Can education change Japan's 'depressed' generation?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It frustrates me to no end because this lack of understanding perpetuates really hurtful stereotypes. Things are not perfect here, of course, but this reporting is absolutely off the mark. Japanese people are no more soulless, depressed automatons than Americans are psychopathic mass murderers.
Please don't measure cultures using a yardstick from your own culture. Do not extrapolate from peculiar societal problems into thinking that there is an overall systemic failure. Different cultures have different problems and different ways of dealing with them. This kind of "journalism" is voyeuristic at best and hate mongering at worst.
I didn't see it as voyeuristic or hateful, but it's definetely something that should be portrayed clearly as either reporting or opinion.
Anyway, I found the article helpful, perhaps you didn't because of the time you spent in the country?
[1] For example, it was one of Naoto Kan's priorities while Prime minister to increase jobs to help stem suicides. Google 'japanese student depression' for example, yields plenty of first page links making similar claims. I'd agree that many of the links don't rise to the level of hard science, and welcome alternative viewpoints and data, but this is not just some random article with one person's made up hypothesis.
But it's not really fair to use only rose-colored glasses. There are serious issues with extreme conformity and group-think in Japan. Yes, there's exceptions to everything, but overall it's far more extreme there than it is elsewhere.
Expectations for how you are supposed to behave and interact are much more strict; and that sort of thing really does rob people of their individualism, to some extent. And you can see this by way of Japan having the seventh highest suicide rate in the world; with only two countries significantly higher than theirs.
Surely, every country has its problems; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about any of them.
> You just don't say that you are happy with yourself because it can limit your development, it makes you look vain, etc, etc.
Tell that to the producers of the TV show Cool Japan :P
(For those who haven't seen it, it's a show that brings in tourists from around the world to gawk about Japanese exceptionalism in all things; while the Japanese hosts inquire why other countries are so backward by comparison. You probably think I'm exaggerating; but I can assure you, it's actually even worse.)
I probably should never have posted what I did. That kind of poor journalism/entertainment which exploits "we're better than them" attitudes exists everywhere in the world. A random rant in HN is not going to change that. If anything it simply polarizes opinion and invites the trolls to control the stage. I wish I could think of an effective strategy to change opinions on this topic.
I don't mind your post and wasn't trying to be a contrarian. Just that I really do worry about this issue there.
But being honest, even after having studied Japan since high school, I still barely understand some parts of their culture. For one example, 遠慮 (enryo) is a concept I'll never comprehend. They say it shows humility to decline at first; but to me, it feels like it turns the tables and makes the gift-giver feel like the one that has to forcefully impose. It would make me feel bad to beg someone to accept my gift. I'm willing to go pretty far to "act like the Romans", but this is one thing I couldn't bring myself to do.
Setting aside the particulars of this article, I take issue with this idea. External cultural observation and comparison is invaluable for bringing new perspectives to internal problems. That's not to say the outsider's perspective is more correct, but merely that it is illuminating in a way that is difficult to achieve from an ensconced position inside an echo chamber.
Funny thing is, you ask 9/10 Bulgarians how they're feeling, the "traditional" way to reply to that, even if you won the lottery, is "oh you know.....so-so".
To say "great" or "wonderful" is seen as inviting bad luck into your life, basically.
If Japan was serious about curbing depression it would take serious measures to reign in the permanent overtime a lot of employees find themselves in, where many are staying in the office until nearly midnight. By "serious" I mean fines and possibly jail time for employers that allow it to happen without reason, or allow it to happen regularly even if they have a reason. And don't rely on reporting, either - start doing audits. If that sounds severe, remember that these are the people whose government formed a committee to investigate why so many Japanese companies required their workers to come in on Saturdays - which committee itself met every Saturday. "Soft paternalism" is probably not going to cut it.
The drinking culture here probably doesn't help, either. Alcohol's links to depression are well-known.
Though the immigrants I work with seem to just reconstruct the same pattern of behavior. My Japanese office mate works til midnight every single night for no reason. I feel sad for the poor guy.
If you think that's mystifying, try having an economy only big enough for 100 million people, but actually have 127 million people, and describe the problem as they "feel" rejected (they ARE rejected, not "feel" it) and if only the victims would work a little harder, a job would magically appear (why?). Its a steaming pile of victim blaming.
Another interpretation is its a confusion of micro vs macro economics. Surely on an individual scale working harder and longer and learning more always benefits that one individual. But on a macro scale if the problem is ten jobs for fifteen grads, its inhumane to tell the five losers that the solution to societies problems is for those five, or all fifteen, to work harder. If they are dumb enough to actually work harder, the most likely outcome is next year they'll be only nine jobs for the fifteen grads, at which time we'll tell the six losers the solution to the societal problem is those six should have worked harder... leading to seven of them unemployed the next year, LOL. We do the same dumb thing in the USA with "go to college and get a great job". Well, jobs aren't magically created by the granting of a diploma, so you do the math on that. Send everyone to college and you merely end up with everyone deep in debt and lots of bartenders and receptionists with really cool sounding degrees.
Basically in a way society advises you on what's best for you. Yes there are examples in other countries, but they pale in scope. In Japan it begins in elementary school and follows you all thru life.
Japanese people were a bit warmer than we thought and as far as I could tell, they like have people visit their country.
Kind of like the 'stay clear of the doors' you hear in subways systems elsewhere but they do it for everything. So basically you get used to the other telling you what to do, in a way. You don't have to think. It's done for you.
Quite a lot of young Japanese live at home even through their university years, and it seems the common case of hikikomori is that they just never leave.