On hikikomori

 6This pervasive distress is reflected in Japan's plummeting birthrate—which now ranks among the lowest in the world—and in the nation's diminishing population, which began to shrink, in absolute terms, in 2005, when the number of deaths surpassed annual births by some ten thousand. 7 This sharp decline can be attributed to women who marry later, if at all, because they don't want to give up their independence to raise children in an unhappy environment; or who, if married, decide that having children is a poor investment of their time and energies, and so refuse to bear them. Radical dissent is also reflected in the proliferation of suicide—Japan has the world's highest rate among wealthy industrial nations—as well as in the growing number of group suicides committed by complete strangers who meet on the Internet in order to die together. Alcoholism and depression are rampant, if seldom discussed, manifestations of adjustment disorder, while exhaustion and overwork claim thousands of casualties each year.

Frustrated and disaffected, many young Japanese just abandon their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of others wander like nomads outside the rigid traditional system, refusing to work, go to school, or accept job training. Even more disturbing—perhaps most disturbing—is the cadre of more than one million young adults, the majority of them men, who literally shut themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, taping shut their windows, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or years at a time. Thus, the anguish the Imperial Family discreetly confronts behind stone palace walls reflects a crisis now being visited on the wider family of Japan.

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Also like Americans, Japanese face the paradoxical challenge that wealth creates. For only in societies blessed with unrivaled prosperity do people have the luxury to consider what it is that truly makes them happy. When the pursuit of material extravagance delivers emptiness rather than inner contentment, a people are forced to confront deeper, more existential questions about meaning, value, self-affirmation, and moral purpose that classroom training alone cannot teach. Exploring this inner dimension demands a different vocabulary, one that wealthy nations often deemphasize and deny amid their constant chase for expansion and greater prosperity. To pose such courageous and fundamental questions is, after all, to subvert the underlying mission by challenging its objective.

While wealthy nations share many common challenges, Japan's particular history, social institutions, and economic architecture also set it apart from others. Indeed, no other nation has more stubbornly defied the comprehension of outsiders. Experts in macroeconomics, for example, are frequently stunned that the models they devise for “normal” market economies simply don't work in Japan. Political scientists find it remarkable that in a nation that has endured fifteen years of bad economics, the political structure has not faltered nor have street protests broken out among its increasingly disaffected citizens. Likewise, Western social psychiatrists find it puzzling that inhabitants of a nation as wealthy as Japan score so low on global measurements of subjective well-being, or that the term “self-esteem” does not exist in Japanese.

I, too, often found myself puzzled and distressed, unable to explain Japan's palpable if inarticulate crisis coherently to outsiders, until I began to hear the stories of men like Kenji, thirty-four, who dares not leave his room, or angry Jun, twenty-eight, who bicycles through the darkened streets of Tokyo some nights to work through his frustration and fear. These are two of the more than one million young adults, fearful, isolated, intelligent, and alone, who barricade themselves in their rooms for protection rather than attempt to engage with a society they feel denies them any expression of self. As I entered their mysterious world and got to know some of these extraordinary men, I sensed that understanding Japan through their eyes could offer a whole new perspective on the nation's festering malaise.

In this book, rather than focus primarily on politics or economics, my aim is to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within. First, I examine the plight of the hikikomori, the young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society. After looking into their lives and those of their parents and caregivers, I explore the history and culture in which their tragic stories are embedded to approach some explanation for Japan's contemporary social deadlock. Then I examine a cluster of behaviors that seem more familiar to Western readers: the fixation on consumerism and brand names in the search for identity; women's painful lives and their reluctance to wed and have babies; and, finally, the high incidence of suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Then, I broaden the view to see how Japan stacks up against its closest neighbor and rival, South Korea. Though these two nations share so much history and culture, I explain the underlying forces which allowed South Korea to rebound smartly from economic crisis while Japan still lags. I also assess how the United States, Japan's protector for the past sixty years, contributes to Japan's profound adjustment disorder, even as Japan permits the United States to prolong its own unsustainable course. Finally, I speculate on how Japan's own survival strategy may come to resemble those of the hikikomori who negate themselves and their adulthood, and shut out the sun of vigorous self-affirmation and moral purpose.

In dissecting this very different culture, my goal is to describe and analyze, rather than argue a narrowly focused point of view. I do this deliberately, for when it comes to the nature and pathologies of many of the syndromes I will try to disentangle, there is still a great deal we don't know—a testimony to the relatively shabby state of social science and psychological research within modern Japan as well as to the low status afforded to such inquiry. I also believe that as a Westerner, cast inevitably as an outsider looking inside a very closed world, it is imperative that I use as many Japanese voices as often as possible to elucidate behaviors and describe their own society.

Tragically these are not subjects the Japanese themselves normally choose to discuss. Indeed, they often likened their society to a duck pond, whose tranquil mirror-smooth surface hides the legs churning furiously below the waterline to keep their places in the flock. One day, over a beer at a fireworks-viewing party in a Tokyo suburb, I spoke of my concern about Japan's social dislocation with a journalist recently retired from a powerful Japanese newspaper. He confided that he, too, was deeply anxious about the nation's passive acceptance of failure; its bankrupt banks and corporate malfeasance, rampant political corruption, and the rising pessimism of its people.

“Half the people don't know how bad things are,” he told me. “The rest are in denial.”

Not just the Japanese live in denial, however. By exploring the deeper inner recesses a people keep hidden, I hope to show that shattering the smooth, glassy surface of a society's appearance represents the first crucial step toward its renewal.

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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. 3 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.”

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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 hikikomori s' 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.

From Shutting Out the Sun ..

By Michael Zelenziger