I've said it before but I love Japan for being weird and wonderful in equal measure. To me. And of course I realise it's a matter of perspective, but although I would never live in Japan again, I also know I would never be bored there. When I first started this silly blog, a friend in Japan sent me an email saying "Do NOT fill it with strange things from Japan". And I've really tried. I know there's the exercise video back in one of the first posts, but since then I have been positively swotty in my willingness to comply. And there's so MUCH gloriously weird stuff one could write about, you have to give me some credit for that, A-chan.
But recently I have been dealing with such a frightful situation of relentless, targeted abuse, (deadly meningitis on its own is just too dull - we needed something more to think about, really we did) and today it left me wanting to build a den behind the sofa and move in. I didn't do that, actually, but I did spend a few moments with the blanket drawn very firmly over my head, and in this shut-them-out moment, I remembered the hikikomori.
Going back a bit, one thing that struck me so much while I lived in Kobe was the Japanese penchant for gentle and philosophical acceptance of "syndromes". The bizarre catches on fast there. You hear of one weird person doing one weird thing and, before you know it, there are lots of weird people doing the same weird thing and bang - you have a syndrome. Oh ok, you could sometimes call it a phase, or a fad, or crazy-crazy craze, but I'm not really talking about the Lolitas, or Ganguro (girls who dye their hair white and black themselves up with fake tan - probably all moved on now but it used to freak the hell out of me...). That's all pretty bloody odd, I think, but now I mean the darker stuff. People flocking to get lost forever in the Suicide Forest of Aokigahara, the kegadol fashion (sex yourself up with bandages to look injured, anyone?) and one that struck me so much while I was there, and which came back to me tonight, hikikomori.
Hikikomori is widespread enough to be described as a sociological phenomenon, although I'm not sure if it as still as prevalent now as it was ten years ago, when the western media started gasping. Usually ascribed to teenage boys (though girls and non-teens were certainly not immune) the hikikomori can perhaps be best represented in our terms as a Sudden Hermit. Certainly, drop-out, often used for want of a real translation, cannot really cut it. These poor people isolate themselves, wholly and without warning, within one room of the house and refuse to come out. Sometimes for years. Causes are often cited along the lines of "inability to conform", " buckling under social pressure", "failure to meet academic expectation" and the good old use-for-all "bullying".
I do not, at all, mean to belittle the obviously disturbed psychological state of someone who one day comes home, walks into his bedroom and refuses to come out again. The effect that would have first on the sufferer and, perhaps more, on his family is unthinkable. But when you start reading up on the stories of those who have suffered from the syndrome, either as a hikikomori themselves or as the person who then had to ensure their survival (in most cases their mother) you do end up rather open-mouthed. I've been re-reading tonight, and you come across tales of families who built new kitchens after their hikikomori son would not allow anyone into their old one; mothers who stayed at home permanently the first moment of self-incarceration, thereby hermitising themselves as completely, so that they would always be on hand, if needed. And families who declared their child dead, rather than face the humiliation of admitting to a hikikomori teenager, and committed themselves to a life of smuggling in food.
It's tragic, but I can't help wondering. Isn't this acceptance of it all a bit, well, passive? It is after all only a door. Can't you kick it in, walk in and march them off to a psychologist? Or at least to the shower. Or am I just too brutally Victorian for words? I honestly can't believe if J or J ever shut themselves in our kitchen that R are I would say "How troublesome, we'll just have to build ourselves a new one."
And however much public and social soul-searching you do for the "cause" of such behaviour, could it not just be that, well, sometimes weird ideas just catch on? I saw one report suggesting that Japan's sakkoku, its 200 year period of total isolation, was the root cause, as it idealised a spirit of the solitary "within the blood of its citizens"...academic, I agree, but I am dubious. I'm not sure if the term has even been medicalised now, and I think it is striking that when you do scan the various research papers available online,they do often say they have difficulties finding similar cases in other parts of the world. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but just not on such a scale.
I don't get it at all, which is not to say I am totally without sympathy. I probably am simply not far-thinking enough. Anyway, it was all interesting enough to get me out from under the Blanket of Despair.
So that's something else to thank Japan for.
PS I don't actually think hermitise IS a verb, but I rather like it...
and PPS I am SO sorry, Yumi-chan, but I couldn't resist..!
