Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
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Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#2It probably doesn't help that news reports like this associate his hobbies with "major sex crimes".
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#3Let's look at it from another perspective.
Why are 20 somethings without jobs, with minimal face-to-face social skills, average to poor grades and therefore minimal career prospects, confined to their homes when a hyper-competitive, youth loving, cute/adorable/flashy/shiny-thing loving society awaits them outside?
When the alternative is to be involved in the antithesis of your own persona, I can imagine why the slightly less horrifying self-imposed withdrawal is still more attractive than the slightly more horrifying "outside". Despite the blatantly obvious effect it may have on your life.
Source: 2 Close pals in Shiogama living together (one who had to deal with the other's hikikomori ways).
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#4Hikikomori might be a Japanese term, but its not a Japanese phenomenon. I know dozens of my American friends who do the same thing -- hide from seemingly unprecedented expectations and similarly daunting odds, hide from society in alcohol, in television, in dual 2560x1600 monitors, even in exercise.
(My room was video games, and I'm glad I found the doorknob.)
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#5Japanese society and education can be very demanding of young people.
I live in Japan and have never seen so much brainwashing on the topic of the unemployed or uneducated.
Besides the term hikikomori there is also NEET (Not Employed, Educated or in Training).
Another shocking thing is whenever an upstanding pillar of the community is shown on TV they go out of their way to mention he is a "正社員", a full time employee.
But when they discuss a criminal they always trot out that he's either "無職", unemployed or at least "派遣社員", a temporarily staffed person.
Even within companies the treatment temps get from the full timers can be cruel and uncalled for.
Until this society is taught to be less caste based I don't think the hikikomori problem will go away.
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#6Hikikomori might be a Japanese term, but its not a Japanese phenomenon. I know dozens of my American friends who do the same thing -- hide from seemingly unprecedented expectations and similarly daunting odds, hide from society in alcohol, in television, in dual 2560x1600 monitors, even in exercise. (My room was video games, and I'm glad I found the doorknob.)
Hrm. There are shut-ins and hermits everywhere. It is not endemic everywhere like it is in Japan. I think, "I know an instance of X, therefore X is not a Y phenomenon," might be oversimplifying just a tad. If the rates of incidence are different, and everything I've read leads me to believe they are, that is interesting -- mainly because it adds entropy that might be useful in understanding the cause.
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#7Hikikomori might be a Japanese term, but its not a Japanese phenomenon. I know dozens of my American friends who do the same thing -- hide from seemingly unprecedented expectations and similarly daunting odds, hide from society in alcohol, in television, in dual 2560x1600 monitors, even in exercise. (My room was video games, and I'm glad I found the doorknob.)
I understand this completely, having been through much the same during a darker period of my life. Seriously dark. Flat Black.
Sometimes I still can't believe I found the "doorknob", but I'm really glad I did.
Also, reading the term NEET here reminded me of Eden of the East, which is a cool Anime if anyone is into that.
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#8From the BBC article: "For a time one company operating in Nagoya could be hired by parents to burst into their children's rooms, give them a big dressing down, and forcibly drag them away to a dormitory to learn the error of their ways."
I was just thinking of starting up something like this in Australia, but just realised the bikies (e.g., Hell's Angels, Nomad, Rebels etc) already do something very similar.
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#9Anecdotally, the phenomenon is exacerbated by many people with varying degrees of untreated depression. (A disease which Japan addresses shockingly poorly, even by the standards of Japanese mental health care, which is shockingly poor even considering that mental health care lags treatment of other illnesses virtually everywhere.)
Re: Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
#10There's a good anime/manga about the subject, called "Welcome to NHK" (NHK = Nihon Hikkikomori, not the TV station with the same name). It captures the situation pretty well.