News & Reviews
A Nation in Retreat
..."Shutting Out the Sun" puts a human face on a nation's plight and provides an intriguing point of entry into a consideration of Japan's crisis of confidence.
...The core of "Shutting Out the Sun" is a lively analysis of the crisis. Japan's rigidities systematically marginalize the creative types (many hikikomori among them) whose innovative thinking might reverse the country's slide into isolation. Without visionaries, Japan remains frozen in an "Iron Triangle" of interconnected business, bureaucracy and politics -- a configuration that powered Japan's postwar reconstruction but stifles the initiative that might lead Japan forward. As one American economist points out, Japan has "gradually shifted from promoting winners to protecting losers."
Having leaped from feudalism to futurism in a single century, Zielenziger continues, Japan skipped its own Enlightenment, importing technology without the philosophy that nurtured such advances. Western-style individualism never penetrated the clannish interdependence of Japanese society and, as the pace of growth falters, individuals find themselves with little to fall back on...
Society on the Edge Of a Nervous Breakdown
The Japanese language has its fair share of colorful -- and revealing -- words. Hikikomori: a person so alienated from society that he literally never leaves his home. Futoko: a young person who refuses to go to school. Parasaito: a "parasite single" or young working adult, usually a woman, who prefers to live at home with her parents rather than marry or start an independent household.
Such personalities play a prominent role in Michael Zielenziger's "Shutting Out the Sun," a book that delves beneath Japan's glossy surface and uncovers a dreary world of hermits, suicides and dysfunctional families.
Retreating Youth Become Japan's 'Lost Generation'
Many young people in Japan have become hermits — retreating into worlds that consist of little more than their rooms. And that's difficult for families. Michele Norris of National Public Radio talks with Michael Zielenziger, author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation.
Zielenziger profiles a caste of Japanese youth called hikikomori, mostly young men who lock themselves away in their bedrooms, fearful of society's expectations. He also talks about Japan's aging working class and the tendency of young women to shun motherhood.
Listen to the interview from this review »
Isolation nation — Japan Struggles To Understand A Dysfunctional Generation
Thirty-four-year-old Kenji (not his real name) has not set foot outside his mother's apartment in Tokyo for most of the last 20 years. He reads newspapers and magazines, enjoys baseball on TV, and is terrified that if he goes out he might accidentally bump into a neighbor or deliveryman. A long time ago, he "fell off the conveyor belt" of society's expectations, and now he does not know how he could face the outside world.
Kenji is one of more than a million hiki-komori, recluses who have allowed themselves to become cut off from normal social contact rather than adjust to the demands for self-deprecation and sacrifice that put "group" ahead of "self" in Japan.
Michael Zielenziger: Contemporary Japanese Society
KQED Radio Forum discusses the causes and consequences of the social, political and economic malaise facing contemporary Japanese society, with journalist Michael Zielenziger.
Host: Michael Krasny
Guests: Michael Zielenziger, visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies, former Tokyo bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, and former Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. His book is "Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation"
'Sun' shines a light on Japan's struggles
Karoshi: death from overwork
Kireru: to experience a sudden fit of violent rage.
Tatemae: false face; an adopted demeanor or attitude that hides true feeling.
— Asia scholar and former Tokyo journalist Michael Zielenziger returns often to this hit parade in "Shutting Out the Sun," his grim, unsparing portrait of contemporary Japan.
Sunset in the Far East
Consistently engaging and written with a good reporter's eye for colorful detail, "Shutting Out the Sun" is both fascinating and informative. ...Written in clear prose, full of surprising insights and fresh discoveries, Zielenziger's new book is a keenly observed catalog of Japanese character and social organization.
A *star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.
An incisive, well-written account of Japan's recent social and economic malaise, including a frightening portrait of the nation's hikikomori: disaffected youths who lock themselves in their rooms for months or years at a time as a way of coping with life in a society that denies them self-expression.
Visiting scholar at Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Stuides, Zielenziger was puzzled by Japan's seeming inability to recover from its economic slump when he began his seven-year stint as Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder in 1996. Then he met some of the more than one million socially withdrawn hikikomori. Mainly men, often bright and creative, they include Kenji, 34, who reads, watches TV, daydreams and rarely leaves his room in his mother's tiny apartment; and anxious, angry Jun, 28, who barricades himself from his parents, sleeps late into the afternoon and bikes frantically through downtown streets after dark. Unlike western youths who still live at home or act antisocially, Japan's disenchanted suffer from a "social disorder" unique to a nation in spiritual crisis, declares the author. Drawing on interviews with young people, parents and psychiatrists, Zielenziger finds in these frustrated young people a way of understanding a change-resistant nation in which "obedience and group harmony," though they served Japan well in the past, are now stifling the creativity and innovation needed to regain a place in the complex global economy. He goes on to describe other behaviors, from increases in binge-drinking and group suicides to the refusal of many young women to marry and have children, that he says also reflect the nation's inability to imagine a future. "Japanese today do not know who they are," one writer tells Zielenziger. "If asked to identify themselves, they can only give a job title or company name." The country would rather withdraw than transform itself, he concludes.
Nuanced reporting on a tradition-bound society struggling to find its way in the 21st century.
Publishers Weekly — July 17, 2006
After its 1990 economic crisis, Japan entered a period of stagnation and has yet to recover. Although at first limited to finances, this depression slowly spread to the country's political system as well as its national consciousness. One extreme example of the problem is the more than one million young men who have given up on school or employment, spending their days in their cramped apartments. In this wellresearched and well-organized book, journalist and scholar Zielenziger reveals how these men ("hikikomori") are both a symptom of and a metaphor for Japan's ennui. With compassion and vigor, he presents close-up portraits of the hikikomori, while grounding their stories in the political, economic and historic realities facing Japan today. Zielenziger also suggests that women who avoid marriage and children, men who drink too much and both men and women fetishizing brand names are additional signs of the mass confusion and discontent. Seven years as a Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Rider newspapers has given Zielenziger the necessary access to this closed culture, though his expose´ is bound to be controversial. His inclusion of both small details and the big picture makes the book as intimate as it is revealing. (Sept.)
