The Japanese Suffer High Cost for Living on a Short Leash

When three Japanese hostages released in Iraq last month returned home, they were greeted not with garlands of flowers, prayers of thanksgiving and applause from strangers for their manifest courage, but with stony stares and accusations of disobedience.

Their cruel reception shocked many Westerners. The two young aid workers and the freelance photographer were vilified for defying Japan’s mighty bureaucrats and venturing on their own into a chaotic landscape scarred by war. The government even demanded reimbursement for the flight home.

Now these former hostages are hiding in their own homes and making apologies to society for “causing trouble” -- after being held at knifepoint. Such behavior reflects a reality hidden behind the shoji screens of modern Japan. This is a society that doesn’t tolerate difference or dissent and punishes it when it appears.

In fact, more than 1 million young Japanese adults have chosen to lock themselves up in their own homes rather than endure the coercion that informs Japan’s collective society. Many would rather sit in their rooms reading, playing video games or drinking than expose themselves to ostracism for being “out of the ordinary.”

The syndrome these young adults suffer from, known in Japanese as hikikomori, is seldom discussed in polite society and only recently has been recognized as a disorder by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. These young adults do not suffer from a psychological disease, like schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Hikikomori is a social disorder that psychiatrists who have studied it believe exists only in Japan’s unyielding culture.

These psychiatrists agree that these young adults, 80% of them men, are prisoners of the rigidities that bind modern Japan. Conformity, fear of risk-taking and reprisals for dissent keep their insular nation outwardly placid and “trouble free” yet constrains its ability to adapt and adjust to a changing world. Like the returning hostages, these hikikomori often suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress after enduring harassment and hostility from co-workers, classmates and strangers.

For centuries, Japanese have been raised to follow Confucian doctrines of filial piety, loyalty and fealty to the group. The Japanese still reject the principles of universalism and individualism: that everyone should be treated the same even though each of us is different. Among Japanese, you are either part of the group or a total stranger.

A drive for material success motivates, but altruism and civil society remain drastically undernourished. Indeed, many Japanese find it difficult to understand why anyone would go to Iraq to help feed strangers; Japan’s growing ranks of homeless are usually fed by Christians of ethnic Korean descent, and charity, as Westerners define it, is virtually unknown.

In today’s Japan, being different is often dangerous. An individual more intelligent or creative than others is subject to bullying and cruel harassment from others in the group. As one hikikomori told me, “To survive in Japan’s economic society, I’d have to kill off my insides, my own original voice.”

In American society, young adults who seek unique and unusual ways to express their individualism and unleash their creative energies might be starting software companies. Westerners are raised to believe they should “stand on their own two feet,” take risks, lead others and think for themselves.

Japanese, by contrast, live in a society where as long as you don’t make a mistake, you win annual promotion. Taking a risk, however, can prove suicidal. (Japan’s suicide rate for adult males is among the world’s highest.)

In the simpler Cold War world, when strength in mass production inevitably led to national wealth, the West came to admire the perseverance, discipline and group ethic that informed Japan’s stirring rise into the first rank of industrial powers. A homogeneous society governed by seniority, reciprocal loyalty between salaryman and boss, and consensus-based management, as well as congenial, sometimes collusive links between businessman and bureaucrat, Japan seemed to have found the magic formula for economic growth -- one that eluded Western nations staggered by crime, turmoil in the workplace, class difference and civil disorder. Japanese didn’t sue each other or go on strike; they worked hard, produced fault-free cars and electronics and served as a bulwark against communist instability in Asia.

But 15 years after the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy,” the demise of the Soviet empire and the dawn of a “postindustrial” society distinguished by creativity and customization, the Japanese have not yet been able to rekindle their economic engine, and there is growing fear, in Japan and elsewhere, that China and South Korea are stealing its thunder.

Today, Japanese citizens increasingly realize that the same system that forges group consensus and represses dissent actively resists the sort of “creative destruction” a new century demands. Perhaps that’s why so many of the best and brightest are leaving.

Americans must wonder whether their last, best ally in Asia will inevitably turn inward rather than engage the outside world, or face up to its need for fundamental change. Someday that irrepressible human desire inside all of us for autonomy and self-expression -- and making trouble -- must be unleashed.

Michael Zielenziger, former Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.