April 27, 2006

引き篭り (hikikomori) is often described as a recent phenomenon which is seen mainly in Japan - but how does it compare to the time-honoured tradition of hermits? Is it unnatural to pursue solitude?

More studies outside of Japan have been conducted. If you have the patience to wait for either of these sites to download you can read about the study of it by Danish students, or watch this documentary. It appears too that soon it won't be just a "Japan thing". Already the term is spreading in a pop-phrase way on the web at least, here on a site about kinematics, being used in blog names, and several usernames. In fact we even have our own. And while the 2004 film Hikikomori: Tokyo Plastic seems to have a ludicrous plot - cases of violence by Hikikomori are real.

  • Yeah, I've read about these before (japan = fascinating to me). If I had a kid who wanted to do this, I'd physically throw them out. Bloody spongers! Imagine the jism and noodle stench of their rooms!
  • Well it is common here for kids to live with their parents until they get married. So a lot of this behaviour is tolerated. Also it hasn't been until quite recently that these parents have been able to get help and support from anyone.
  • Yeah - they have like 'girlfriends' to come round and re-socialise them, don't they. Tempt them out of their rooms with trips to the pictures etc. What a job!
  • Better to have pretend girlfriends than let it continue until they kidnap their own. Also although Hikikomori are predominantly male, there are of course girls as well. There have been several segments on television, in which they have found girls and then paid for plastic surgery for them, or to send them off to fat farms. It seems that the girls hide away if they believe themselves not to meet up to the perception of beauty in the media. (sorry I can't provide links to memories in my brain)
  • It doesn't sound quite like hermits, but it does remind me somewhat of Georges Perec's "A Man Asleep". The character there wouldn't qualify as a hikikomori (he lives alone and does go out into the streets) but there's a similar withdrawal from social contact and normal activity.
  • Our hikikomori was a bright presence, and could make a fine poet if she chose to -- hope she's doing well, wherever she is, she's certainly one I miss. She seemed to me the antithesis of the descriptions given in the links. Always think folk -- regardless of age -- need to perceive themselves both as being valuable to other folk, and at the same time, have some measure of control or choice over their own lives in order to feel reasonably happy with their existence. Not a lot of that going around these days, it seems.
  • When you get dumped by your rental sister, I think you can fairly claim to have reached some kind of nadir of human existence.
  • > It doesn't sound quite like hermits i was thinking the same thing. it seems to me that the people described are withdrawing from social contact without effectively withdrawing from society. they still depend on certain social supports (shelter and food from their parents, for example) while failing to engage with other people.
  • I've always love Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs." Ah! To be all alone in a little cell with nobody near me; beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to death. Singing the passing hours to cloudy Heaven; Feeding upon dry bread and water from the cold spring. That will be an end to evil when I am alone in a lovely little corner among tombs far from the houses of the great. Ah! To be all alone in a little cell, to be alone, all alone: Alone I came into the world alone I shall go from it.
  • It is intereting how wealthy societies create their own mental illnesses. Only in a wealthy society can so many people hide in a room in their parents' house, refuse to eat to an unhealthy degree, or be so depressed that they can't get out of bed.
  • Oh, I dunno. Some of the descriptions of shamans in other cultures -- well, some of them stayed in their igloos/typees/huts all day for months on end. And then they would come out and might do antisocial things. Or not. But being a shaman -- this was a niche, a place/position in a culture that valued these folk. Don't think we have anything quite comparable for the hikikomori types. But wot do I know? /seriously introverted
  • MonkeyFilter:Imagine the jism and noodle stench of their rooms Gads, Kit!
  • When 20% of the people in the age group are doing this, I think it ceases to be a mental illness and is more a social pathology. Something is wrong when someone is so alienated that they'ld rather sit in a cell then be out among people, and it may not be with the person.
  • in a crowd or alone same thing, same thing just try to escape the cage of the self
  • TUM: That's absolutely GREAT!
  • I dunno, bees. I wouldn't say shamans are hermits or recluses by any stretch of the imagination. In Shamans, Sorcerors, and Saints Brian Hayden describes a shaman thusly: a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains ecstasy in order to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf of his group members. It's one of the better definitions I've run across in my studies. Though a shaman may spend months in seclusion it may just be the method used for entering a ecstatic state of consciousness. Deprevation is a common method used for entering these states and deprevation of social contact would probably help. The withdrawl isn't from a loss of interest in society or any sort of anti-social behavior - it's essentially the opposite. But I pedagress. I'd say this sort of behavior grows out of some evolutionary mechanism in genetic memory for the reason that it appears to be so widespread. We historically and prehistorically strove hard to provide for ourselves and survive, therefore ignoring a sort of comfort threshold by not having a chance to pay attention to it. When the time comes that the comfort threshold is reached through our wonderful constructions of society and the need to strive to survive is over the individual's previously unnecessary genetic memory takes over and creates this sort of behavior. This sort of middle-class society is a relatively recent change throughout the world. Or not.
  • Think Brian Wilson gave expression most memorably in recent times to the primal urge to go to one's room. Chimp, I recently finished reading Joan Halifax's Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives. Fascinating to read these shamans, in their own words, telling how they came to be what they are. Almost without exception, the narrators in this book went through a period of extreme isolation, usually in adolescence; some also suffered from protracted illness, before they entered into their full ability. Here's Lame Deer, a Sioux, describing his initiatory experience: "I was all alone on the hilltop. I sat alone in the vision pit, a hole dug into the hill, my arms hugging my knees as I watched old man Chest, the medicine man who had brought me there, Disappear far down in the valley....Now I was all by myself, left on the hilltop for four days and four nights without food or water until he came back for me." And from an Eskimo, Igjugarjuk: "When I was to be a shaman I chose suffering through the two things that are most dangerous to us humans, suffering through hunger, and suffering through cold. First I hungered five days and then was allowed to drink a mouthful of warm water; the old ones say that only if the water is warm will Pinga and Hila notice the novice and help him. Thereafter I went hungry another fifteen days, and again was given a mouthful of warm water. After that I hungered for ten days, and then could begin to eat...." And so on. Extreme isolation, often privation. Until the individual is reborn, so to speak, emerging this time as a shaman. Can't help but wonder whether this process is somehow being short-circuited in modern cultures, so the shaman never emerges from his/her trials, but remains weak, and incomplete.
  • there's some footage in a jane goodall documentary (fifi's boys, i think it was called) where freud, the then dominant chimp male, wanders off by himself to spend the evening gazing at the stars. freud is a bit of an oddity among chimps; he used to display by banging a stick on rocks while walking in a stream in order to keep his bigger (but younger, iirc) brother frodo in line. frodo has since taken over as alpha.
  • Frodo was a bit of a prick, but that's alpha for ya. bees, I think you'd have some very different results when you look into the shamans of Korea. Also, isolation is somewhat necesary for shamanic states of conciousness to reduce the background noise; in places where ecstatic states are brought about by discomfort rather than psychotropic substances, it is more difficult to enter the supernatural world. But what I wanted to note was that the difference here is that the shaman only sequesters him or herself as a means to help his or her people, and not to seclude him or herself from them for the virtue of that seclusion. Jeanne Achterberg writes on deprivation: 
    "Typically the shamans fast before doing difficult work. The fast may include dispensing with food, or with salt, or even with water...Most ceremonial work is done in darkness, or with the eyes covered to shut out ordinary reality. Visions are sought by staying isolated in deep caves or in the monotonous landscape of the tundra or desert."
    I admit there is the element of rebirth in such moments but it isn't certain or defining. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux, when he was nine and had his great vision he was sick, but tended to by his parents. John G. Neihardt transcribes: 
    "Now and then the voices would come back when I was out alone, like someone calling me, but what they wanted me to do I did not know. This did not happen very often, and when it did not happen, I forgot about it: for I was growing taller and was riding horses now and could shoot prarie chickens and rabbits with my bow. the boys of my people began very young to learn the ways of men, and no one taught us; we just learned by doing what we saw, and we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls."
    In this case it seems that Black Elk came into shamanism more as a rite of adulthood than a rebirth; a stage of growth. I like where you're going with the "suppressed shaman" theory. Michael Harner in an interview with Gary Doore had this to say about human potential: 
    "One of the things I have noticed is that people in general have shamanic abilities, whether they are concious of them or not. The basic forces of anger and love, for instance, have a tremendous influence in the world on many levels of reality of which we are ordinarily unaware. Thus, when one person gets angry at another it is not just an exchange of words and emotions; because from a spiritual point of view anger is terribly destructive, both for the person who is giving it as well as for the one recieving it."
    He concludes the interview with:
    "Respect is a key word in this regard because the experiences that come from shamanism tend to foster a great respect for the universe, based on a feeling of oneness with all forms of life. By getting into harmony one has much more power available to help others, because harmony with the universe is where the true power comes from. Then one is much more likely to lead a life that emphasizes love rather than hatred, and which promotes understanding and optimism. With this kind of work there is no end. And to my mind this is a beautiful thing, a very beautiful thing."
    So in this imagination we have these young hikkomori secluding themselves from society in order to love it more, however, they are failing in this task by refusing to respect the rules set by temporal anchors of their own parents paradigms. Still, it could gel nicely with some sort of evolutionary memory. The silent sons of shamans.