The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins

There's always Starbucks. I'm only half-joking, there's always people there at all times of the day in Japan.

It's really difficult to read about this kind of thing and maintain an appropriate feeling of cultural relativism without wanting go "oh Japan" or in my case "oh Korea". There's been many times with my family and friends a seemingly intractable situation will come up that a Westerner would simply resolve with a bit of a Western Rock'n'Roll "well fuck 'em" attitude and get on with life. As a Westerner, I find it incredibly frustrating at times. But obviously it's more complicated then that and when I try to see things through my family and friend's cultural lens it all makes a kind of sense.

On the flip side, I think lots of Western behavior is explained by an insatiable desire for group membership -- despite social expectations of individuality (especially for Americans).

People do all kinds of weird behaviors, bizarre clique joinerisms like wearing crazy fashions, or obsess over the moment they turn old enough to join the Marines or take on group-specific behavior patterns, and just like with 情 this mood and desire seems indescribable to them (I don't know of any satisfactory word in English for it). But you can go to any public place and look at groups of people who all dress, act and try to be as "the same" as possible as their clique-mates.

And then you end up with the strangest of all joiner group identities, the ones made up of "individuals" who strive obsessively to be "individuals" just exactly like all the rest of their clique-mates. Hipsterism seems to be a particularly well known variant of this, but there are others.

I suspect a similar psychological mechanism is at play, but just on opposite ends of the spectrum.

there were Arcades, but they pretty much all closed in the nineties

When I graduated from college, I worked my entire time there and was kind of over stressed/exhausted, so I took a sabatic year. I spent I guess 6 months browsing the web, reading about compilers, and watching video lectures, I just spent time with my mom. My dad started questioning me, but both were very supportive.

After about 6 months, I started to gain weight, so I decided to join a Gym. A pal offered me classes on a local university and things started to move on.

I was very depressed, sad, I didn't want to do anything, literally, I just wanted to sleep. At the end, I took about 16 months in rehabilitation, I grew frustrated of literally doing nothing, and started to work again, first at the family company as a hobby, then as general manager, it really helped me that I've been an entrepeneour since my 16's, and well. things just keeps going.

I really where on a different position than all of this persons, but I acknowledge it's very hard to stand on your feet after a break down. Is like you loss the will to live and you start giving a fuck about everything, friends, family, money, everything.

Returning to the sabatic year. the second part of that sabatic year, was one of the happiest moments on my life, I got a Girlfriend (Denisse), I traveled not a lot, but enough, wasted all the money I've saved from the company I had on college (I developed webpages), but I got some great friends, they were awesome people and I laughed and enjoyed life like never before.

Straightforward to the present time. last year suddenly I felt like the loneliest person on earth, I've been working so hard the last 6 years, that again I didn't had friends at all, I wake up, work, gym, bed. In that order, now I'm in my 30's, still single, I buyed a flat, buyed fourniture, but at the end, I still live with my parents, I just can't handle being alone there. and throught I can say I'm quite succesful, being succesful is not actually a requisite to make friends, a requisite to being friends is being happy, and was again stressed but now I was kind of angry with life too.

I changed gym (I used to go to a sports club rather exclusive, where I couldn't meet new people), joined graduate school, actually I'm studying two master degrees right now, one in applied statistics, and another one in business planification. I also joined new groups in order to meet new people. Things are changing now. Now I've friends againg to hang out on weekends. But damn, I have to make assessments every now and then about my life, and take corrective actions because if I just keep going, it seems that the path always takes me to a depressive life, maybe is my personality, maybe I isolate when I take a challenge (as a programmer, I like to program in isolation, so when I become general manager of the family company, I isolated myself until I took the company to profit again). Nevertheless, the only thing I take for sure is: Damn, life is difficult.

That said, I'm an introvert myself as well. Spending time with others in a social setting drains me mentally, and I prefer being alone or with my SO. But if I never left the house for months or years, it would be quite depressing for me.

I think the issue goes beyond people who simply don't like spending time with others. People are suffering.

If there were, wouldn't the market eventually take care of it?

> One of the nice things about having a 9-5ish job is that I have to go into the office on a regular basis (not necessarily every day).

You hit the nail on the head for me. What I miss most from a normal job isn't money or status, but simply being around other people. I never once thought that I would have felt this way.

I'll be joining a coworking space when money permits, to be sure.

I think a lot of it is about inertia and always choosing the easier path. If your parents enable you to live without having to work, for a lot of people the ease overrides the benefits of work (independence, sense of worth, etc).

Down the track, more and more socialising will be digital, more shopping will be online and so on. Some people will exist publicly only as avatars bearing little resemblance to their physical selves.

You could look at it this way, I suppose, but it falls apart a bit when you consider that Japan's falling birthrate is at least partially a product of women tossing out their traditional roles. Yeah, that still leaves plenty of pressure on everyone, but it also sets a precedent, or at least enforces it.

But no, most Japanese -- hikikomori or not -- do not "just want to live western way." The things you mention about that are largely the opposite of Japanese experience and expectation, and to suggest that kids who have never left the nation, let alone their own homes, have somehow adopted the cultural norms of cultures thousands of miles away just by consuming their internet leavings seems more than a bit questionable.

There are plenty of jobs. In fact, there's a labor shortage. It's just that they're all shitty low-wage part time jobs with no security.

Housing only seems to be a problem in Tokyo. My wife and I have been looking at apartments and there are tons of all sizes that have been open for months. Nothing at all like back home in Sweden where there's a 3 year waiting list even outside of Stockholm.

For some people, it might be true, though. Regardless of this fact, this is a very unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle which should be corrected and these people should be helped. I don't see it much different from somebody being addicted to drugs. Sure, they might be happy taking drugs, but that's not going to work well forever. (Obviously this is an exaggerated example)

I've been a shut in for 5 years now, I was pretty content and happy for the first few years. It was only until my parents started having financial troubles and begun the process of divorce when it turned into hell. Everyday I'm terrified by the thought that one day I'll have to go back to society. I knew some people that went through this and they have mostly ended up homeless because they simply were too under qualified to get a job. Health care is a problem too, I do my best to stay in shape and eat healthy foods to prevent any major illnesses because if I were to get sick it would mean severe debts as I have 0 savings.

Once your children understand that you won't actually throw them out, any conversation pushing them is just negatively reinforcing their impression that interaction is a problem, not a solution.

Nah, many of those are in internet cafés, and social pressure seems to be at least part of what keeps them playing (you don't see it happening with non-online games, after all). Different condition.

They do often spend a lot of time on the internet, but it's not a cause, it's a related fixation (when you're trapped -- by what's probably some combination of your own preference and perceived outside forces -- in a room, the internet provides a wealth of things to do). It's a social malaise that might as well be an extension of the NEET phenomenon.

No, it's just that there aren't that many native born Japanese who are fluent in English or visit Western websites.