First government survey of hikikomori | Hacker News Reader

First government survey of hikikomori

japantimes.co.jp

137 pointsUltramanoid52 comments

Funny how everyone’s response is always to suggest therapy or medication and never to question whether the society people are escaping from is one worth participating in.

Right? Diversity in aspiration and life experience tends to be tolerated iff its within a publicly accepted manner.

The man living happily wired into the net meeting his financial obligations and not breaking any law is fine in my eyes.

Sometimes the net is preferable to the available versions of meatspace

It's interesting what the sense of a direct translation of hikikomori implies. Original form is (if you have the font)

引き子守

The first two characters imply someone who is dragged along and the second two refer to a nursemaid suggesting nursemaid-ing someone who doesn't want to be here. Not in defense of any such defeatist behavior but there is the question of how (and possibly why) would you impose measures to counteract that mindset if individuals and their support context are comfortable with it?

The second half of the word (the "komori" part) is not written 子守 but rather 籠り, which means "to isolate oneself".

The 引き part is less "dragged along" in this context and more "pull away from," so the literal meaning is "to pull away from (society) and isolate oneself."

Side note: according to EDICT:

引きこもり [ひきこもり] (n) (1) shut-in, stay-at-home, hikikomori, people

引きずる [ひきずる] (v5r,vt) (1) to drag along, to pull, (2) to force someone along, (3) to prolong, to drag out, (4) to influence strongly, to seduce, (P)

子守 [こもり] (n,vs) (1) nursemaid, nanny, babysitter, (2) child-minding

But starting from [ひきこもり] ambiguities are possible.

my observation on suicide prevention too

people genuinely believe they are being empathic, but copy and pasting "prevention resources" isn't getting close to what people are going through

If those people would support themself they wouldn't be seen as a big problem. But as long as they are just a burden, society will be cautious.

It' doesn't matter whether someone participate activly with society, as long as they benefiting from it, they are a part of it.

It's extremely difficult to find those around me with similar interests who actually have anything approaching 'spare time'.

Additionally, it's very difficult to be interesting without a diverse set of different friends and experiences to be the bridge between. As a 'natural leaf node' I find that I've been the first to get culled when others contract or otherwise shift their time allocations for higher priority slots in their lives.

The transaction cost of visiting friends is also affected by the size of metro areas, traffic/lack of good transit meshes, and the insane cost of housing. It often isn't worth leaving a small, opportunity isolated, corner of suburbia to meet someone else if it's going to take an hour or more one way for each trip; particularly if that's during 'rush hour' traffic hell.

Today's war for attention is insanity fueled by ad revenue and I feel like everyone's a looser in this war.

Do we have any statistics from other countries?

The numbers given in the article suggest about 1% of the Japanese population are hikikomori, that seems, at first glance, quite common.

In the West many of those with the hikikomori traits are medicated under anxiety and depression. Japan does not have the same mental health processes we have here.

I wonder which way is better for the people living with a predisposition to reclusive behavior. Is medication to allow these people to integrate with the rest of society better or worse for their well-being than having them live alone?

I like to imagine people who take medication for social anxieties do so because they managed to get themselves to a doctor and ask for such, then willingly continue to take the medication of their own volition.

Howber, now that I’ve wtitten that it occurs to me there may be expectations in a culture that are difficult to see from within.

They don't live alone and are unable to live alone. Someone must bring them food, cook for them and otherwise pay bills. Also, they do not report high hapiness.

I'd imagine it would be correlated almost 1:1 with unemployment statistics, which are very well documented.

Interesting, I would have assumed no correlation with unemployment statistics.

Almost by definition, you can't be hikikomori if you're employed. So there's at least that.

True, although I would have thought they fell outside the definition of unemployed as well as they aren’t seeking work.

The most common unemployment statistics only include people actively seeking employment. Since you'd 1) be actually willing to work and 2) have to interact with strangers to go on job interviews, it that wouldn't be considered a hikkomori.

Unemployed almost never includes retired people and 36.2% of those surveyed cited retirement as a trigger for social withdraw.

There are European countries with 5%, 10%, 15% unemployment numbers. It'd be insane if they had that percentage of completely recluse population. And they obviously don't.

He said 1:1 correlated, not 1:1 equal. I.e. if for the sake of argument one in five unemployed are shut-ins but nearly no employed people are, then you have a good starting point to estimate populations.

Unemployment of the youth in Spain is at >33% now.

it must have been, but with the internet remote activities have diversified enough to allow to have what would qualify as part time job without leaving the room/house.

For instance blogging, affiliate ads, game streaming, youtube ads, etc.

This might not a big part of the pie, but it’s not 0 either.

In the article they state that people that are hikikomori don't have a job. I would assume that if you are a content creator with income that stays at home all day you would be left out of the study.

I think as a large scale societal issue, we are about to see a lot more gatekeeping where modern, microtransaction, power-law distribution of revenue income streams don't really mean anything financially, but will disqualify participants from help and assistance to "save program money". If you amazon turk'd once for $2 total, you have a "job" so no help with medical care for you, etc.

Its likely the way the market will "fight" modern gig economy business models is by weaponizing socialized support systems. If you ever uber and make $5 or get $50 from admob annual income for a youtube channel, you're "a rich self employed small businessperson" with substantial legal and taxation reporting requirements and an official "job" so no college student loans for you, no food stamps, etc. Fight the business model by drying up the supply. If the only people doing mturk, uber, or recording youtube content are either dirt poor or independently wealthy, that will eliminate that segment of the marketplace via lack of supply. The income from gig economy isn't enough to live, so survival will dictate abandonment of the gig economy. The legacy marketplace players have a large financial motivation to implement something like this. I don't think taxi drivers or legacy TV network execs will oppose shenanigans that wipe out the gig economy.

The japanese article has a definition of how they labelled people.

https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASM3R4DZQM3RULZU005.html

It’s still pretty vague, my rough translation: “people who didn’t participate in social activities, like school or work for more than 6 months”.

Also it’s stressed that this time they didn’t automatically remove at home spouses, and they were flagged as hikikomori if they had almost no interaction outside of their family.

I wouldn’t surprised if blogging or content creating on the net would be excluded from “social participation” or not seen as communication in general.

Strange that Japan considers older recluse becoming more common than younger recluses a new development. That is the opposite of the stereotype on the West, where the "old hermit" is a longstanding archetype.

I always have the "mouse utopia" experiment in the back of my mind when I read this kind of story...

I think about this too. For those who don't know the reference, I recommend reading [1].

What happened is that Dr. John Calhoun made a series of increasingly large "utopias" for mice and rats. Mice were fed, kept warm, and placed in a controlled area where there were no predators. After a bit, the mice begin to thrive and expand. But after a while things start to go astray in ways that are unexpected and a bit strange. And ultimately the population collapses and completely dies out --- even in utopia.

[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopi...

Since we're talking about Japan, the 2003 anime Texhnolyze had Behavioral Sinks at its conceptual core.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2017/07/03-1/the-g...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK47Azd6OO8

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