Hikikomori and Others
I wasn't really planning on talking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I've watched the news in Japan, of course, and followed the story a little online, read Matt Good's take on it, got into a big discussion with Texas on the nature of Terrorism. (capitals added) But I wasn't planning on mentioning it here until I came across this article by Michael Zielenziger about Cho Seung-Hui.
Clearly, some of the evidence suggest that Cho was both enraged and very much socially isolated.We do know that some hikikomori are able to conduct themselves, from time-to-time, in the ‘real world’ while also retreating to their rooms…going to classes, or to work, then shutting themselves off. That is to say, they can have days and weeks of “normal’ behavior…and then have to seclude themselves. We also know that some social isolates grow so frustrated as to become very angry and frustrated as Cho was.
Hikikomori is a Japanese word. It refers to a pheonomenon, and the people afflicted with it, wherein a young adult, usually a student, locks themselves in their room away from stress, social, familial, and school-related. They don't go to school, or see friends. Their parents feed them, and they only leave their room for the bathroom. Sometimes it's not quite that bad. Sometimes I imagine it's worse.
It's a problem that in Japan is taken fairly serious, the Ministry of Education has a definition for it, but more and more it's being suggested that hikikomori is hardly a Japanese phenomena. Zielenziger continues.
Yet in many ways, the high-stress, high-pressure environment that Korean Confucian culture imposes on its youth…mirrors the stress Japanese young adults endure…and it is not unreasonable to suggest a young Korean, detached from his childhood environment, would retreat…or suffer some sort of traumatic incident after coming to the US.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we're really not all that different.
posted by Matt @ 3:37 PM
5 Comments:
bah, it's all about politics. no politicians really care about the value of human beings.
it's not the first time that people mourn for something that has lost less people compared to another event that is happening at the same time that has costed even more people.
during the Nazi Germany's jew extermination, the Japanese have slaughtered half the city's population in Nan Jing, they were all innocents, and are killed like animals, and then there was this bio war weapon research group 731 that used live humun in Nan Jing to test their plague, or Yersinia Pestis strain to make effective plague bombs that were planned to drop in China that would cause another plague epidemic. no one ever condemned them for the crime, only sympathized with the Japanese because they got 2 nukes on them. and all the Japanese that had lived in Vancouver during WW2 were later compensated because of unequal treatment during WW2, but none of the Chinese did. why? politics, Japan is a more powerful country in technological advancement and its strong relation to America, not so much for China until much later.
and everyone thinks the Japanese are peace-loving people, but if America haven't dropped the 2 nukes, they would have been guilty of creating another plague epidemic in Asia.
Armand, what are you talking about? People condemn the Rape of Nanjing all the time. It's called the freaking Rape of Nanjing.
I just dont recall any presidents or country leaders openly say that they sympathise with the Chinese government about the rape of Nanjing and condemn the Japanese's war crimes for that. and I have certainly never heard of any day named for remembering it.
... or maybe it's just the communist country thing...
I'm glad that you remember it though.
i should apologize for what i said earlier, due to my lack of political sources, I don't think I should say that no one has ever pointed out about the rape of nanjing, my point was that no national leaders publically anounce sympathies and apologies unless it benefits their own nation, or their own political interest. politicians' words don't really reflect what's the real suffering of this world, and that even though people like you do realize the devastation in the middle east is far greater, and stress and pressure in teenagers of Asian countries are also quite high, it will never come to their attention. so I just found it amusing that people still care about what they say the most (in Matt Good's article that is).
p.s. I believe the Chinese students suffer just as much stress as the Koreans and Americans, but instead of socially, it's academically. but i have never heard of any students in china suicide... or maybe that the communist news never cared to say anything about it.
>> no national leaders publically anounce sympathies and apologies unless it benefits their own nation, or their own political interest. politicians' words don't really reflect what's the real suffering of this world
That I would be happy to agree with in general. Though Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, did recently apologize again for the whole Comfort Women thing. Sometimes the bias works the other way. The Japanese government has apologized a lot over the Comfort Women thing (in between bouts of revionism, albeit) but nobody ever seems to remember them doing it, or count is as sincere. The same thing has happened with apologies for all of World War II. I don't know anything specifically about the Rape of Nanjing though.
Anyway, my point is that these issues are complicated, and to say that Japan has gotten a free ticket out is unfair. I absolutely agree that Japanese politicians are sometimes a little crazy about this stuff though.
Post a Comment
<< Home