The Story Behind Shutting Out the Sun
I moved to Japan in 1996 as a foreign correspondent, expecting to chronicle the rebirth of this modern industrial power. But as the years went by, and the robust recovery never appeared, I grew more mystified. Not simply by the lack of change. But also by the lack of protest or political dissent on the part of its hardworking, everyday citizens who saw how their system was now failing them. For more than a decade Japan's economy stopped growing, major banks failed, and the economy was trapped in a spiral of falling prices and deflation worse than America's own Great Recession. The Japanese seemed unhappy, yet seemed powerless to foment change. No Franklin Roosevelt emerged to offer hope to his people. And the more I explored the mysteries and the social architecture of this very unusual society I found some other pieces of the fabric that seemed difficult to explain away.
Here I was living in a country that was still so prosperous, where the gap between rich and poor was far narrower than in the United States, where fewer homeless and destitute line the streets than in New York or San Francisco, Yet I found that:
- more than one million young adults shut themselves in their rooms for years as a time. These adolescents and adults, known as "hikikomori", withdraw from societies for months or years at a time, not going to class, not working, not even leaving their homes, and often not even abandoning their rooms. These recluses become wholly dependent on their mothers to feed them.
- three times as many people die each year in suicides than in car accidents. Japan's male suicide rate in particular had exploded and become the highest in the wealthy, industrial world.
- Japanese women have systematically chosen not to marry and bear children. Today Japan has the lowest birthrate in the world. And beginning in 2005, Japan's population began to shrink in absolute terms, as more deaths than births were recorded. Within fifteen years, one in every nine Japanese will be over age 80.
- Half of all unmarried men 18 to 34 tell government census takers that they have no casual companionship, friendship and certainly no regular sexual relationship with a female. 40 percent of all women are also equally lonely.
After becoming accustomed to life in Japan, I began to sense the quiet dissolution taking place under the glassy surface of the water. Then, when I met like Hiro and Kenji, it all began to click. Hiro a 26 year old, had locked himself in his room for seven years after being ridiculed by peers in his junior high school. He described to me his life as a hikikomori. Kenji, 36 years-old, had been alone in his room for almost two decades before he agreed to meet with me. He was unwilling to come out, unable to work or go to school or even sneak off to a movie. These men rarely even talk to their mothers, who leave hot meals at the bedroom door.
These social isolates also account for much of the domestic violence in Japan, because frustrated, isolated men beat up their parents. These men are shut down and shut out of a Japanese society that demands a harsh and confining social order even as the new global architecture of commerce and media demands more individual autonomy, more self expression and ultimately more freedom for adults to shape their own destinies.
Shutting Out the Sun details my search to understand what makes these young men, and their nation, so "different." Through depictions of these isolated men and lonely women, and analysis of Japan's unique social architecture, it examines Japan's long and difficult period of "adjustment" to the global age. It's inability to rebound from economic failure. Its hostility to entrepreneurship and a smaller government. I also explore why South Korea, the nation closest to Japan culturally as well as geographically has been able to change so quickly after it faced economic calamity in the late 1990s while Japan finds itself facing social deadlock. In the end, this book explores the "values" that make Japan different and the "social architecture" that makes citizens in other nations quite literally "see" the world so differently than we do.
In turn, I think it helps us understand, in this age of Iraq, why it can be so difficult to implacably impose our values on others, and of the dangers that hubris can bring: how the differing social architecture of other societies makes its citizens see the world differently and how, in the end, culture really does matter.
