2013-07-01, 16:05 | Link #3201 | ||
Banned
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Montreal, QC, Canada
Age: 40
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From the moment I read "unattractive", my answer would be: "Get yourselves a total workout in the gym and/or book appointments with estheticians who are paid for that, men. Then come back to give your opinion after you get laid." Quote:
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2013-07-01, 17:16 | Link #3202 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2008
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http://www.mgtowforums.com/forums/at...airy-tale-.jpg |
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2013-07-05, 12:53 | Link #3203 | |
AS Oji-kun
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
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Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
A lengthy BBC News report on the phenomenon including interviews with psychotherapists who treat it as a mental illness and the therapeutic methods they use. Quote:
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Last edited by SeijiSensei; 2013-07-05 at 13:07. |
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2013-07-05, 13:26 | Link #3204 | |
Moving in circles
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 49
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Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
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I highly recommend reading the full story. Even better, listen to the original radio documentary on which the text article is based. It's the last in a six-part series about mental health issues all around the world and yet another example of the BBC World Service at its best. For my part, two things stand out in particular. Firstly, the passage above about how Japanese families and youth found it hard to adapt to the socio-economic changes that destroyed the "conveyor belt" stability of their lives prior to the 1990s. I can empathise with that to a certain extent, as I experienced a similar sense of dislocation during the same period. Singapore didn't undergo the same problems as Japan at the time, but something definitely changed. The dot-com bubble happened, aong with the attendant upheavals wrought by the "information revolution". Up till then, it was the norm for the best and brightest students in Singapore to win prestigious civil service scholarships, attend the best universities in the world, and return to a fast-track career in public service. As civil service leaders, these highly intelligent and often idealistic youth would find ample opportunity to rub shoulders with the political elite — and to "change the world". But the increasing sophistication of the new economy opened up new opportunities in other careers that promised greater rewards. So, within a generation, priorities changed. Where once we had a cohort of youth who believed in a socialist vision, we now have young men and women who are more likely to think first about fattening their bank accounts. Looking back, I believe I was caught at the pivot point between two generations, two different worldviews. It was not a happy period for me. My second point is less personal and more speculative. The BBC documentary touched briefly about conditions observed elsewhere in world with similar symptoms as those of the hikikomori. This raises a nagging doubt that has bothered me for a while, especially whenever I see AnimeSuki members talk casually about being "hikikomori" themselves. I suspect that some of it may actually be copycat behaviour, not unusual among the impressionable young. That in itself may be another story altogether. I welcome your thoughts and comments. |
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2013-07-05, 14:10 | Link #3207 |
Banned
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I read the article and it had a lot of inaccuracies, I hope the documentary itself is better... but my first impression is that they are trying to make popular correlation and present these as causes for the situation... pushing under the carpet the real problems that are not limited to Japan.
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2013-07-05, 22:29 | Link #3208 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Montreal, QC, Canada
Age: 40
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Quote:
Just 16 million men in the prime of their lives over a population of 130 million, that's just damn too low and it looks even more worrying with the number of kids out there. It's one more reason to write up something new and fast about birthrate incentives to make up for that lost generation in the next one at the same time they invest money in mental health services (that also includes support for families) to get those hikikomori out of the house at all costs. Last edited by KiraYamatoFan; 2013-07-06 at 02:51. |
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2013-07-06, 02:33 | Link #3209 | |
Moving in circles
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 49
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That's a crazy coincidence. I suppose bright minds think alike.
Judging from the timestamps, SeijiSensei posted his message while I was in the midst of editing mine. In any case, I'll leave my post as it is, as I was hoping to extend the discussion beyond the hikikomori phenomenon, which most members here are, in any case, already familiar with. Quote:
For my part, my major quibble is with the tenuous attempt to describe the condition as a "mental illness". To the producers' credit, they did manage to get a Japanese specialist to clarify the point. In the documentary, the expert said it is not at all clear whether it's an "illness" that led to the withdrawal, or whether the withdrawal itself leads to an "illness". |
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2013-07-06, 05:04 | Link #3210 |
Banned
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@TinyRedLeaf: I will elaborate when I watch the documentary, the article only by itself is rather superficial for making my mind. As for the real problems, I was thinking about inaccessibility to education, exclusion to people of a certain background within corporations and the government, military-like practices in the workplace, social pressure to achieve pointless milestones in life that end up making it harder, and the almost complete marginalization of alternative lifestyles... most of these are not limited to Japan, but are prevalent to a greater or lesser extent in every country.
Some of the problems I see with the article are the direct link between ones inability to integrate in society with the hobbies that he/she has which themselves help him to retain some form of social life since society itself has already ostracized him. Also another very annoying point was the insinuation that hikkikikomori are more likely to become violent, while the few violent crimes that occur in Japan are from overworked and socially integrated members of their society. I have more issues with the article, but as I said it might have been just the presentation and the documentary itself won't be another superficial hate-fest about something that the mainstream just "does not get" and wants to destroy it. |
2013-07-06, 06:21 | Link #3211 |
AS Oji-kun
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
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Personally I thought the presentation was pretty balanced and sympathetic, but then I don't live in Japan. I did not think the violence aspect was overplayed; they mentioned that the occasional young man has been known to attack his parents, but I didn't see hikikomori portrayed as a vast dangerous underground tribe.
Also the article itself doesn't mention any hobbies that I see; anime and manga are mentioned once in a sidebar. Are you talking about online gaming as a method of maintaining a "social life?" Do you see that as preferable to the therapeutic methods being used to help these people learn how to interact with flesh-and-blood humans? I certainly don't. I think you are asking for the article to be a full-out assault on aspects of Japanese culture that you don't like. That's not what it is about, nor is it a likely subject for a journalistic article. The other sidebar about women was rather intriguing. There may be many more girls and women in this group than we usually imagine. Saito, the psychiatrist, put the figure at 20-30% but an "Internet survey" by the NHK put the figure closer to 50%. (I don't put any trust in Internet surveys myself.) A researcher at the University of Glasgow speculated that "female withdrawal into the home seems so natural to Japanese society that women hikikomori may remain unreported."
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2013-07-06, 11:36 | Link #3212 |
Banned
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About the sidebars, because I follow BBC online, they use the sidebars as bullet points or to provide context, and just throwing anime & manga there, along with sex crimes, while the article pretty much was irrelevant, and hardly verified this connection is a statement in itself. Add to that the western media lust to assault foreign to them cultures, and you can see why I am very apprehensive about what I am going to hear in the documentary itself.
These and having talked a little with a shut-in while in Japan, their depiction in popular media is generally very off target. I hope in this case they take their time and explain that hikkikomori are just an easy target for the society that creates them, and are irrelevant with otaku... oh! which is also oversimplified when defined. EDIT: As a comparison, this guy has a very accurate and encompassing description about what an otaku is in a couple of minute (1:15-2:55)... this is where the BBC documentary about hikkikomori failed, they have no clear idea what they are, and confuse a lot of things that they want them to be. Last edited by Malkuth; 2013-07-10 at 17:13. Reason: comparison |
2013-07-12, 01:18 | Link #3213 |
( ಠ_ಠ)
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep
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Although there ARE social, and economical background to rising number of NEETs, IMO it's nearly dismiss-able to the biggest reason: because they can get away with it. Because the parents neglect to throw them out of their house, and ALLOWS lazy scumbags to leech off them, they take advantage of it... I mean, why not?
I chat with these ilk every day, the Japanese NEETs, and know for a fact that majority of them don't really have an excuse for why they bum out. Of course, I'm talking about NEETs in general, and not just overall problem of shut-ins, which is often a mental illness case. I'm rather unsympathetic to lazy young Japanese in general.
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2013-07-25, 09:40 | Link #3214 |
NePoi!
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Ontario, Canada
Age: 43
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Apologies if there is a separate thread covering Japanese history, but a poster on another forum noted this BBC Radio 4 podcast looking at sakoku as was practiced during the Edo period.
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2013-09-02, 19:50 | Link #3216 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Rubber-Suit Monsters Fade. Tiny Tokyos Relax.:
"For decades, Japanese studios dazzled, terrified and tickled global audiences with monster movies and television shows featuring actors in rubber suits laying waste to scaled-down Tokyos, or dueling atop miniaturized Mt. Fujis. The genre, known here as “tokusatsu,” or “special filming,” helped take the Japanese film industry global by creating such fabled creatures as Godzilla and Mothra, pioneering the way for other fantasy genres like animé. But now, in an era when lifelike digital effects have made the use of small models and suited actors look quaint and kitschy, tokusatsu is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The last Godzilla movie shot in this style, the aptly named “Godzilla Final Wars,” was released almost a decade ago, after a half-century span during which the creature appeared in 28 films, sometimes every year." See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/wo...anted=all&_r=0 |
2013-09-02, 21:22 | Link #3218 | |
今宵の虎徹は血に飢えている
Join Date: Jan 2009
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Tags |
culture, discussion, japan, japanese culture |
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