Hikikomori -

[Masta]

I fell into the Hikikomori rabbit hole on YouTube, and I am trying to understand these people.

For folks who don’t know what a Hikikomori is, it’s a term Japanese people use to classify their shut-in populations. They are usually young adult men in their 20s. They stay in their room day and night sometimes never leaving to even use the bathroom.

Spoiler

If I unrelate these people to me and my personal experiences then they have serious social anxiety and depression that needs treatment.

Now to relate and my questions:

(1) Why doesn’t the parents grow a pair and force their children to do things? I feel as though that is difference between America’s shut ins and Japans, the parents.

Side note: Hikomaris play or spend many hours on the internet, so the parents would really only have to shut it off in order for them to leave their room.

(2) Do they have severe mental illness or is it an excuse not to work?

(3) Ive heard in school japan is a highly competitive place where your worth was in your academics and failure at that tend to lead to hikimoris and suicide, but not sure.

(4) Although I don’t see it as mainstream here in the US, there is an increase in shut ins here. I’m not exactly sure what to predict for their future? Not joking at all, suicide, but if they intend to stay, then I don’t know.

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

I find hikkis kind of relatable in some senses and alien in others.

1. I actually don't know. I'm not overly familiar with what Japanese family dynamics are like.
2. Por que no los dos? As for illnesses, take your pick. Autism spectrum? Avoidant personality disorder? We could go down the list here. It's not uncommon for people with disorders that have depressive aspects to self-isolate.
3. I have heard that as well. I've also heard that Japan has literal suicide forests where such students or would-be students go to do the deed.
4. While there's some degree of difference between Japan's culture and the US' culture I don't think the statement "Japan is our future" is totally inaccurate, as things stand currently.

 

[Just A Butt]

I'm calling in @Hikikomori-Yume

This is your wheelhouse, bro. It's time to shine.

EDIT: He can't come out to play. Mods banned him from Deep Thoughts.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

Gonna pull in @Cedric_Eff for his opinion and other things about this topic. We probably have a Western perspective on it, but now we need the other perspective.

 

[wylfım]

High social pressure to succeed academically to the point where all other aspects of life shrivel away and die leads to people who are absolutely socially inept and incapable of leaving their room. Shocker.
The US is going that way culturally, though I tend to favor more Camille Paglia's argument that its because of the high drinking age, car insurance, college, and other aspects of extended childhood keeping young people from actually interacting with and learning from adults on how to socialize.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

Gonna pull in @Cedric_Eff for his opinion and other things about this topic. We probably have a Western perspective on it, but now we need the other perspective.

Hikkikomori’s are often looked somewhat down upon by regular people, often looking at them weirdly. Many people I know tend to look at them as filthy anime nerds who barely leave their homes. But there are some who look at hikkikomoris as having some sort of mental disorder preventing them from leaving their house.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

It's literally this in human form:

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

It's literally this in human form:

It does look like it's following that pattern, yes. There are still questions about how well an experiment using rodents translates to human behavior, but only a fool completely discounts what Calhoun etc. found there.

If you want to get really morbid we're not just seeing Beautiful Ones in human populations. We're seeing females ratcheting up aggressive and overdominant behavior and even veering into filicide/infanticide. We're ticking off a lot of fucking boxes.

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

I'm not Japanese in any way, so everything I say is based on trends I've heard and observed on the internet about Japanese society and seen a couple of people who went to Japan and supposedly studied Japanese culture to some degree to properly fit in as non-Japanese native people, usually Americans and some weeb-ish friends who are trying to understand Japanese culture so they can go to Japan. So this is very loose "facts" so to speak, so don't take this 100% as fact and more a consistent trend I've noticed here or there to try and answer these questions. In short, I'm talking pretty much out of my ass.

1 and 3: Japan's culture is pretty workaholic from what I've observed, you can't even leave your job socially speaking unless your boss is ready to leave in some workplaces, if you try you get death glares from basically everyone and you're not being enough of a team player, overtime pay be damned. I remember hearing a story where if you're about to hit overtime, you basically clock out and go right back to work until you can leave. This naturally means you need to prepare for that culture in school and getting into a good college is a pretty life deciding thing when your life as an adult is to work for your company to the best of your ability. I'd imagine hikkikomori's failed at this sort of culture somewhere along the line or just gave up before failing entirely because they couldn't handle the pressure so they have locked themselves typically into anime, manga, or video games to escape the fact they're more or less deemed a failure by basically everyone.

2: If you remember Logan Paul's trip to Tokyo beyond the controversial suicide forest bit, you remember every native just death glaring at him at best and not doing anything as he made a huge ass out of himself, stood in front of traffic that didn't just try to hit him, or put fish on people's taxis while no one really seemed to care? That is from what I understand is because Japan typically doesn't like making a fuss and would rather socially shove you out of their lives instead of telling you to fuck off like you'd expect from say America at some point. So the parents just likely are too unable to do anything with their failure of a child in their minds and something about Japanese family dynamics doesn't allow them to kick them out.

4: As much as I like anime and Japanese media in general, I'm pretty convinced that it is designed with this culture in mind as a form of escapism which means it still becomes escapism when you bring it to America. I mean if you're a man/woman in Japan who works constantly, busting your ass, or a teenager who is struggling through school having anime, waifus/husbandos, and all that typical weeb shit, in general, take you away from your stressful life or try to make you live through all this fantastical nonsense anime has. Power of friendship and all that happy shit in shounen anime like Naruto makes more sense when you feel like you're trapped in a depressing loop in your life which might be what the creators were thinking when they made the manga, light novel, anime, whatever they likely wanted to make people think more optimistically. Bring that escapism over to the US and soon people get stuck in that escapism to get away from whatever problems they have, or they're addicted to video games like WoW or something.

tl;dr Japan is tough and some people aren't capable of handling it and would rather get lost to anime, video games, or the internet and the parents are possibly just incapable of telling the child to suck it up. They're probably just overly depressed fucks who've just given up and would rather die in their room alone then try to fix themselves. Though I'm just a dumb American so I could be wrong on some of the finer details or literally everything. So I encourage people to correct me.

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

Interesting topic.

One thing to mention also is that by virtue of having a title for this group of people at all, there are probably social forces that encourage this kind of lifestyle. Sure they're shut-ins, but they're probably also deeply connected to social networks of others just like them, which feed into and cultivate their behaviors.

 

[Marco Fucko]

1. There's a lot of parents both in Japan and the west that are extremely non-confrontational and even hands off with their children. They might complain to you but would never do anything as drastic as throwing you out, so the grown up kids remain in the household nonproductive.
2. Hard to say whether the chicken or the egg came first. I can tell you from personal experience when I've been unemployed in the past my depression has gotten worse and fed into itself.
3. That's correct. Asian society in general is so pressuring that they have pretty considerable suicide rates. South Korea was #10 and Japan was #30, and all the surrounding countries were African and Eastern European according to WHO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...#List_by_the_World_Health_Organization_(2016)
4. I have a friend who's right on the edge and has been working his way out of it. The broad attitude is taking a look at all the negative elements of society and saying "no thanks". You can see this in internet subcultures, people have been scrambling to radical politics and 'odd' social viewpoints. The Manosphere, all the tumblrites who fancy themselves revolutionaries, the alt-right, et cetera. All of these groups exist because there is an element of society that has either fucked them personally or they have seen the results of that fucking and don't want to engage (check out the thread on 'Why millenials are having less sex and getting married later' to see a good collection of people avoiding the 'traditional' marriage path due to things like financial burden or mental/emotional scarring)

I guess in short Hikkis can be explained as people who have been damaged or do not want to be damaged avoiding pain. If you don't have to work and your parents can take care of you, or you can scam social security or whatever, then why bother? A lot of elements of life definitely do lead to pain, and they don't want that.

 

[Clop]

Turning into a shut-in is a lot like smoking. You started because shit was tough, you needed something good to balance out the overwhelming amount of bad. You kept doing it because it made you feel much better. When you try to stop, your brain panics because it's not getting the good shit and sees you heading back to the grinder and tells you shit like "It doesn't matter, nothing will change, let's just go back to enjoying ourselves" and your brain's likely smart enough to know what to say to convince you that yeah it's so much nicer here.

You'll tell yourself daily that you cannot succeed and nobody will ever love you if you try to kill a bad habit just so that you'll stick to the bad habit. Every instance of people saying your behavior is disgusting just reinforces the thought that you're shit and you shouldn't stop trying to make yourself feel better with destructive behavior. You need outsiders to tell you that shit's not true, but those people are in short supply and countries like Japan commonly only shame the loner and are only now starting to turn around and actually trying to help the hikky (because when birth rates are plummeting suddenly they give a shit about someone being alone and miserable because people suck like that - they'll do the bare minimum to help you once they get something out of it.)

Nobody gives a shit about you until you give them a reason to, and every day that process is made so much harder than it needs to be. Risks to socializing increase every day and the rewards keep diminishing. You make your best friends during your teens and if you lose them as an adult, you're fucked. You'll never establish a new circle, you're just off the map for good, drifting between random people and co-workers never feeling really like you belong anywhere, so back into your closet you go, just to feel something.

 

[mr.moon1488]

I don't know enough about modern Japanese culture to speculate on why it's happening there, but here I think it's largely because everyone is kind of anti-social anyway. Old fuckers seem like about the only people who don't freak out if you try to make a bit of small talk with someone.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

I don't know enough about modern Japanese culture to speculate on why it's happening there, but here I think it's largely because everyone is kind of anti-social anyway. Old fuckers seem like about the only people who don't freak out if you try to make a bit of small talk with someone.

That would explain a lot on why older people and people who socialize end up better in Japan because they can actually socialize. I’ve seen a lot of old geezers in their 50’s and even 60’s who’d date Filipinas.

 

[FA 855]

1. Some parents do not understand their own children, or are just as socially awkward as their children, some parents lack any authority or emotional connection to their children and vice versa to make change.
2. Severe mental illness, usually disillusionment and retreatism from society after multiple rejections by it. The only way to 'win the game' is not to play.
3. Yes, that is accurate, it also happens in China a lot, I know a guy from China irl who was a party member and he tells me a lot of stories about it, basically the government sees them as a burden of sorts, since young unemployed and connectionless (no wife) men are likely to become unproductive members of society prone to crime, video games offers them escapism which is better than crime so the government turns a blind eye to it and basically hopes they don't reproduce.
4. Suicide, political radicalisation, crime, no children.

Something else, not everyone wants to socialise, some people are natural social hermits and we should let them live their life in a hopefully productive way, in a society of social media and greater interconnectedness than ever before, we are naturally biased towards a extroverted society, and we expect our members to be as such, some people are happy just having a family to go home to, and some don't want social media hanging over them.

 

[Lemmingwise]

I think that in general, people really don't understand technology addiction in the way that we understand opium addiction.

That's not to say that all japneets or hikikomori fall into this category.

I think at least half european/american coverage of hikikomori are a way to take potshots at "incels" and lay more of a foundation to politically attack the basement shitposters.

Bit of a different question, is incel the new "nerd", now that nerds are cool, quirky and wealthy?

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Bit of a different question, is incel the new "nerd", now that nerds are cool, quirky and wealthy?

Don't think so. I mean, it gets thrown around similarly but "nerd" never had the implied threat-narrative attached to it that "incel" does (probably because I don't remember nerds running people down in a rental van or anything similarly exceptional)

 

[Masta]

Bit of a different question, is incel the new "nerd", now that nerds are cool, quirky and wealthy?

Call me exptional but I see incels a step below nerds in the social hierarchy.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Call me exptional but I see incels a step below nerds in the social hierarchy.

Well that's what I was asking... with the elevation of nerds, was there a vacuum at the bottom tier social category?

 

[FA 855]

I think that in general, people really don't understand technology addiction in the way that we understand opium addiction.

That's not to say that all japneets or hikikomori fall into this category.

I think at least half european/american coverage of hikikomori are a way to take potshots at "incels" and lay more of a foundation to politically attack the basement shitposters.

Bit of a different question, is incel the new "nerd", now that nerds are cool, quirky and wealthy?

There isn't a single word replacement for nerd I can think of, Incel has too many meanings (Socially awkward, but that's not enough to be a nerd!) Incel is just a new and strangely self depreciating term for men who have always existed throughout history, we just used to call it the underclass, or loners, or ASPD's or nerds. So is Incel a spiritual successor of sorts? Yes, but not like a direct lineage imo.
Also I'd say nerds are a constructive force whereas incels are destructive.
Their is a natural crossover but Incels are really and always will be a separate entity to nerds.