Hikikomori

　　　○○　Doug's Roving Report　○○

Good morning Eiji,

Today there is another
important topic/word in the Mainichi Newspaper that needs mentioning.

1. Have Straight Talk readers heard of
"hikikomori" => youths shutting themselves
inside their homes for six months or longer.
This is where young people refuse to go to school and withdraw from
society. When I first heard you had met some of these people I was very
surprised to hear this existed, and why the government was not helping
these people and parents.

2. The newspaper says the government estimates 696,000 youths nationwide
are hikikomori and a further 1.55 million youths claimed they understood
with the inclination to isolate oneself from society. WHAT!!!? Nearly
700,000 kids in Japan are not going to school and being supported by the
families. That's more than the population of my home town in Canada, and
equivalent to a number of slums in India wouldn't you say? Why is the
government and schools allowing this? Why is it that governments do not
offer the necessary assistance to families? Why do families not ask for
help? Simple -- because society - the city hall and government doesn't
help or encourage it. This needs to change first..........

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/news/20101023p2a00m0na003000c.html

　　　　-- Mainichi News (Oct 23, 2010) --

　　Secretive families, neglectful government
　　　　mean no help for weakest among us

The Cabinet Office recently announced that an estimated 696,000 youths nationwide are hikikomori, shutting themselves inside their homes for six months or longer. According to the same report, 1.55 million youths claimed they could sympathize with the inclination to isolate oneself from society. It looks like for the time being, the government will claim the official figure for hikikomori as approximately 700,000.

In reality, the estimated population of hikikomori varies from year to year. According to Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry surveys conducted between 2002 and 2005, the number of affected households was an estimated 410,000 in the first year. The number continued to fall in subsequent years, with a 2005 figure of 260,000 households.

The reason the figures varied so much from year to year is not because the actual number of shut-ins changed dramatically from year to year. On the contrary, the hikikomori population actually has a tendency to remain fairly level; we must therefore conclude that the vacillating numbers are attributable to research methodology.

In contrast to other disorders, it is nearly impossible to accurately grasp the reality of hikikomori populations through surveys and interviews at medical institutions. The only realistic method of collecting information is by making individual visits to the homes of those afflicted. However, in a country with a rapidly rising number of households refusing to participate in the national census, securing adequate cooperation for an investigation on a topic considered taboo is not so easy.

Based on these state of affairs, we can infer the possibility that fluctuations in the estimated number of shut-ins are greatly influenced by how cooperative families are with the surveys. We can also assume that the nationwide population of 700,000 hikikomori is probably a modest estimate. In other words, families can be a huge stumbling block in this kind of survey.

While some may consider this too big a leap, I could not help but link the study on hikikomori with recent media coverage on missing senior citizens. According to the Mainichi, as of Aug. 5, the whereabouts of 57 people across the country aged 100 and over were unknown. The number has continued to rise as local governments conduct their own investigations. In Nagasaki Prefecture, for example, the family register of a man born in 1810 still existed. Born in the same year as Chopin and Edo period figure Chuji Kunisada, the man would have been 200 years old if he were still alive.

The disappearance of so many elderly people can be attributed to anything from the mentally ill wandering off or whole families skipping town because of extenuating circumstances, to people without kin failing to be identified after dying from illness. But what about the case that first brought this widespread phenomenon to light?

The July discovery of the mummified corpse of a man -- who would have been 111 years old if he were alive -- was what triggered the recent hoopla. And as it turns out, this case is symbolic for many reasons.

The family of the deceased man had covered up his death, turning away ward officials who requested to see him. In other words, efforts to confirm the man's well-being (or death) were blocked by family. Here, too, as with shut-ins, we see families standing in the way. Regardless of whether or not families intentionally obscured the truth, their passive resistance -- exemplified by the fact that they submitted neither a death notification nor a missing persons report with authorities -- has led to so many elderly people being unaccounted for.

The reality of families as obstacles figures more prominently in child abuse than anything else.

The abandonment of two children's bodies by their mother in Osaka this summer was just one of a number of child abuse cases recently covered by the media. Even though the April 2008 enactment of a revised child abuse prevention law authorizes child guidance centers to conduct on-site inspections, only three such visits have been carried out to date. This can be attributed to the understaffing of centers and cumbersome red tape. But most significantly, here, too, families are getting in the way. It pains me to think that young lives have been lost because of families that stood in the way of urgently needed intervention.

Why is it that barriers erected by families are so effective? I can't help but think that they represent families' resistance -- or to take it even further, passive revenge -- against the state.

What shut-in youths, the elderly, and young children have in common is their social vulnerability, and the consistent passivity of a government in taking direct measures to protect them. As a result, for a long time, the task of protecting the socially weak has been left effectively to families.

The introduction of nursing-care insurance and other measures may have improved things somewhat. But in Japan, the level of resources allocated to protecting the social underdog is in no way high compared to that of other industrialized nations. The Japanese government still depends on families to care for their own.

Is not the "family as a social obstruction" the result of the government's long-term neglect of this state of affairs?

The swelling number of elderly people who cannot be tracked down and increasing reports of child abuse are signs that the family, as an institution, is beginning to fall apart. Will the Democratic Party of Japan transform Japanese government from one that has been dependent on families to one that takes care of its citizens? Let us watch and see. (By Tamaki Saito, psychiatrist)

(Mainichi Japan) October 23, 2010


===================================================================
Part 2

Yesterday I had lunch with the president of a small successful company
and his wife and we were talking about the pressures kids today go
through in Japan.
He said he was like a "hikikomori' kid when he was young - he didn't
drop out of school but didn't put in much effort. After graduation he
left Japan to travel and ended up living in Hawaii for a number of years
and studying English. Now he owns his own company of 10 people and
works with many top international and domestic companies.
Hikikomori youths are not strange - and I have met a number of them too
now -- what is strange is a society/government not working to help these
youths.