Japan home to 541,000 young recluses
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
The worst part is that it will take decades for society to fix this.
In the past there were plenty of jobs at all levels but modern business productivity is so high that demand for labor has become specialized and for many has essentially collapsed. What exactly will replace labor is not clear, but some kind of basic income would enable people to pursue meaningful contributions to society outside the dollars per hour context and thus open up many new possibilities.
While it's better than letting people starve or get food stamps, you might find a large class of young, unemployed males who have trouble getting interest from potential mates. Historically, that's always been recipe for political unrest.
And even if there's not, if basic income becomes a thing, I'll bet there is large positive status attached to someone demanding your labor. People on basic will be second-class citizens, and there will always be political pressure from the 'working class' to reduce the drain on the tax base.
Poor people in the traditional sense would be able to pursue internships without pay to gain skills because they are underpinned by UB. An option not available today. As an employer I could take on more 'apprentices' on UBI, the contract being that I give them training, give them guidance whilst they work 'for free' until a certain point it becomes worthwhile to pay them above and beyond UBI because they're worth it.
On the other hand, there are always alternative paths to attractiveness, outside of the purely financial. In some sub-cultures, you can be broke as hell, but if, say, you're really good at playing guitar, you can have your pick.
I believe a better solution would be to put automation in the service of people directly, as property of the people. Maybe small communities would be able to combine work with automation to provide for all their necessities. In the future, a few solar panels, 3D-printers and robots could possibly bootstrap a whole community.
Then the role of the government would be to provide the initial technology and to make sure each community has its own bootstrap working in order, not to distribute UBI. People would still have work to do - to supervise automation and work alongside with it, where necessary.
Somehow, control and ownership of the means of production (automation) would need to be divided and spread equally in the population, otherwise, it will just detract from the value of people.
But if we spread automation ownership, then there could be a new level of independence where a community could provide for all its needs internally and perhaps, even desire more autonomy from the state.
When people are desperate for work, and jobs are hard to find, people will put up with all sorts of bullshit from their employer. When people know they'll be okay regardless, they're much more likely to quit when they get treated like shit.
And I suspect for a lot of businesses, the cost of improving working environment may be lower than raising wages. For example, I think "customer is always right" policies cause a lot of employee stress for relatively marginal gains. A less desperate labour force may be willing to take lower wages at a restaurant that lets them tell obnoxious people to GTFO.
(And yes, I understand that companies would rather spend that money on ads rather than taxes... you can replace the ad industry with any other industry we'd be better off without.)
People, justifiably, ask how we could possibly pay for all this, but the current US welfare system costs a comparable amount. Moreover, the US financial system is currently set up to allow money inflows to be controlled and to benefit the central banks. A much more sensible and effective method for controlling the velocity of the economy would be to put place monetary inflows into everyone's individual bank accounts, but obviously the people in control aren't going to give up the gravy.
That is not at all how it works. A basic income within reason would almost always be an economic growth mechanism by transferring money from investment class to consumption class. The market for the guaranteed needs of an adopting nations population would be an incredibly large, incredibly stable business center for competition and innovation, and it would increase market participation by eliminating the barrier to entry that is currently made by gated welfare.
Of course we need long run, wide spread, UBI experiments. If all you are talking about is "what if" any reasonable scientist would balk at the conversation. But if you take historic evidence - that giving the poor money makes them, by overwhelming margins, and on average, spend it on their needs in predictable, immediate ways, you would be getting similar economic motivator returns on UBI taxes as you would on some forms of infrastructure.
And by comparison, infrastructure projects also considered a net positive policy because the money made by businesses using your infrastructure vastly eclipses the costs of building and maintaining it. UBI works the same way, by creating stable demand for the necessities of life, and providing the means for a similar force multiplier in people wanting to contribute optimally to the economy by their own judgment than by the will of money in the hands of others for those individuals profit. Because sometimes, making a major stakeholder in a company richer does not mean the greatest source of economic growth for the society as a whole compared to the entrepreneurial potential of every citizen presently bound to that model.
It is confounded by the growing wealth inequality, where the rich find it a valuable asset to buy up these valuable residential buildings that are in demand as a store of value, further diminishing the supply and further exacerbating the problem.
Under a UBI, the market for residential is restored to what it was decades ago when the towns now abandoned in the post-industrial US were populated. There are many times more houses than homeless in the US, but because those homes are located nowhere near a stable income nobody can live in them.
The same applies to food and electricity. We are not at any supply side bounding here, and a UBI makes these makes so incredibly stable and predictable it lets the margins of businesses operating in them get as close to break even as possible because of the certainty metrics now associated with them.
That's not nearly enough to cover it. The top 1% has 38% of the wealth. In 2009 total wealth of US was 55 trillion[1]. That leaves us 20.9T to spread around 315 remaining millions. That's about $66,300 per person from our anti-rich crusade. Not a bad bounty, but that's a one-time prize. How do you intend to fund UBI for anything longer than a trivial amount of time (<5 years) with such a small sum?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#/m...
Capital owners will have increased costs due to taxation, but they'll also have increased demand for their goods and services.
US population: 322 millions US national income: 15.78 trillions $
To give a 10000$ UBI to every person in the US, you need to tax 20.41% of the national income.
We have seen an element of this in the UK where housing benefit largely ended up in the laps of landlords.
And besides, I think a most of the other people doing cool stuff will want cheaper accommodation as well, and over time particular kinds of cool stuff will congregate in different smaller towns.
The move from single-income to double-income families produced far less than a doubled standard of living, but it drove housing prices sky high. It's an interesting natural experiment for what we might see with UBI programs (which act a lot like adding a 'free' wage-earner to each household).
Everyone just magically has enough money to buy 'the basics', but can't use the money for anything else, in fact they never see the total.
What happens the the price of 'the basics' then? What happens when everyone can afford to not be wanting?
There are probably 'better' basics, for example penthouse apartments, but those will are all already above basic, so buying caviar or high end steak might be off the table.
What would happen if demand is just met?
The money would need to be spent anyway, these are basics. Not having spent it would result in what? More crime, more jail time, worse medical outcomes? All of that sounds like expense to the population at large, in the form of emergencies that use social safety nets.
I think the argument for UBI / BIG is that it identifies the root cause of the expenses and attempts to just fix the problem (by, for example, having a basic minimum of housing, or in the case of areas where housing costs too much; causing more housing to be built).
EDIT: To add to this, it's worth pointing out that many corner stores in low income neighborhoods already take advantage of peoples' lack of access to easy transportation to charge unusually high prices for common convenience store items. It's already more expensive to be poor, and I think basic income would just increase the predatory practices that are already happening.
There are plenty of discount stores that are working their way in, e.g. Dollar General, Family Dollar, but they don't have control over the rents either and in alot of larger cities they also are facing opposition from the small businesses that would be out of business since they would have no chance of competing on price at that point.
Whether having every small bodega or other small retail shop replaced by 7-11, Dollar General, Family Dollar, etc. and yet another avenue for access to the middle class shutdown is worth the affordable prices for everyone else is debatable. I can see both sides of this anyways.
I think predatory practices will decrease because people will be voting with their feet, no longer constrained by where they live.
Also not everybody can afford to move.
Basic income is precisely about "afford" part.
Those who won't move will benefit too because landlords will have to work on retention.
This assumes that basic income either includes an allowance for moving or contains enough of a surplus over basic needs that savings can be accumulated.
Economy of scale. Given fixed size of the UBI check, you want to live where services are cheapest. And services will be cheapest in places where more people are serviced together, because that cuts down on distribution costs and other such overheads.
Also, areas where people who have more money than just UBI live, would have higher prices simply by virtue of there being more money in the local economy. This isn't really dissimilar from the existing arrangement, where rich areas are expensive to live in, and so there's natural geographic segregation. But UBI would boost this into high gear.
To clarify, I am a strong proponent of UBI personally. But I think we should be really careful with these kinds of unintended side effects, and try to anticipate and manage them before they cause a bigger mess than what we're trying to address.
Also, have a look at this: https://medium.com/migration-issues/should-a-universal-basic...
Huge retailers today offer worse prices, lower quality and lousy service because they can get away with this, being the only game in town.
At the same time, rent in cities skyrocketed, making low-density and rural places much more affordable.
We now know that economy of scale peters off at some fixed scale.
He can try, but then he'd lose out to competing landlords who don't raise rents as much (or at all). It's like gas stations; owners know that people are willing to buy almost as much gas at $3/gallon as they are at $2. But when the price of oil falls, they can't just keep charging $3, because their competitors will charge less and take all their customers.
Or alternatively the stores could compete by offering better service, in which case people benefit from that.
That wealth can be used to consume the same amount of goods/services that it could have before the redistribution, but now many users get to make those consumption choices instead of one or few.
Yes, this redistribution will have a massive impact on the _pricing_ of different goods and services within an overall market. However, total wealth (ability to consume in aggregate) will remain the same within that market.
But a bit of inflation may not be the worst thing – the current almost-deflation is a lot worse and both private and public debts could finally be lowered. Unfortunately, it's a pretty imprecise mechanisms and there are some people that suffer disproportionally such as those around retirement age getting fixed pensions.
Doesn't that mean that the people who need it the most will just get less than they're getting now?
In other words, are people who are relying on current US welfare systems often using more than (say) 10k/year in total benefits, and giving them 10k in cash instead would actually reduce their total compensation? And if not, then how can the cost of our current welfare systems be comparable to UBI?
The idea is that it reduces administration costs, eliminates poverty traps, and reduces the stigma of unemployment.
I'm no expert in politics, but I think if their benefits were cut they would probably protest, and the protesters would look very sympathetic.
And if we say "OK, we'll have some extra funding for legitimate expenses for the legitimately disabled" you're not going to be able to do away with administration costs.
Why someone that doesn't need a special vehicle would use the subsidy? The normal car fit their needs for the same price! And it's not even accounting the more probable situation in which the subsidy doesn't cover all the cost difference.
They'll have much less work anyway now that nobody is starving or homeless by lack of money, might as well focus.
You would presumably couple it with a heavily progressive income tax, with the result that people higher up on the scale end up paying way more into the system than the basic income check they receive, and people at the bottom pay no tax at all. So the effective amount of welfare is directly linked to one's income or lack thereof.
Also, UBI can replace most welfare, but not all. In particular, your example with the wheelchair - that sort of thing really ought to be covered by health insurance (which should be managed entirely by the government, or at least price-controlled).
This is one of the primary gripes that I have with UBI. You've just described means testing! "So the effective amount of welfare is directly linked to one's income or lack thereof."
We've moved the means testing around a little bit, but it's still there, and it's still open to politicization. The right demands that the threshold between welfare givers / takers be lowered, the left argues it be raised, and we're right back where we started.
There's no way to avoid means testing - the money has to come from somewhere, and this inherently means that some people pay more money into the system than they receive from it.
The point of UBI is to make this whole setup as transparent and low-overhead as possible.
The nice thing about it is that, in theory, because the redistribution is basically regulated by just two knobs (size of the UBI check, and how progressive the taxes are), adjusting them is politically easy, and adjustment range is pretty much unlimited. I'm hopeful that it would result in fewer situations like the ongoing ACA "debate", where right wing just wants to sink it altogether and replace it with something else entirely, because they can't get where they want by tuning it. If we can get this to work, UBI would always be there, but more left-leaning or more right-leaning governments would simply adjust the knobs more or less gradually depending on how much "freeloading" they're okay with.
And smooth adjustments are easier to adapt to, and cause less social upheaval (think of the shock to the society and the economy if Republicans somehow manage to repeal ACA, say, tomorrow...)
Basic income means everyone gets the money they need to survive without having to go through a humiliating application process, and they only have to care about taxes when they start earning money.
Moreover it means the remaining administration is focused on tax fraud, and can prioritise its resources appropriately on the worst offenders, rather than having an agency dedicated to chasing poor people for relatively trivial amounts of money (likely at greater cost than the fraud itself).
In terms of the politics, I think the peace of mind benefits of welfare will be more obvious to the middle class when it's automatic, rather than it being something they could maybe apply for if they get really desperate.
Basic income will allow capitalism as we know it (that is, end users making consumption choices, not an organization making choices for the end user) to continue in a society where production is completely automated.
Supply is automated, but how does the system know what to produce? Well dollars are basically votes for production and basic income is enfranchisement in such a society.
Most importantly, basic income provides a mechanism that can work during the harsh transition from "some highly skilled humans are still needed for production while the majority of people are no longer needed" to "zero humans are needed."
Unfortunately, I have spoken to a lot of people in Japan who are dead against any kind of social security. It's not an unusual to view unemployed and poor people as 100% responsible and worthy of no empathy.
I always hear about how Japan is making robots to take care of the elderly, because there will soon be more elderly than young - so i guess im going off that.
As of 2010, about 2 percent of the U.S. adult population have a severe form of social phobia and have trouble leaving their house, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health: http://www.livescience.com/16216-outgoing-shy-personality-na...
It's not coming to the west. It's more here than there.
I don't know about it being the fault of the education system, though.
In the end, the genesis of Hikkikomori's reclusion is their feeling of having failed at life. They can't deal with society's expectations of them, so they withdraw from it completely. There's not much parents can do to change that feeling of failure.
It's not really a distinctly Japanese phenomenon. I'm sure you can find just as many young recluses in every developed country. Japan just found a cute term for it, that's all.
"Hey, we're going out to hike a trail. It's only for the morning. Please come along with us."
"Dad's going to the baseball but has no one to go with him. Can you go too so he doesn't get lost?"
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+japan+be...
Also, having trouble leaving the house vs: The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry defines hikikomori as people who have stayed at home for at least six months without going to school or work, or going out to interact with others.
It's 4.75% according to alpha based on a 2010 estimate.
[0] WHO World Mental Health Survey Consortium: 2004
[1]http://pax.moo.jp/sadjournal/2014/01/24/日本人は社会不安障害にならない？/
I imagine it will turn into something like 3%.
You'd be surprised.
The US measure of severe phobia is one thing, but the cutoffs being used for the phenomenon in Japan are way stricter.
I don't know if this is the part of the problem for hikikomori phenomena but you are right about the above.
I started working at 16 and have worked multiple industries ever since. I've had many opportunities to advance and have a promotion but I was always held back by one thing, college. Simply because I was told to do it. I've half-assed both things, college and work, not because I wanted to or I was lazy, but because it was hard to do both at the same time. So many missed chances. "Oh you are in school? Sorry we need somebody full time for this position." Now several years later, I have a piece of paper and many lost opportunities with one weird resume. I wish I never listened to anyone about "you must go to college" and just worked and took on opportunities that I had instead of "sorry, it's not compatible with my college schedule, can't take this on".
And I gotta say that I am a "recent" graduate now who has been working since 16 but my resume looks like I am a dabbler with no extensive experience in anything. I am worse off now with a debt.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't effected me greatly emotionally and physically. The confusion about what I've done wrong is so stressful that I am a borderline hikikomori. So I think you are right in some parts.
While the east wants to be more like America, because their students are too rigid and instead needs to focus more on creativity and play!
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/03/248329823/...
School forces you to interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds.
This is the worse argument ever, it's exactly the cure.
Besides which, school isn't there to baby you, that's supposed to be the parents job.
Sure as back up for people with abusive parents, but the concept it should be the default is very scary.
It's 7 hours a day, what's happening the other 6?
What exactly should you be learning that won't into that extra 6 hours?
Instead, we (all of us) havr to do the hard work in instilling courage, mistrust of blind obedience to authority and critical-thinking into those coming up to be less fooled as adults and more likely to become public interest lawyers, more involved in fact-checking and holding people accountable for their duties / behavior.
Standardized testing (NCBLA) is exactly the wrong "medicine." There is no quick/easy fix except spectacular teachers, parents and mentors that care to not spoon-feed, child-proof the world or helicopter parent too much because learning requires someone else doing the thinking to figure out why it's important, not simply being led through random motions aimlessly.
4 years of inefficient learning
> growing as human beings
what does this even mean
> making friends
You don't need school to make friends.
> Being unemployable after college is BS.
Do you actually believe this?
Elementary kids often do go straight home and then play with friends or waste time, but once you're in junior high, you're basically considered a young adult and expected to have responsibilities.
Many clubs will take up MORE time than homework, with the sports clubs often having an hour or two of practice before school with the same again after school, plus most of Saturday and sometimes half of Sunday.
Generally when students get together, the last thing they want to do is play sports since they're doing that pretty much every day of the week!
Not in my experience. For some parents and communities maybe, but certainly not all.
Basically, you go to whatever elementary school or junior high school that is in your area. When you are ready to go to high school, you choose which high school you want to go to and you have to pass an entrance exam.
A high level high school is very stressful and you have to study all the time. A low level high school is very easy going and it is not unusual for some students to graduate without having studied anything at all. At a high level high school you are expected to go on to University and have to prepare for University entrance exams. At a low level high school, you may still prepare for University entrance exams, but you are not necessarily expected to do so.
In a low level high school there are many activities surrounding how you can can contribute to society. In the high school I taught in (a very low level one), every Wednesday afternoon was taken up by classes on what it's like to work in a factory, or a convenience store, or a farm. There were classes on basic etiquette, how to talk to customers, how to get along with people, how to dress, etc, etc, etc. I was always annoyed because they wouldn't let me join in on those classes -- it would have been fascinating!
Essentially, students in a low level high school are indoctrinated into society as well as having a very basic education. There is a lot of emphasis on skills that students are likely to need (like using an abacus, typing, writing kanji, very simple foreign language exchanges, etc). Things like math, science, etc were taught, but I never got the impression that they were seen to be particularly important parts of school. The main thing about a low level high school is that apart from normal bullying, there is practically no stress. Seeing a student who is not smiling is an indication that something has gone absolutely pear shaped.
My colleagues in high level schools told me that things were pretty much the opposite. Tons of stress every day. Pressure to perform. Lots of expectations. Focus on academics, almost exclusively. Students are expected to already know how to act in society, etc, etc. Very different life.
But low level schools outnumber high level schools by about 4:1, so the huge high school stress that everyone assumes exists in Japan is really limited to a minority of top performing students.
Having grown up in Canada, I would choose the Japanese system hands down over the Canadian system. I would have been in the super stressed high level school and having a much better time ;-)
I would greatly fear the movement away from topics like history, science, civics/political science, etc. in favor of the creation of someone I would describe as an "economic drone"
I think it would be a great loss indeed to lose focus on our past.
I'd love to go to school for general learning all the time, but that's not directly applicable to my job, and with the costs so high, it's just not practical.
And young people today are better than previous generations in basically any category: SATs have risen steadily, political participation is at the level of the late 60ies, volunteering is commonplace, crime is at an all-time low and cultural output is exploding.
The only thing that could ruin the next generation would be teaching them "pratical skills" by which people usually mean stuff like accounting. That's the humans-as-economic-units view that leads to exactly the situation in Japan: Millions of super-educated, completely generic young people who work 12h a day as told without ever complaining or having an original thought.
This guy I stayed with got about 5, maybe 6 hours sleep a night, worked 12 hour days (at least), and would be required to participate in mandatory social activities, such as attending a hostess bar and drinking.
In Europe and Netherlands, this guys work conditions would be considered extreme and in the case of Australia, probably illegal.
I'm not saying that there isn't other factors like education and economics at play, but the way I saw pepople living, falling asleep on the train and not getting proper sleep, looked pretty unappealing to me.
It doesn't feel like there is anything wrong with these people at all.
a father, mother and their early 20s hikkikomori son were sharing an apartment, with their son having very little communication with his parents. One day he burst out to his mother: 'Why did you divorce my father?' The mother answered that they did not divorce, it's just that the father leaves for work before the son wakes up and returns from work after the son goes to bed.
On the weekend, the workshoppers rented a van and drove it up to Sedona, where they went hiking. After a few hours on the trail, she suddenly broke down sobbing. Eventually we got the story out of her: between architecture school and a job which began the day after graduation, she'd been working six and a half days per week, without ever taking a holiday or even a sick day, for over five years. This was her first fully free day in all that time. It was evidently completely overwhelming for her, like being released from a long prison sentence.
Obviously that's just one data point, and perhaps architecture isn't representative of other professions, but there you go.
Think back though, my wife had a friend (engineer) who had been working solidly for 30 days without a break. I guess stretches like that do happen.
I live alone and don't go outside unless I have to buy food. I work online, and make electronic music and play video games when I'm not working. It's how I choose to live my life and don't see anything wrong with it.
That's 541k individuals and rising that are not going to reproduce in a nation whose majority population is aging[1] and whose overall population is projected to collapse by almost 15% in 2050. Imagine 40% of your population being 65+. With a TRF of 1.7, that's over 1 million potential young replacements that are missing from the economy. Many people in Japan are terrified of the increasing trend if not necessarily the number of current individuals.
Declining birth rates are the norm in the west and the simple solution to that is immigration. That doesn't work so well in Japan, which while perfectly polite to visitors is in many places extremely homogeneous and they like to keep it that way.
[1]: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/retirement/ret...
[2]: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/population/
[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/without-bab...
Immigration is "the simple solution" if the only thing you care about - selfishly - is that your retirement and pension benefits are being paid out.
It's a problem that's suddenly gaining more interest in Japan because they aren't making babies. Getting more babies is a political platform that a lot of people are currently riding. Hikikomoris and NEETs are an easy, growing trend you can point to and say "this is why we aren't making enough babies, they need to do their part, our system is fine they're just lazy".
I don't follow Japanese politics, but implicating NEETs in their demographic problems seems completely out of touch.
When I was dating my ex, who is from Japan, a major part for not settling down with me was because I am not Japanese. She moved back to Japan, couldn't date anyone due to her age (late 20's). She ultimately dated/married a Japanese American and moved back to the US with him. I would imagine her husband being born and raised in America - could care less that she is 29.
Racism is both bad AND stupid, and I think it is hilarious for them to be suffering the consequences of their stupidity.
Theit system has a number of problems but it also has a number of advantages.
Besides, the countries who do let in immigrants are less xenophobic but not by a wide margin.
I'm xenophobic by denouncing xenophobia?
Xenophobia is just another cultural value and if I disagree with it them IM the xenophobe?
Furthermore, you condemned an entire nation and wished harm upon them on the basis of a perceived breach of your own values, which I might add are not completely clear to me.
It doesn't have much to do with cultural relativism, but with the assumption that you know what's good for Japan better than they do.
Hosting the Olympics in 2020.
Their cultural icons Pokemon, Nintendo characters, etc are known around the world.
Very low crime rate.
Yeah total idiots those Japanese are.
FYI: there are no laws that ban discrimination in Japan, for instance in the housing market. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan
Another form of xenophobia is with the rental market, where a large proportion of places is simply out of reach for foreigners, regardless of their income level. Positive point is that this is usually not the case for the more premium bracket.
On the other hand, immigrating to Japan is very simple for qualified labor, which is great for foreigners looking for some experience here.
In many countries we're seeking to repel this "simple solution" that is destroying us but are not allowed to.
Japan seems to be the only country in charge of themself.
That's a nice ironic load of bull right there.
TRF?
If you want a sobering view into the life of a hikki, browse wizchan for a few hours. These are not happy people.
But in the end, I do agree most NEETs aren't happy. I think when we hear "not working or studying" we tend to think "vacation", not depression/loneliness/being ill.
Still, I'm definitely considering it for this one, or something like it.
The "unemployed young male who just plays video games" demographic that recently got a writeup in the WSJ certainly seems to parallel Japan's NEETs. With hikikomori, it's more anecdotal, but when I flick through my Tumblr feed I feel like I see a lot of people who state outright that they just can't function outside. I think in a few more years it will be noticeable enough that we can say it's happening here "for real"
I'm going to sound rude and this is out of anecdotal experience (and I know some people actually can't function outside) but you should be careful when people on Tumblr say that. I've found most are just bored or lonely teenagers who self-diagnose themselves random things like Aspergers, ADHD, depression, etc. for whatever reason (sometimes for a valid reason related to family/household dysfunction, other times just to appear more interesting and to fit in online). When I used Tumblr five or so years ago I remember following these people and the ones I kept in touch with well, to sound rude again, grew out of it.
last few years, finally people are starting to acknowledging the problem.
PS: there is also an inherent risk of large demographics of idle people encouraging both lone wolves and mob mayhem. Busy people with friends, kids and what's inside vlogs generally don't suddenly become terrorists or overthrow the regime.
According to my clinical experiences, hikikomori has a history of attachment trauma with their mother (all biological mothers due to the absence of divorce in the families). When rejected emotionally by a mother, a young child hides his original self for protection, and creates a false self to adapt to the dysfunctional mother. The child grows to an adult who neither trusts nor shows his true identity to people. When the conflicts between pretending and hiding the true identify become unbearable, he would retreat into extreme degrees of isolation and confinement.
This phenomenon is observed commonly across my hikikomori clients. Hikikomori begins from dysfunctional mother-child relationships, which are influenced by the society that values group harmony and compliance over individual freedom. The syndrome began surfacing when Japan achieved economic success while the mothers with traditional values were unprepared to satisfy the children’s needs for love, individual freedom, and self-actualization. Hence, many hikikomoris find no place in Japan, feeling captive in the affluent but culturally oppressive society.
This societal situation combined with Japans's extreme economic shift (from miracle economy to great stagnation)to create this perfect storm that is Hikikomori.
Japan's economy was export dependent for a long time. The Japanese would manufacture more than they consumed and sell the surplus to the world. This ended when the Asian Tigers repeated the strategy at lower cost. Meanwhile asset prices inflated wildly because people thought the good times would never end. Which they did in the early 90s.
With demand for Japan's surplus product less, and assets overpriced, Japan had to begin a painful process of deflation. I think house prices fell for over 20 years after the bubble burst.
Japan's economy began to bifurcate after this, with the remaining good jobs going to the best students and the other students left with temporary jobs. The stakes are high for Japanese students.
Fundamentally, the Japanese islands are crowded and not very resource rich. Exporting finished goods allowed the population to grow above the economic carrying capacity of the land, and now the population is falling to adjust to the new reality.
If Japan still had a go-go economy like it did in the 70s and 80s, I doubt there would be as many recluses.
It seems like most countries have learned the lesson (or have never had to) and avoided the mistakes Japan has made, although the EU is headed in vaguely similar directions.
Also, the amount of what I'll call "social bullshit" is piled high (if you have a better, less provocative term, let me know). What is said is very far away from what is meant, and if you can't peel away the onion of social bullshit to discover what people really mean, communication is very difficult. Even playing patio11's game Stockfighter was very difficult for me to understand the directions, as the space between what you're supposed to do and what he suggests to do is very large (to me).
Futility being the key term.
In Russia you're not homosexual, you're a paedophile.
Doesn't this simply illustrate the awful way in which human beings are treated -- by countries slightly more backward than those that, at least, acknowledge the existence of mental illness, or sexuality? (BTW:I'm not equating sexuality with mental illness, but the way certain things are ignored, or labelled/conflated.)
You'll live in some shit tier city because you aren't making enough to move somewhere nice (or can't get a work visa), people around you are aggressive low IQ proles in Europe - always looking to pick fights (see https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1713078/moments-after-photo-of... ), if you aren't an aggressive muscular guy you'll just get some fugly harpy who will "settle" for you. There's just nothing in it for me.
I have been to Japan and the society is fairly autistic. People are polite but want to stay in their own little bubble. You could collapse on the street in Tokyo and nobody would give a shit if you don't block the entrance of a business. In the outskirts of Tokyo people live in bleak housing blocks that already look depressing from far away that make modern condos look like masterpieces.
Think this ten times the size: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Cwmbran_...
The society is super hierarchical, with old people being on top and young people earning almost nothing, jobs being hard to come by, guys not getting girlfriends / wifes cause strong independent women don't need no man and socializing with random people outside the internet is highly uncommon as well.
If I was in Japan I would be a recluse as well.
EDIT: Bring on the downvotes. I miss the usenet days where people actually had similar opinions to me and it was still a 99% male space where women were universally hated - long before fuckbook, twatter and young engineered brainwashed by colleges into becoming social justice warriors.
I sympathize with you being rejected after commenting about how you feel rejected. It isn't very fair. The virtual space used to be a refuge for recluses who were ran out of regular society. Physical appearance or health did not factor in because nobody could see you.
But the Internet isn't that place anymore. Now it is dominated by the same competitions. To get favorable treatment here you need to be beautiful or wealthy. If your account was "pg" you could write this and anything else and it would be voted to the top.
Sorry. You have an ugly personality, and it requires special compassion for anyone to not reject that. Not everyone knows what it feels like to be rejected and how it can push you further into ugliness. I don't have any solutions for that, just wanted to let you know someone out there recognizes the pain.
I disagree; The internet is not one big homogenous blob.
> You have an ugly personality, and it requires special compassion for anyone to not reject that
I do agree with your assessment, but it seems that unimportant is actively working towards being rejected. Instead of trying to improve himself, he's happily playing the role of the reject, blaming society and "harpies" or whatever on all his woes.
I'm sure there are people whose instinct is to find the goodness inside folks like him, and god bless 'em - but it ain't me. When someone flings shit at my feet, I don't dig through it to see if they swallowed a diamond.
Or just well spoken and reasonable? Sure well known celebs of the tech industry do perhaps get the "favorable treatment" of extra upvotes. But people aren't participating in these discussions just to get "favorable treatment", they're doing it for the intellectually engaging environment, the quality of which is a result of trading off some amount of unmitigated free speech
And it's not like dissenting opinions get flagged or even downvoted to oblivion - the grandparent isn't gray, for example. Only noise, hate speech and misinformation gets that treatment. In fact I'd argue that grandparent maybe should be, since he's citing a universal hatred of women as a positive value in a community - so I think it's still a lot closer to Usenet than you claim.
The irony in this statement is staggering.
This might be more of a reflection of living in a large city, rather than being Japanese. In a rural area, you wave to everyone you meet. In a large city - Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, New York, etc. - your arm would fall off by mid-afternoon.
> a 99% male space where women were universally hated
Funny, I don't remember Usenet as a MRA haven, but perhaps we just visited different newsgroups.
Funny, when he himself isn't interested in fruitful interactions with other people - at least, not those people who happen to be women, or men who don't hate women.
We didn't actually need help, and we weren't mad at each other, we just discuss things loudly when we disagree about the best course of action. However, we were touched by their willingness to help out others, even though there was a language barrier. (They didn't know I speak some Japanese.)
So I have to disagree that you won't get any help if you have a problem.
Granted, we didn't visit the "outskirts", and it may very well be different out there, but we were in some non-touristy areas when this stuff happened.
Let me be clear, they are not actively out there hating you because of the views you hold - they just hold no opinion at all about you, one way or the other.
I am not one of those people.
I am glad you are a recluse. You've made the right choice.
Good luck and goodbye
Your statements about how you see the world are very black and white, but the world you are talking about is very very complex, and there are infinite shades of grey. If you went outside and interacted with other people without prejudging the outcome I think that you would have plenty of experiences which do not conform to your expectations of how the world is. I say 'expectations' because I don't think you've attempted to disprove your own assumptions - and I think your assumptions are based not on your own experiences, but on anecdotes from echo chambers (usernet, etc.) (now i'm assuming too much - but you can tell me if i'm wrong).
Maybe you have had some bad personal experiences that lead you to your views on harpy women, proles and aggressively muscular men. I would like to hear what they are.
Is this a serious statement? I can't imagine someone would be so fragile and yet bold (blind?) enough to post that they miss their safe space while at the same time lambasting that perennial "SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS" boogeyman.
This literally happened when I was visiting Japan and your belief is invalid. My girlfriend fell down the stairs in the Tokyo train station during the rush hour commute and many strangers were concerned for her well being (to the point we had to decline several times being taken to a hospital).
i was offered help multiple times when standing alone by myself when waiting for something, or someone. i'm an asian male, pretty much indistinguishable from any random japanese guy.
i've been a lot of places and i have a hard time believing that you could fall down in the middle street anywhere on earth and nobody will help you, including new york, shanghai, other megacities.
excepting maybe some extreme examples like communistic societies at the height of the cold war, but that's it.
If a random guy collapses on the street nobody would care.
I fully respect that you have figured this out (because you're absolutely not wrong), but have you ever considered trying to become a top-tier male? Like, throw in a serious year or two of hard work, weightlifting, social skills improvement, cooking, grooming, study, wardrobe, etc etc, to see how the other side lives?
It's not "easy", but now I'm just wondering... since you've figured out that modern society has nothing to offer such men, which most men will NEVER truly understand, why not become the opposite?
Glad people like Ronnie James Dio didn't wimp out at their dreams because they weren't tall. But how many Ronnie James Dio's have we not had a chance to enjoy because they thought less of themselves? I hate it.
I don't get anything out of having sex with women I don't like and I generally don't find women to be likeable. Just like most guys I have been looking for love in my 20s just to find out that no such thing exists beyond a mother's love for her children. I look above average and dress above average these days and get a fair amount of unwanted female attention as they apparently love my facial expression of seething contempt for most people.
In other words, their existence as part of the system is perceived as miserable as - if not more so - than being outside of it. So why bother trying?
There's very little to no return on investment for their efforts in improving themselves (or being part of the system).
If due to pressing economic circumstances they were forced to work, they would not be any less miserable, perhaps more so.
I do have one thing to say about housing in Japan. It does look extremely bleak, but I think the looks are deceptive, and much of it is actually of quite a high quality. The way it was explained to me by a Japanese person is that everything is designed with earthquakes in mind. Anything extraneous might fall off in an earthquake. Any decorative features, fancy light fixtures, or signage are excluded.
The result is that even the most important buildings end up looking like bland, featureless blocks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_60