hikikomori

sigh. another day at work. this is going to be one of those weeks when i can't concentrate on anything, get very little accomplished, and wonder why i have to work every day for the rest of my life, when it'd probably be more productive for me to just come in like 2 days a week.

there's another storm happening now, and the lights have buzzed and flickered a few times, but they haven't gone out yet. if they go out, we get to go home, but i don't think i have that kind of luck stored up. maybe i'll go out and somehow sabotage the power lines.

apropos of above, yesterday i was reading this article in the new york times online about this epidemic of japanese young men who decide to hole themselves up in their rooms indefinitely, for months or years. they're called hikikomori, which translates literally to withdrawal. [i know it means nothing, but it's interesting how the latin root for death managed to sneak its way in there, isn't it? i know, i'm so pretentious.] so thousands and thousands of kids are just living in their rooms, emerging only to get food from their family, or sneak out to a 24-hour convenience store for sustenance.

A leading psychiatrist claims that one million Japanese are hikikomori, which, if true, translates into roughly 1 percent of the population. Even other experts' more conservative estimates, ranging between 100,000 and 320,000 sufferers, are alarming, given how dire the consequences may be. As a hikikomori ages, the odds that he'll re-enter the world decline. Indeed, some experts predict that most hikikomori who are withdrawn for a year or more may never fully recover. That means that even if they emerge from their rooms, they either won't get a full-time job or won't be involved in a long-term relationship. And some will never leave home. In many cases, their parents are now approaching retirement, and once they die, the fate of the shut-ins - whose social and work skills, if they ever existed, will have atrophied - is an open question.

it's just super-weird, isn't it? completely rejecting society, but not killing yourself. and how did it spread? how did everyone decide to start doing this? if you never leave your room, how do you tell other people about what you're doing?

...only in the last decade and only in Japan has hikikomori become a social phenomenon. Like anorexia, which has been largely limited to Western cultures, hikikomori is a culturebound syndrome that thrives in one particular country during a particular moment in its history.

but somehow i dig the idea of deciding that you don't like the way society is run, and you don't like what's expected of you, the pattern that your life is supposed to fall into, but it's too hard to do anything else, so you just go in your room and stay there. it's the reversal of being sent to your room for misbehaving. you can only really reject society if you have someone to subsidize you, right? it takes serious funds to pack up and move somewhere really isolated, to buy your own piece of land, and then the government is still going to find you and make you pay taxes and register your dogs and put plates on your car and do all those kinds of things.

anyway. it's still raining, but the power hasn't gone out. i still haven't done any work. my wisdom teeth wounds are still endlessly oozing. three yellow electric company trucks with cherry-pickers just drove by. maybe they'll short something out for me.