The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
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Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#2One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM on a Thursday? Is it allowed for me to just go to the gym? Shouldn't I just stay home a few more hours so that the lady behind the counter will assume I am coming in after getting home from work early at 8 or so?)
There exist people with similar levels of social isolation who nonetheless go to work every day. They are occasionally written about in reports of him hikikomori, which strikes at least some people as odd, since "I go to a place where nobody cares about me and spend my entire day there" is not exactly out of the mainstream of Japanese experience.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#3One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM…
> to the total exclusion of any third place
There's always Starbucks. I'm only half-joking, there's always people there at all times of the day in Japan.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#4One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM…
This is incredibly on point.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#5One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM…
I'm married into a South Korean family, and from my observation Korean society has less intense version of Japan's social collective mood (IIR it's written as '情' in both countries)
It's really difficult to read about this kind of thing and maintain an appropriate feeling of cultural relativism without wanting go "oh Japan" or in my case "oh Korea". There's been many times with my family and friends a seemingly intractable situation will come up that a Westerner would simply resolve with a bit of a Western Rock'n'Roll "well fuck 'em" attitude and get on with life. As a Westerner, I find it incredibly frustrating at times. But obviously it's more complicated then that and when I try to see things through my family and friend's cultural lens it all makes a kind of sense.
On the flip side, I think lots of Western behavior is explained by an insatiable desire for group membership -- despite social expectations of individuality (especially for Americans).
People do all kinds of weird behaviors, bizarre clique joinerisms like wearing crazy fashions, or obsess over the moment they turn old enough to join the Marines or take on group-specific behavior patterns, and just like with 情 this mood and desire seems indescribable to them (I don't know of any satisfactory word in English for it). But you can go to any public place and look at groups of people who all dress, act and try to be as "the same" as possible as their clique-mates.
And then you end up with the strangest of all joiner group identities, the ones made up of "individuals" who strive obsessively to be "individuals" just exactly like all the rest of their clique-mates. Hipsterism seems to be a particularly well known variant of this, but there are others.
I suspect a similar psychological mechanism is at play, but just on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#6relavent music? https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/child-psychology/id6959497...
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#7One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM…
I'm married into a South Korean family, and from my observation Korean society has less intense version of Japan's social collective mood (IIR it's written as '情' in both countries) It's really difficult to read about this kind of thing and maintain an appropriate feeling of cultural relativism without wanting go "oh Japan" or in my case "oh Korea". There's been many times with my family and friends a seemingly intra…
YMMV, but having seen both the Japanese and Korean sides of the coin, I'd generalize Korea as being more "intense" on all counts: studying even harder, working even longer, endurance being prized even more as a virtue. Although I think both societies are slowly evolving out of this, Japan is just a bit further down the path.
But yes, the let's-all-be-individuals-together cliques are still going strong. Japanese Halloween illustrates this nicely: virtually everybody who dresses up does so in matching groups.
http://tokyofashion.com/halloween-in-japan-shibuya-costumes/
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm married into a South Korean family, and from my observation Korean society has less intense version of Japan's social collective mood (IIR it's written as '情' in both countries) It's really difficult to read about this kind of thing and maintain an appropriate feeling of cultural relativism without wanting go "oh Japan" or in my case "oh Korea". There's been many times with my family and friends a seemingly intra…
YMMV, but having seen both the Japanese and Korean sides of the coin, I'd generalize Korea as being more "intense" on all counts: studying even harder, working even longer, endurance being prized even more as a virtue. Although I think both societies are slowly evolving out of this, Japan is just a bit further down the path. But yes, the let's-all-be-individuals-together cliques are still going strong. Japanese Hallo…
It seems to tap into some kind of deep sub-cultural emotion. I mean, we are social animals and all, but sometimes it gets weird.
https://wedatenerds.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/frat-guys.pn...
I don't disagree at all with Koreans doing things in a particularly intense way. Based on my readings of ancient to modern Korean history it seems to definitely be a fairly modern cultural trait (at least not much older than the occupation).
However, Japan seems to have a very intense cultural relationship with this particular mood. I can't really think of a single k-drama that will spend half the episode with a character fretting about how they may be threatening the social harmony of their group, but I could probably pick a j-drama, anime or manga that does at random. It seems to be an issue Japanese people spend an extraordinary amount of time contemplating, expressing, acting upon, reacting to, watching, evaluating, teaching and thinking about.
It can make consumption of some Japanese media quite interminable for people who don't care.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#9This is of interest to me as a member of my family, here on the U.S. (totally non Japanese) fits the syndrome quite closely.
As far as I can tell, a combination of social anxiety, depression, pressure, laziness and lack of pressure (enabling behavior from his parents) has led him to not work in over 20 years and live with his parents, socializing online but showing no interest/ability in socializing with people in person... Or doing any productive work.
As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to join society - my relative now is almost 40 but has very little experience in the 'real' world. He has no experience doing things like buying a car, negotiating a mortgage or lease, applying for a job, working at a job, maintaining a household in general, sustaining or building a mature romantic relationship, or any of the other skills he should have learned in his twenties. It's harder to be a 40 year old 18 year old than an 18 year old one.
Re: The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins
#10Does anyone who was born and raised in Japan have anything to say about all this? I've read several threads over the last couple of days on this topic and it seems that the only people who comment on these kinds of stories are at best foreigners living in Japan. Is this a taboo topic for native born Japanese?