Can Someone Else Write This Post, Please?

There is a blog post that probably should be written about a micro-abomination committed by the Asia Society against the reputation of this blessed land.

You have to start with this bit of text on the Asia Society's blog (Link) by Shreeya Sinha. Her bio is displayed to the right of the text.

The text tries to justify the Asia Society awarding a grant to videographer Okahara Kosuke, who has produced a documentary following the lives of six women who cut themselves. The text claims that self-injury is a major social problem among women in Japan, which unfortunately for Ms. Sinha, is untrue.  We know this is so because an article in the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences finds:

The present study clarified that 9.9% of junior and senior high-school students (male, 7.5%; female, 12.1%) reported a lifetime experience of deliberate self-injury at least once. These findings confirm our previous studies using a small sample, which reported that the prevalence of self-injury in male and female junior high-school students was 8.0% and 9.3%5 and that 14.3% of female senior high-school students reported self-cutting at least once. The present results also appear to be approximately consistent to the prevalence of self-injury in other countries: 11.2% of female high-school students in the UK, 12%of female university students in the USA, 13.9% of Canadian adolescents, although only Turkish high-school students had a higher prevalence of self-injury (21.4%).

A hat tip has to be given to Mark McDonald, a writer from The New York Times Rendezvous blogs, whose post on the Asia Society's display of Okahara's work links to the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences article, even though the findings therein undermine the assertion that Japanese young women engage in self-injury at rates that are somehow aberrant.

Getting back to the text by Ms. Sinha, she makes a real go of proving the unprovable by offering a citation (Link).  Unfortunately for Ms. Sinha (I repeat myself) the citation is a secondhand report from a self-published sex memoir of a Jamaican-American former English teacher entitled -- and here would be an excellent place to toss in an "and I am not making this up" -- Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Of Exile and Excess in Japan. That the citation misspells the name of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and offers no clue as to where one can find the study cited is hardly noticeable in a paragraph where the first sentence has the former teacher claiming to have had sexual relations with 40 women in his first three years in Japan and 20 more after his retirement from playing the field (his italics, not yours or mine).

Having navigated through this jaw-dropping passage, you might want to work in the Abe Shinzo quote the Society is so proud to display on its website:

"The Asia Society has been playing an important role in deepening ties and understanding among the peoples of Asia-Pacific and the United States. I truly expect the Asia Society will enhance this role for furthering the region's stability and prosperity."

Those with some stamina might want to double back to work on the second half of the McDonald Rendezvous post, where he visits with the hikikomori phenomenon, this in order to rekindle the debate on whether or not the hikikomori exist as a statistical or clinical entity.

So, whoever you are, please write this post -- because, frankly typing, I just cannot bring myself to do it.

Hikikomori Update - Some Light Upon the Subject

In an attempt to attach some numbers to the nebulous concept of hikikomori, the unknown numbers of persons in between the ages of 14 and 40 that consider themselves cut off from the rest of the world, incapable of leaving their rooms or their homes and in contact with only with members of their immediate family, the Cabinet Office tried conducting person-to-person interviews with 5000 citizens 15-to-39 years of age to ask them about their life habits. The interviewers were able to conduct full interviews with 3287 respondents, a 65.7% response rate.

Of the respondents, 1.79% classified themselves to be full-blown hikikomori, a percentage if compare the national population of the age cohorts in question would indicated a national population of 696,000 hikikomori. In addition to those who categorized themselves as hikikomori, some 3.99% of respondents, agreed with expressions such as "There are times I too want to lock myself away" -- making them seeming candidates for a transition to hikikomori status.

However, when one drills down into the numbers, the actual population of the classic hikikomori, of persons locked inside their rooms, being brought meals and leaving only to visit the bathroom, seems insignificantly small.

Total respondents agreeing with the following:

"I hardly ever leave my room" 0.12%
"I do not leave the house" 0.09"
"I will make occasional trips as far as local convenience store" 0.4%

Adding all these up to a more more narrow definition in line with the popular image of the hikikomori, the government finds a less staggering 236,000 hikikomori, only a tiny fraction of whom are living truly hermetic lives. It is only by adding the above to the 1.19% of the respondents who say, "I go out whenever I need something that helps me pursue my hobbies" that one reaches the 1.79% fraction.

As to why the 1.79% respondents fell into their hermetic lifestyles, 23.7% said, "I got sick" or "I just couldn't fit in at work;" 20.3% said, "My work search did not go well;" 11.9% said, "I stopped attending (elementary, junior high, high) school;" and 6.8% said, "I did not fit in at college."

In the breakdown in the sexes of those classifying themselves as hikikomori, men outnumbered women 2-to-1 (66.1% to 33.9%). As to the age cohorts, 33.9% of the self-identified hikikomori were in their teens, 38.9% in their twenties and 23.7% in their thirties.

Interestingly for those who would seek to reduce the number of hikikomori were the percentages of persons who seemed trapped by embarrassment more than anything else, in need of perhaps nothing more that a little push to get themselves going again. Over 7 out of 10 hikikomori (71.2%) felt sorry for about what they were doing to their families. 50.8 % felt afraid of what others might think of them.

I may be overly optimistic, but it sound like that with a little counseling, perhaps some medication over the short term and a supportive local environment -- together with a temporary expansion of a worker training and job search programs -- the hikikomori social phenomenon can be reduced to a tiny number of truly mentally ill individuals.

Then again, believers in the hikikomori crisis would argue for a vast undercount, saying, "Why would on Earth would hikikomori answer the questions of government survey takers?"

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Sources: Jiji Press and Kyodo reports of the findings. Actual Cabinet Office report is not yet available online.