Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

Is this isolation, I wondered, simply these young adults' peculiar form of rebellion against their prevailing culture? Or are they too sensitive or inquisitive to accept such collective constraints, and flee to their rooms both for protection and self-preservation? Or are they - as Taka, one twenty-four-year-old, suggested - simply and unsettlingly "different" from the society that surrounds them? "I was raised to have a good career and be a good boy," he told me. "My problem is that I can't go to work like other people. I'm different."

I heard another point of view from the sixty-year-old white-haired mother of a hikikomori, a gentle and sympathetic woman who accepts and understands her son's plight, much as it grieves her: "hikikomori are kids who value the intangibles," Hiromi told me. I had met her for coffee to talk about the desolate isolation of her son who, now in his thirties, has for five years been living at home, confining himself to his room because he feels he has no other place where he can just be himself. "hikikomori can see the intangibles, but cannot speak out because there is no place in Japanese society that allows them to . . . So," she concluded, "a person who challenges, or makes a mistake, or thinks for himself, either leaves Japan or becomes a hikikomori."

And, indeed, leaving Japan has been a partial solution for some like Shigei, who has been hikikomori for the last thirteen of his thirty years. He told me that he was able to relax and meet others only when prompted by a friend to get out of Japan and visit Thailand on a trip his parents paid for. "I felt different in a country where the buses don't always run on time," he told me. Jun found temporary relief from his anxieties during a visit to India. Another hikikomori, thirty-five-year-old Yasuo Ogawara, went into hiding in his twenties after being badgered and rejected, often cruelly, by residents of the provincial town where he had relocated with his wife. "In this society, anyone can become a hikikomori," he told me, describing how his in-laws had ostracized and bullied him to the point where the couple divorced. "It's the nature of our social system that is really the cause. It's a system operated by factions, and you have to understand the very nature of the social system to understand this problem.

"Today the values of parents and of young people are completely different," he went on. "The post-bubble bills are coming due, and we have just started to pay for our decades of focusing only on the material."

* * *

After listening to the tales and predicaments of dozens of these isolated men, I began to better understand the behavior of Jun and other hikikomori as their extraordinary but utterly rational indictment of a postindustrial monoculture. It isn't that these adults choose isolation out of indulgence, but that they see no other course. They need some "free space" in which to breathe, without the prying eyes of outsiders constantly judging them, forcing them to join the herd. The only space they can control is their own bedroom.

Hikikomori instinctively know that the world outside Japan - and the way that world works - has changed dramatically in recent years as Japan lags behind. They seem to perceive the nature of Japan's economic and spiritual crisis far more acutely than do the hundreds of bureaucrats and politicians I have met over the years.

Yet if what makes Japan seem so foreign and incomprehensible to most Westerners is its insularity, homogeneity, and lockstep conformity, then it would seem logical that this syndrome - where the young try to escape that singularly compressed and restrictive life - may exist only in Japan. And since every social system is likely to foster its own unique afflictions, investigating this unusual behavior could lead me to deeper truths about Japan and its current malaise. My journalist's intuition was essentially confirmed by Satoru Saito, one of Japan's most prominent psychiatrists, who has practiced psychotherapy and taught psychoanalysis for years. An avuncular, gentle man who wears sweaters and smokes a pipe, Saito counsels dozens of hikikomori patients, as well as abusive husbands and troubled families, at the Institute for Family Function, his narrow concrete slab of a clinic in Tokyo's Azabu neighborhood. Saito is one of many specialists who also see Jun's and Kenji's and the other hikikomoris' social isolation as reflecting a rational, Japanese style of coping.

"Many Japanese kids don't express themselves. They would rather express themselves in a fantasy world and through passive-aggressive behavior," he told me one afternoon when I visited him and asked him to analyze this syndrome. "They go on behavior strike, they go into emotional shutdown. This is one of the ways of expressing a Japanese way of life. But in acting this way, these children are simply mirroring the behavior they see among adult Japanese, especially those from elite or privileged backgrounds."

Kenji's willful retreat into the bedroom, his unwillingness to fit in, can be sensibly explained, Saito told me. Japan's traditional family structure is splintering, he said. Its educational system, which emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking, is being questioned as never before. Young people now sense that the old rules don't work in a global age.

In the 1980s, when Japan's economy was still humming, no one had ever heard the term hikikomori. But after the economy began to sputter and misfire, the pistons began to fail and fluids began to leak, exposing the rigidities and social dysfunction that had finally made the gears seize up.

Saito and I agreed that tracing the roots of hikikomori might offer clues not only to Japan's unprecedented breakdown, but could also help explain why the Japanese self seems so ephemeral. Why individual expression remains constrained by bullying, oppressive pressure, and demands for strict conformity even in these modern times. Why Japan - a nation so bold as to build its own Eiffel Tower, learn how to make pizza and play golf, listen to hip-hop, take up aerobics, flock to wine bars, and build a miniature Dutch village as an amusement park - never engaged in the political, sexual, and gender revolutions that once convulsed America and other Western nations. And why the mechanisms that might compel useful political and social change have been short-circuited, keeping gifted young men like Kenji and Jun and Hiro shut in and shut down - an arrow pointed deep inside each, pinning him in place.

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.