A post-modern dilemma: the opposite of an angry discontented class of people ready to foment revolution, instead giving up and choosing to lie fallow.
On a societal level, perhaps it ends up being the more stable alternative. Individually, it saddens me to see a lost generation and of all the potential that could have been.
Yeah this doesn't work if your parents kick you out as soon as you turn 18. When you have to pay rent and feed yourself, you can't afford to stay shut.
One documentary on Japan after WWII illustrated this best. After the war there were tens of thousands of orphans running around in Japan. The girls were al sold up as sex slaves and the best looking ones sold as brides. The boys, however, were all simply KILLED.
They'd wander around in the ruins of buildings and every week there's be fewer of them. Who killed them and what happened to their remains is a complete mystery. They were simply killed because they weren't useful in a society that needed labor and couldn't afford to have more mouths to feed.
I believed Japan to be a civilized society but the above story has made me change my mind. If you go around killing children simply because they're not useful you don't really deserve to exist as a society.
No offense, but this all sounds extremely unlikely. Human beings simply don’t operate that way, even under extreme conditions. Assuming that source exists and is the way you recall it, I’m guessing it was some kind of propaganda.
It wasn't propaganda. It was a BBC documentary that was on 3 or so months ago.
Maybe someone from the UK can shed a light on this.
And the narration in the documentary almost matches my post completely. Except for the part last paragraph, of course.
This really shocked me and the more I pondered on it the more convinced I became that Japan is an inhumane society.
I know, it was a dreadful time after the war. But come on, killing children simply because they're not useful? That's not something any sane human being would do.
Yeah, such claims demand sources. For the most part, the orphans were caged. However I wouldn't be surprised if many were killed. The stigma for war orphans in Japan was pretty intense. There is no telling how many were killed outright since nobody cared to document it.
Ask HN: For any Japanese people here (or people that spent significant time in Japan), do you feel that there is a lot of culture in Japan that is widely accepted, but is actually really toxic?
Sometime back it turned out that Japan didn't actually have the number of centenarians as it claimed. Turned out that people died, and their relatives didn't report it so they could keep collecting government checks.[1]
I wonder if hikikomori is some similar societal level semi-fraud being perpetuated. This normal seeming young man has locked himself in his seemingly very clean room for 2 decades. I don't believe it.
Such people are real but they aren't "total shut ins", a lot of it has to do with bullying and anxiety and abuse.
That and our hunter gatherer past, many people simply aren't meant to be corporate slaves that most people are.
Industrial captialism where you own nothing and in a state of permanent indebtedness to rich mega corporations and the richest families on the planet. Not exactly a high quality life if you are are at the bottom of the class structure.
Have you lived in the west to compare it ? Its not any more rigid, but it is rigid in ways that have different society outcomes.
The west definitely has 'less' penalty for breaking the society norms. Maybe you get away with not having to be as strict with the societal requirements because you are gaijin ?
I tried to offer my perspective to some extent in my reply to taurath above (or below).
And as for me being a "gaijin"? That's not even relevant, because my observations are based not on how people interact with me, but rather how my Japanese coworkers tend to communicate with each other on the numerous (almost exclusively open plan) work floors I have been part of for many years.
Working conditions vary hugely from company to company. On a spectrum from "black companies" -as they're called here- to "modern companies" with strict enforcement of work/life balance in terms of office hours and (lack of) overtime. Also, in my experience there's often a lot of variance within the same office too. Usually between those who have learned to set their own boundaries and those who haven't.
If anything, conditions are often the _opposite_ of rigid. Overtime is far more strictly regulated in Japan than in the US, for example. As such, blatantly over-exerting employees is nowhere near as common here as people overseas seem to assume. Because that kind of thing can land a company in a lot of trouble.
It's usually rather the un-rigid aspects that lead to stressful working conditions, as far as I can judge. People here generally strongly value being considerate of those around them, especially in terms of not being a burden to others, and one way this manifests itself is by a drive to meet implicit expectations of coworkers -- real or imagined. Over-promising and over-committing is a common mistake anywhere, but its an even easier trap to fall into in a country like this where expectations aren't rigidly outlined at all.
> The extremely rigid gender roles expected by society are another.
Well, yes, I concede that there is (still) a far larger gender-based bias in societal expectations than in many Western countries. However, wouldn't you say that in most aspects women are the side that draw the shorter sticks here? And yet, about 3 in 4 hikikomori are boys/men, so I'm not sure what kind of conclusion you'd want to draw from that...
On a societal level, perhaps it ends up being the more stable alternative. Individually, it saddens me to see a lost generation and of all the potential that could have been.