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Japan’s Hidden Youth… Amy Borovoy

“In the spheres of education and mental health care itself, there is what might be described as a kind of ‘‘antipsychology’’ or ‘‘antipsychiatry’’ bias in Japan… not an opposition to psychiatry itself but, rather, a web of ideas and institutions that militate against pathologizing the individual and that, instead, make it possible to view a vast array of human differences and distress as potentially manageable and containable through reliance on self-discipline, coping and support from family and others” (554).

“treatment discourses [to help hikkikomori] emphasized accepting these youths as they were—slowly drawing them back into social life through strategies such as setting small goals, big brother and big sister programs and continuing parental care. The issue was chiefly how to reintegrate these isolated individuals into mainstream social participation” (555).

“Since 1992, the Japanese Ministry of Education has stated that the refusal to attend school, seen as a related problem, … must be regarded as a socially produced problem, rather than an individual or a familial one” (555).

“The psychiatrist Saito Tamaki, one of the most widely cited and respected specialists in hikikomori care, also sees hikikomori as evidence of constraining social structures rather than individual problems… Saito sees hikikomori as a ‘condition’ (hikikomori jotai), not itself a disorder or disease, rooted in a malfunctioning of the communication system among individual, family, and society; the system then reproduces itself” (555).

Behavioral problems are rarely linked to psychological illnesses and parents are considered responsible for their child’s health rather than health care professionals.

“Ethnographic studies of Japanese early education (preschool through elementary) reveal that teachers are quite tolerant of chaos and hyperactivity (or what we might call hyperactivity) and are similarly casual in dealing with hitting and other bad behavior. What they tend to flag as worrisome or unacceptable is children’s failure to participate in group activities” (560).

Japanese schools place special needs children in a regular classroom, assuming that the “stronger children” will overcome prejudice and the disabled children will “benefit from mingling with mainstream peers. At the same time, inclusion is undeniably linked to an ideology of ‘‘sameness’’—and the pressure to hide problems and assimilate into mainstream values” (560).

“The flip side of this emphasis on equality is that for those who fall behind, the road is ambiguous. According to counselors and teachers, students may spend wasted years, sometimes getting bullied or frustrated in their inability to keep up. Some students are bullied; others withdraw” (561).

“The small group of students who populate school counselors’ and school nurses’ offices often befriend one another, creating their own small social unit… Such a coping method defines the hikikomori phenomenon, and one could argue that such spaces of withdrawal exist in other corners of Japanese society, beyond the home and school. One wonders what other unnamed havens exist in Japanese society: internet cafes, where it is reported that disenfranchised youths increasingly spend the night, homeless encampments or even locations outside of Japan, where Japanese youths increasingly seek escapes that become long-term” (564).