddle adult kids. The kids have never been encouraged to fend for themselves, and this is the natural result.
Actually it's much closer to the collapse of the Japanese family, more than anything. It's not the coddling, it's the disdain for people, society, and not wanting to go into the massive "grind your face into the dirt" mentality that exists in Japan.
But we're seeing the entire thing play out here with the current generation of kids too. It's just not getting pulled up in the media.
Om, nomnomnom...
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."
Time to get me a Tommy Gun, change my name to Gatsby, and fill a warehouse up with a stack of USB drives with porn.
Soon, Daisy will love me for who I am!
I can vouch for that. The ROI on 3D women versus the 2D kind is simply atrocious.
Sure it's marginally better with a 3D woman but the price you pay is outrageous relative to slight increase in satisfaction over my hand, the screen, and some good inebriants. The amount of money saved has allowed me to buy my own place to hide out in rather than having to live with mom and dad.
The karoshi stereotype exists in Japan for a reason. The whole culture seems to be built around working yourself to death. A friend of mine visited there and described life as non-stop work. Guys basically work all day, then face social pressure to go out with the boss at night. Basically, they are "on" all the time. So of course there is a large segment of the population that sees that life and goes "screw that!" and decide not to play the game.
This, right here.
I understand and feel the revulsion that a healthy adult has towards child porn, but from an objective/legal point-of-view, the West got stupid about how they enforce such laws. Here's why: The basis of laws surrounding it is that the production of child porn harms a child - something that makes perfect sense, and should have laws in place to prevent/limit as much as logically possible. OTOH, who exactly is harmed in a comic strip? One would think that it would present a means of release for those pervs who do get into such crap, and to let them do so without harming anyone in the process. A teenaged kid sexting his/her SO should get a stern talking-to by the parents, and definitely should be enlightened on why that is a monumentally stupid idea - but no, the kid should not get tossed in the slammer and stigmatized for life.
Possession/distribution of actual photography or video depicting actual kids being sexually abused *is* illegal in Japan - because sexual abuse is just as much a crime there as it is in any other civilized country. Hell, if I remember right, distributing photographic/video porn depicting genitalia of *adults* is a crime in Japan (albeit a misdemeanor w/ a heavy fine...) OTOH, the comic/drawn ones can show whatever detail the artist feels like including.
You (tqk) are definitely correct in that Japan is an enigma unto itself, culturally. Millennia of isolation will morph any culture into something that will likely never be understood from any POV outside of it. That said, Japan got hella creative in what their multi-faceted culture is and represents - to themselves. Anyone else could blow off an entire a lifetime trying to understand it.
As for TFA? I can see why it would make sense for some Japanese men to simply withdraw from society... Japan isn't exactly an easy-going culture to live in, competition for anything (females, jobs, status, whatever) is incredibly intense, and there are few other routes available to the typical Japanese man that doesn't involve a shitload of money (e.g. move self and family to another country whose culture you may get on better in.) These men still have a non-negotiable duty to care for their parents, and real estate/rent is frickin' astronomical anyway. They spent nearly every waking hour of their childhood with little outside of intense study and discipline, so it's not like they learned to be social mavens in the first place - they likely only found peace when they were alone.
Hell - even if they do find a job and a wife, they may not leave home anyway. The answer why is pretty simple; If their parents own and don't rent, they stand a better chance of inheriting their parents' home than they do of ever being able to afford one of their own - which is pretty traditional in its own right. In most cases, it's not like they have as much potential competition from siblings, what with smaller family sizes over the decades.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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!
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.