dagblog - Comments for "The American Hikikomori"

Audio: Confronting Suicide in

artappraiser — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:03:16 +0000

Audio: Confronting Suicide in Japan
June 17, 2013. newyorker.com

This week in the magazine, Larissa MacFarquhar Profiles a Japanese Buddhist monk who offers counsel and aid to people contemplating suicide. Here, Macfarquhar talks with Sasha Weiss about the culture of suicide in Japan and how Ittetsu Nemoto’s belief in suffering as a path to self-knowledge has prepared him to help the suicidal.

I didn't listen to that audio, I read the article in the print edition, but the article is behind a paywall for those who don't have a subscription. The article does refer to hikikomori at various points. I will type a paragraph from it to give you an idea, a paragraph which comes after the first-page description of the type of death workshops Ittetsu Nemoto now leads for the suicidal:

In the past, Nemoto organized outings whose main function was to get hikikomori--shut-ins, some who have barely left their rooms in years--to go outside. (There are hundreds of thousands of hikikomori in Japan, mostly young men; they play video games and surf the Web and are served meals on trays by their parents.) He led camping trips and karaoke evenings; he held soupmaking sessions and sat up all night talking. But, on the whole, these outings were unsatisfactory. Hikikomori were phobic, and suicidal people were disorganized; you couldn't rely on them to show up.

Nemoto believes in confronting death; he believes in cultivating a concentrated awareness of the functioning and fragility of the body; and he believes in suffering, because it shows who you really are [.....]

Science fiction/fantasy is

Orion — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 22:31:26 +0000

In reply to Also at The Atlantic,

Science fiction/fantasy is even more popular in Japan and alot of Southeast Asia than it is here. Man of Steel and The Dark Knight take pains to make these heroes gritty - Japanese films from Godzilla to anime like Metropolis are outlandish and don't even apologize for it. India may have more of an old school culture with people who are much better socialized. I don't know - I don't know the reasons for the cultural differences.

People are schizophrenic,

Orion — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:12:19 +0000

In reply to This is brilliant and

People are schizophrenic, Michael. I have had some people in my life tell me both that I have never worked a day in my life and that I've accomplished more than most people my age. The same people. That wasn't just a reflection of them - society itself is that schizophrenic, telling you to do A and then guilt tripping you when you do A for not doing J.

It's infuriating and it has no small part to do with why the rate of attempted and completed suicides is so high, why antidepressants are hot sellers and why we watch so many movies about people with superpowers.

It's important to remember that it's not because society itself is bad but society is made up of individuals and most of those individuals appear to be really confused about everything.

Jennifer, who runs the site, and I actually have very similar life experience - something I didn't think anyone else in the world had - and alot of our life experience is based on that same experience with a society that is mentally ill, doesn't know what it wants and punishes people who don't give it whatever it is that it wants. I think that this piece turned out as well as it did because the two of us were working in synergy together. It could have just been a whinefest if I did it by my lonesome.

I'm actually not sure that anyone on earth is antisocial. Every person I've ever met does want to engage the rest of the world on some level. Often they don't know how. The hostility comes from having a perception reinforced on some level that they can't be a part of that world.

Anyways, that went on longer than I thought it would. Thanks a whole bunch, Michael, for pushing me to do this at all - I'm wondering if some of the stuff I've written elsewhere may be of more interest to Dagbloggers than what I wrote before. Heh heh.

Also at The Atlantic,

artappraiser — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 03:10:46 +0000

In reply to This essay has some related

Also at The Atlantic, re,this: The lights in our apartment were usually off, and the only light over either of us was, emulating from the computer or portable video game system, usually both, see this.

This essay has some related

artappraiser — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 03:02:33 +0000

In reply to The American Hikikomori

This essay has some related thoughts in it, and I think some of those thoughts should interest you, judging from some of your past writings as well:

Why the West Loves Sci-Fi and Fantasy: A Cultural Explanation
The world's largest film industry—that'd be India's—is largely barren of the superhero and spaceship films that dominate Hollywood. What, exactly, accounts for the difference?
By Christine Folch, The Atlantic, Jun 13 2013

It just has a bad title, because Japan and China are included in it as cultures that have similar needs.

I'm not sure I totally buy Professor Folch's theses, but the essay certainly is thought provoking about the phenomenon of alienation et. al. (Some of comments section ain't all bad either, as is common whenever there's a good comparative culture essay.)

This is brilliant and

Michael Maiello — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 02:18:43 +0000

In reply to The American Hikikomori

This is brilliant and provocative. Not sure what the answer is. I'm a very social guy but, as such, kind of understand the opposite impulse (sometimes very, very well). I mean, is it so bad to withdraw from society, for a time? Society has its drawbacks. Society gathers and collates your telephone calls without asking your permission. Society expects a tip even for bad service. Society treats every Kardashian and every Hilton better than it treats you and when you object to that, society acts like you're the one with a problem. Is rejection of society, as we've created it, that irrational? Hikikomori seems to make some sense. Also, and total ignoramous observation here -- if hi is rendered in Japanese as the figure of some one walking, might they not, in this context, be walking away from an unwelcome situation?