NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Hikikomori and a 'Second Japan'
On June 9 a delivery truck rammed into a Sunday afternoon crowd in Tokyo, killing three. The 25-year-old driver then hopped out and stabbed 17 shoppers, killing another four. It is considered Japan's deadliest crime in seven years. After police made an arrest they quickly turned to the Ministry of Education for help in determining a motive. As they anticipated, the Ministry found the suspect had been a poor student. One of his high school teachers remarked, "He wasn't outstanding at all in his studies or extracurricular activities. He was really a mediocre student."
The deadlier crime of seven years ago occurred as American journalist Michael Zielenziger was writing his book Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (Vintage Books, 2007). Mental health professionals immediately suspected that the man, who stabbed and killed eight students at an elementary school, had taken revenge for being bullied as a child. When a child fails to measure up to academic and cultural standards, he is as likely to come under physical as verbal attack.
Some bullied students commit suicide. Some grow up to be violent criminals. A large number simply refuse to attend classes. The latter often harden into a type of recluse peculiar to Japan known as "hikikomori." They differ from true hermits in that they live in bedrooms and depend on family for resources. There are an estimated one million hikikomori, overwhelmingly male, ranging from pre-teen to middle age. If they emerge from the bedroom at all it is usually to beat up their parents for not delivering some demanded good or service. Yet despite the brutality and grotesque selfishness, people who engage the hikikomori find them clear-thinking and creative.
But it is precisely that kind of thinking that may have led to the creation of hikikomori. Shutting Out the Sun holds that original, independent thinking is frowned upon in Japan. It traces the taboo to Japan's zeal in catching up with the technologically advanced West starting in 1863. Rote learning and suppression of individuality were essential to the intense commodity production required to beat the West at its own game. There were few avenues open to creative thinkers. Now that Japan needs such people in the aftermath of its economic collapse in 1989, they are out of the country in supportive cultures, or at home locked in bedrooms. The hikikomori represent an exaggerated backlash to the culture of self-sacrifice for the good of the whole.
Zielenziger sees a larger social problem in which Japanese society itself wants to go into hiding and fill the void it finds at its core. To him, Japan cannot begin to heal until the preponderance of collective over individual thinking is reversed.
It may be true that individuality is the key to recovery if Japan is to regain its status as an economic superpower. But is that what the Japanese people want? When the Marxist-Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya toured Japan in 1966, she met many youths who told her they wanted to "develop relations with the Second America--the America of the Negro Revolution, of the Free Speech Movement, of rank and file labor struggles" (News & Letters, February 1966). That call for solidarity comes from a Second Japan--one that still desires collectivity, but collectivity that aims to unleash full human freedom without sacrificing the individual to the whole.
--David Mizuno'Oto
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