Reminds me of a buddy of mine in college.

Except he stayed in his room at the frat house for a month to win a bet. And he had pledges for servants, and lots of visitors bearing beer and other controlled substances.

Time for Godzilla to make an appearance and shake up Japan.

This is just another artifact of emergent gerontocracy. Define the options of the young down until they are neither interesting nor challenging, and a certain proportion of them, particularly guys, will simply pass, as they do on starting a family, which leads to fewer young people, a more deeply entrenched gerontocracy...

This is like a boat in which traditional roles require people to sit spaced out along its length by age. Right now more and more people are ending up bunched at the old end, the boat looks like sinking as a result and some of the younger people are jumping off their end early, both anticipating and hastening the inevitable.

We're going to have to reshuffle the traditional distribution of power and income back towards the young somehow before we are through.

The US could afford to watch and wait while others in worse straits grapple with this, but just as likely is that we will lead the way towards constructive solutions as usual.

So, if you just stay in your room for five months straight, they don't have a problem with it?

"...and listened to Radiohead and Nirvana."

Betcha he listened to a heck of a lot of Sigur Ros too...

Anybody know what is the Japanese word that refers to a person sequestered in the Eastern Time Zone for 40 years or longer, with no social life beyond his home and the oddballs who frequent his web site. Thanks in advance.

Oh those wacky Japs. Well at least they're not slaughtering the Chinese anymore or decapitating US airmen on the decks of their aircraft carriers.

My brother spent a couple of years in Japan with his girlfriend, he said the language barrier alone makes it impossible to enter Japanese society. He can speak fluent Italian but even after 2 years of diligently learning Japanese he could barely grunt out basic street directions and shop requests like an ape. The basic colloquial language is fiendish, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg, there are multiple layers of more formal, archaic Japanese to learn and everything is further modified by respectful forms of address that change depending on who you’re talking to.

It’s a society utterly bound up in complex etiquette, and totally rejecting of outsiders, not in a hostile way (the Japanese will forgive westerners almost any kind of bizarre behavior) but with a seeming incomprehension on the Japanese part that anyone else could be a member of their nation without being born into it. There are hundreds of thousands Koreans living in Japan that have been there for generations, utterly indistinguishable from the Japanese, but they can’t get citizenship and are still considered as foreign as the day they arrived.

It’s a weird, atomized, technocratic society, I can see how maybe some young people just freak out and decide to spend the rest of their lives in their rooms.

Just like Brian Wilson did.

Seriously, oj, I do agree that it would be counterproductive for a clinically depressed person to go into isolation. Short of physically harming themselves (or going off their meds), it's probably the worst thing they could do. Lincoln, for one, figured that out ... with a little intervention from people who cared about him. Social interaction, especially if it involves helping others, can do wonders.

Given the already-low birth rate in Japan, you can't have much hope for turning it around if many of those children that are born are not deterred from acting like this by their parents (But eventually, the Japanese will develop a robot that will sit in its room for months at a time without coming out. It will save the families money on food and music purchases, and they'll be selling them at The Sharper Image stores in the United States by the following Christmas).

This subject has always been one of the most worthless on this site. -Perry

Geez, apparently I've somehow missed the hikikomori thread.

Press gang them onto a sailing ship. Rum, sodomy and the lash. That will cure them.

joe shropshire:

kenkon shishou, although genshishou shinrabanshou is funnier, and probably applies in Orrin's case.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at January 17, 2006 2:54 AM

There is an American version of hikikomori . . . it's called Democratic Underground.

Boring countries to read about or discuss.

Japan
Germany*
Canada*

*Pending re-classification

How is this guy different from a monk or religious hermit?

He's contemplating himself.

Get real - he's not contemplating anything.

And you know this about him in what way? ESP?

And how is contemplating God a better excuse for living your life wholly alone?

Robert:

It's not. But it is different. God though doesn't want us to sit alone and comtemplate Him.

Robert:

It's one thing to listen to music (from Led Zeppelin to Michael Jackson) in order to withdraw from life for a bit, but spending years listening to Nirvana? Because it's 'dark and desperate'?

Sure, this kid (and many of the others) are scared, probably lazy, and unable to grow up. Every teen has felt that. But contemplation helps to move through it (along with good parents, good friends, and lots of activity). Contemplation itself is not a bad thing - what this kid went through (or did to himself) was a bad thing.

Jim,

I'm just giving OJ grief over chalking up every dysfunctional report coming out of Japan, Germany, Europe, pretty much everywhere but red-state USA, to advanced-stage secular materialism. The kid's obviously messed up. Japan is a very strange society, there's a lot more going on there than can be summed up in one of OJ's bromides.

No, there isn't.

Re: atomisation of Japanese society

I think looking at Japanese society as "atomised" is kind of off, at least as I understand "atomisation," which is to say, a kind of extreme isolation of the individual in which he is disconnected from any larger social institutions, like church or the club or the neighbourhood or other more fraternal organisations. I.e. that the individual bowls alone. Japan is about as far from that as you can possibly get -- neighbourhoods have *much* more prominent and influential neighbourhood organisations than we have here, and they get together all the time and do all kinds of things (i.e. not just checking the burnable and nonburnable trash days). Within the society more generally, people end up plugged into all kinds of organisations with group affiliations and loyalty like nothing I've ever seen here in the US, and you don't get anywhere without knowing people.

That's one of the sources of corruption in their society, after all, that social organisations and individual social connexions count so much more than official laws and procedure -- and it's something Koizumi has been trying to clamp down on, just as his predecessors have, through their Administrative Procedure law and more recent anti-"Amakudari" pressure.

I think the hikikomori all do their hikikomori thing not because of atomistic secularism or anything, but because they find it so tiring to be in a world where everyone knows everyone and everyone talks to everyone, and compares you against all of your peers (like the nice boy down the street who went to Toudai for Law and has joined MITI or whatever the hot new ministry is these days) such that you can never escape. For all that it's four islands with 120 million people, it's still an extremely small, interconnected society. There's very little anonymous space, comparatively speaking, even in the big city.

Here in the US, if you want to get away (and you are not a recogniseable member of the elite), you can run off into the countryside somewhere else or change states or move to one of our sprawling cities, where no one will know your name. It's much harder to do that in Japan, because family and social ties reach so much further, so people retreat into their rooms instead. Or at least, that's my sense of things.

Well "all" hikikomori are probably not the same. I'm being overbroad and glib there. But I don't think secular materialism or an atomistic society play much of a role in the hikikomori phenomenon. Not to say that a Christianisation (or Islamicisation) or Japan couldn't pull them out, or even that the revival of Imperial Shinto couldn't. But I don't think their absence is the reason this has happened.

this phenommenon was predicted, in the movie "Zardoz". these zombies (in the article above) have been cut off drom life itself, and are withering, in a semi-alive state.

Taeyoung;

But the institutions that used to offer interknitting--family, corporation, etc.--are dying oin the vine, thus the atomization. Sheer presence of others is not a social network.

Corporations?