The Search for Meaning: Creative Responses to Depression
October 2007
Banner photo: Davis McCardle/Getty Images
Choosing a Life Apart
Across Japan, more than 1 million young adults, men and boys primarily, have chosen to withdraw completely from the society around them. These recluses hide in their homes for months or years at a time, refusing to leave the protective walls of their bedrooms. They seem as frightened as small children abandoned in a dark forest.
Some spend their days playing video games. A few surf the Internet. Many just pace, read books, or drink beer and shochu, a Japanese form of vodka. Others do nothing--for weeks at a time. Unable to work, attend school or interact with outsiders, they cannot latch onto the well-oiled conveyor belt that carries young boys from preschool through college, then deposits them directly into the workplace--a system that once made Japan seem so orderly and purposeful to outsiders.
As the old Japanese system which guaranteed jobs for life and middle-class prosperity for nearly all has broken down in the past decade, so too has the social fabric for many Japanese adolescents. These men are seeking meaning by choosing to separate themselves from a society they believe has lost its way.
These are men like Hiro, a gangly 19 year old whose long hair nearly obscures his face, who dropped out of junior high when he was 13 and lives at home uneasily with his bickering parents, seldom stepping outside. Hiro has no idea what he's going to do with himself as he emerges into adulthood.
Or consider 34-year-old Kenji, who almost never leaves his tiny room in his mother's modest apartment on Tokyo's western fringe. He is a pale, quiet child-man, his smile wan, his hair thinning. For most of the past 20 years, his daily rituals have seldom varied. He reads the newspapers each morning and watches Tokyo Giants baseball games on television every summer evening. He passes long afternoons with magazines and daydreams. Sometimes he speaks to his mother. Other days he sits silent, deep in thought. Anxious, trembling and alone, Kenji is scared--too scared and scarred to venture into the world beyond his front door.
Men like Kenji and Hiro--and 80 percent of them are men--are called hikikomori, which translates loosely as one who shuts himself away and becomes socially withdrawn. These men cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mentally handicapped. When psychiatrists evaluate these hikikomori using The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,or DSM IV, the standard guide used in the West to diagnose mental disorder, their symptoms cannot be attributed to any known psychiatric ailment. Instead, Japanese psychiatrists say that hikikomori is a social disorder, one only recently observed, which cannot be located within other cultures. They may shut themselves away, but these men--as I found during months of conversations with them and others just like them--are surprisingly intelligent, stimulating, open and responsive adults full of cogent ideas and fascinating insights into their society and themselves.
Within mainstream Japanese society, two views of these hikikomori have tended to compete for prominence. One views these young adults as "spoiled brats," men of privilege indulged by doting mothers. Advocates of this view prescribe a swift kick in the pants to get these men out of the house and into the workforce.
A second perspective is that these men are profoundly depressed, mentally disturbed or psychotic, of no practical use to Japanese society. In their view, hospitalization and drugs are called for.
Space to Be
But what if these young men are neither indulgent nor incapacitated, but perhaps see the world rather more clearly than many of the adults who surround them? These sensitive young men rightly fear a Japanese culture that will not indulge their needs to express their own individuality. They understand that a nation deeply wedded to the values of the industrial era, where discipline, order, conformity and hierarchy created power and wealth, no longer guarantees similar abundance in the Internet Age, where men and women in wealthy nations must live by their wits and their creativity.
What to do about these "maladjusted" youngsters? Some believe they should be placed into strict "work camps" where they are forced to socialize with others and trained for a skill, like carpentry or baking. But many of these institutions are coarse and cruel, insisting, as Japanese society often demands, that round pegs fit square holes.
However, the most innovative approaches are those that attack the problem by transforming the social spaces in which these young adults operate. One is a "free space," or alternative school, operated in the Tokyo suburbs by a former advertising executive. In this rambling old farmhouse, young people study the curriculum that interests them, not the subjects required by the Education Ministry, so that a teenager interested in math can study calculus intensively, without also having to study history or calligraphy. These young people choose the food they will have for lunch and cook their meals together; they clean house together, and they play volleyball and other sports. In this lively and relaxed environment they are given the freedom to explore on their own while being sheltered from the pressure to pass rigorous entrance examinations that often imprison their peers in cram schools and anxiety.
When I asked the proprietor of this private facility, Nobuyuki Minami, what he tries to teach his young charges, he distilled his school's lesson into two basic principles. "Choice and responsibility," he told me. "Choice and responsibility is what I want these kids to take away from here. If they can learn to make choices for themselves and take responsibility for those choices, what else can I teach them?"
What else, indeed? Giving young people a sense of their own potential, and then freeing them from social constraints to follow their aspirations, will create surprising new opportunities--for themselves and the society around them--to discover innovation and the tools for reinvention.
Michael Zielenziger, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation.
