Part 1

Shutting Out the Sun; How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
by Michael Zielenziger

The world's second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America as the leading global economic powerhouse. But the country failed to recover from the staggering economic collapse of the early 1990s. Today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends, notably a population of more than one million hikikomori: the young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society. There is also a growing numbers of "parasite singles": single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children.

In this trenchant investigation, Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan's tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Shutting Out the Sun is a bold explanation of Japan's stagnation and its implications for the rest of the world.

Chapter 1

"An Arrow Pointed Deep Inside Of Me"

He pedaled feverishly down the narrow back streets of Kanda and Asakusa, legs churning, his face - intense dark eyes, a well-trimmed mustache - obscured by his bicycle helmet. He cruised past the silent storefronts selling rice crackers and stationery, past the ancient wooden Senso-ji shrine surrounded by shuttered souvenir stands, and darted through darkened alleys and deserted streets, his mind disengaged from the outside world, the rhythms of J-Wave radio reverberating through his headphones, the beat propelling him forward, no destination in mind.

Manic, angry, indomitable, Jun pumped fast, faster, through these ancient neighborhoods heavy with his history, his legs almost flailing, his knees driving hard. Sweat beading his forehead in the humid night, he sliced through the low-slung neighborhoods of Tokyo's old downtown, the working-class flatlands along the banks of the Sumida River, far removed from the aristocratic, hillier districts to the West, deathly still in the hours after midnight, the road illuminated only by the arc of a few scattered streetlights and the eerie blue fluorescence of the ubiquitous Family Mart and 7-Eleven convenience stores. Later he might stop at one to browse through its huge array of comic books and purchase a polyethylene bottle of orange drink to slake his thirst.

These tranquil few hours before dawn are strangely precious to Jun. Only in this empty calm can this wiry twenty-eight-year-old work off his restless anxiety. Only on these rare dark nights when he can gather the courage to venture out of his tiny room, can Jun be in the world yet be himself, and escape for just a few hours the confinement of a bedroom that has become his citadel. Being alone seems to him his only mode of self-preservation.

"I have an arrow pointed deep inside of me," Jun said to me once, as he sought words to describe his pain. "Listening to music and getting high from the exercise, that's the way I coped. At night you can go out when other people can't see you . . . If I didn't go out at all on those nights," he added darkly, "I'd probably have done something violent to my parents."

* * *

Jun is not alone in his pain and anxiety. Nor is he uncommon in his solitude. There is also gangly, nineteen-year-old Hiro, whose long hair nearly obscures his face, who dropped out of junior high when he was thirteen and lives at home uneasily with his bickering parents, seldom stepping outside. Hiro has no idea what he's going to do with himself as he emerges into adulthood. And there is thirty-four-year-old Kenji, who almost never leaves his tiny room in his mother's modest apartment on Tokyo's western fringe. He is a pale, quiet child-man, his smile wan, his hair thinning. For most of the past twenty years, his daily rituals have seldom varied. He reads the newspapers each morning and watches Tokyo Giants baseball games on television every summer evening. He passes long afternoons with magazines and daydreams. Sometimes he speaks to his mother. Other days he sits silent, deep in thought. Anxious, trembling, and alone, Kenji is scared - too scared and too scarred to venture into the world beyond his front door.

Across Japan, more than one million men and boys like Jun and Hiro and Kenji have chosen to withdraw completely from society. These recluses hide in their homes for months or years at a time, refusing to leave the protective walls of their bedrooms. They are as frightened as small children abandoned in a dark forest. Some spend their days playing video games. A few - an estimated 10 percent - surf the Internet. Many just pace, read books, or drink beer and shochu, a Japanese form of vodka. Others do nothing for weeks at a time. Unable to work, attend school, or interact with outsiders, they cannot latch onto the well-oiled conveyor belt that carries young boys from preschool through college, then deposits them directly into the workplace - a system that makes Japan seem orderly and purposeful to outsiders, even as it has begun to break down.

Men like Kenji, Hiro, and Jun are called hikikomori, which translates loosely as one who shuts himself away and becomes socially withdrawn. (The Japanese word joins together the word hiku or "pull," with the word komoru, or "retire," to render the meaning "pulling in and retiring.") These men - and 80 percent of hikikomori are males - can not be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their own homes. When psychiatrists evaluate these hikikomori using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM IV, the standard guide used in the West to diagnose mental disorders, their symptoms cannot be attributed to any known psychiatric ailment. Instead, Japanese psychiatrists say that hikikomori is a social disorder, only recently observed, that cannot be found within other cultures. These men - as I found during months of conversations with them - are often intelligent, stimulating, highly open and responsive adults full of cogent ideas and fascinating insights into society and themselves.

There is ample mystery attached to this pathology, one that stubbornly pricks at the curiosity of someone hoping to fathom the plight of modern Japan. In Western Europe or the United States, many modern teenagers also resort to antisocial behavior, but exhibit it differently. In rebelling against parents and schools, many "act out" and explode in rage, or wear outrageous styles of dress to make a "statement," or play loud music sure to offend the older generation. Some cut themselves. In the United States, where guns and knives as well as drugs are so readily available, youth violence can seem commonplace, as if representing an unspoken tradeoff for the openness, independence, and self-expression the society demands. Yet a culture that encourages individual freedom from an early age, that instructs young children to "stand on their own two feet" and find their own way through life, actively encourages originality and risk taking and is far more likely than Japanese society to accept certain strains of nonconformist behavior. In a vast and heterogeneous nation like America, a man like Kenji might end up designing computer games, handcrafting furniture, launching a tiny software startup, editing music videos, or writing a Web log.

Yet in the confinement of Japan's neo-Confucian society, which preaches the importance of obedience, discipline, self-inhibition, and group harmony - and where even individual identity is deeply swathed in mutual interdependence - men like Jun and Kenji have imploded like vacuum tubes, closing themselves in, cutting themselves off, and utterly marginalizing themselves. Unable or unwilling to go out, languishing alone in their rooms, they depend on their parents to leave their next meal at the bedroom door.

Copyright © 2006 by Michael Zielenziger.

About the Author

Michael Zielenziger is a visiting scholar at the Institute of East Asian Studies, U. C. Berkeley, and was the Tokyo-based bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers for seven years, until May 2003. He has written extensively about social, economic, and political trends in Japan, Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. After September 11, 2001, Zielenziger also spent long periods in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Israel, covering the aftermath of terrorist attacks.