Customer Reviews

Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (Vintage Departures)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

While reading Shutting Out the Sun, I found myself at times in admiration of Michael Zielenziger's insight and also perplexed by his conclusions. I've made many japanese friends and visited the country multiple times. While no expert, I can certainly say that my interest in the country and its culture, is beyond casual. I have my own theories (and first-hand experiences) with many of the concepts of the book. Mr. Zielenziger is foremost a newspaper man and his pavement-pounding, investigative journalism is deserving of five stars. However, his conclusions in the second half of the book bring the whole work down a peg and sound more like the "cocktail-party theorizing" that I imagine goes on amongst international correspondents.

The first 92 pages of the book are intense and revealing as Zielenziger explores the dark world of the hikikomori (young Japanese who withdraw from society, not leaving their rooms). He interviews the doctors, the parents, and even the hikikomori themselves. He ties their plight into the overall societal and economic problems of the country as a whole. He describes how certain problems and behavior are particular to Japanese society. He does this very throughly and convincingly. Then on page 93 Chapter 6: Careening Off Course Zielenziger, uh... careens off course! The chapter shoots off into a 30 page crash course on Japan's post-war economic history. Then later another chapter doing the same with South Korea. He runs through the history of Christianity in South Korea. He compares Japan to South Korea. He compares Japan to China. He compares Japan to America. With the exception of chapters like "The Cult of the Brand" and "Womb Strike" the second half of the book falls wildly short of the first.

Who cares if China is more open to foreign investment? The freedoms, annual income, and standard of living for an average Japanese are far better than that of Chinese citizens. He interviews two commercial, non-political, pop artists; Haruki Murakami (novelist) and Takashi Murakami (graphic artist) but what about their (very political) counter-parts? Kenzaburo Oe (writer) or Katsuhiro Otomo (manga artist) come to mind. He downplays the very active and internationally recognized arts movement coming from Japan during it's recession. Zielenger claims the architecture coming from Japan suffers "from a dreary sameness", again I find this odd, as a lot of contemporary cutting edge green architecture has come out of Japan in recent years. I saw kids in Japan downloading full color maps and searching the internet with their cell phones way before such things were done in America and Zielenziger says the japanese are lagging in their use of the internet. He claims foreigners will have trouble in Japan because "few signs, maps, or menus are available in Roman script." That is simply untrue! Even the subway ticket machines have a button to press for english!

This all may sound like harsh criticism, and it is, but I still have to recommend this book to people deeply interested in Japan, as it is the first and only western work dedicated to the hikikomori and other obscure Japanese societal woes. The good parts are really good. The bad parts were thrown in there to make the book 298 pages (340 with acknowledgements, notes, index). Zielenziger tries too hard to conjure up new reasons why Japan can't get its act together instead of furthering his own profound findings. The fault in his attempt to live up to the sexiness of the books title can be found in part of his summary, while describing Japan's possible, dismal fall from grace he states Japan could choose "to turn itself into an Asian model of Switzerland, a peaceful, relatively prosperous, insulated, and increasingly irrelevant nation, a quiet and stable second-rank power." Doesn't sound so bad...

The impact of this book derives from its unique combination of human sensitivity and investigative objectivity. Rather than evolving from preconceived conclusions on the part of the author, "Shutting Out the Sun" resonates as the product of an honest quest to bring clarity to the human truth underlying the bursting of Japan's bubble economy and the hurdles the country must surmount in stepping up to the new global challenge. The author applies his immense journalistic skill to deepen this inquiry as he moves from questions of economic stagnation, through layered social realities, into the heart of the personal, graphically illustrating the effects of a level of conformist social pressure barely conceivable to those who haven't witnessed it first hand.

For those who have had long experience with Japan and care dearly about the people of that land, the book gives welcome voice to shared areas of grave concern. And for the reader who is but intrigued with Japan from afar, it provides a precious glimpse into the shadows cast by the "sun" of apparent social harmony.

An added bonus - the dynamic writing moves you right along. This book is a lively read!

Foreign press correspondents who choose to write a book about Japan fall into two categories. Some start with a general idea and try to build a demonstration around that broad intuition - for example, that the economy will set into decline at the very time when it was booming (to borrow from Bill Emmott's The Sun Also Sets), or that Japan is run by an Iron Triangle that is hollow at the center (as Karel van Wolferen demonstrates). Others take a different approach and try to gather as much information as they can about a narrow subject - Tokyo underworld, for instance, or Japanese base-ball, or the plight of princess Masako.

Michael Zielenziger tries to combine the two approaches. He starts with the ordeal of the hikikomori, those youngsters who live in complete social isolation, shutting themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or even years at a time. He then broadens his topic to the fate of the whole nation, arguing that Japan has entered into depression mode and now faces gloomy prospects. He provides an interesting comparison with South Korea, where a vibrant civil society found the way to recover from a severe economic crisis.

Hikikomori are a problem that is specific to Japan. Those reclusive young adults, mostly men, suffer from what specialists call a social disorder, not from a mental illness that could be diagnosed and cured accordingly. Indeed, their plight find echoes in Japan's founding myths: according to the fable of Japan's creation, the sun-goddess Amaterasu once hid in a cave and plunged the world into darkness after her unruly brother ravaged the earth and despoiled her gardens and temples. Only through songs and merriment could she be coaxed from her deepest isolation. But modern recluses, often pampered by their over-protective mothers, have little incentive to leave their seclusion and face the society that often rejected them as teenagers.

What is the connexion between the sorry case of these individuals who seek refuge in the isolation of their room and the state of Japan as a nation? First, as a social disease, the hikikomori phenomenon must have social causes. The author hints at a few of them: the traumatism of war and defeat, which may revisit grand-children after having skipped one generation ; the lack of moral purpose and self-direction, when the pursuit of material wealth delivers emptiness rather than inner contentment ; the heavy conformism of a group-centered society that lacks tolerance for deviant characters ; the structure of dependence that, according to psychiatrist Takeo Doi, characterizes Japanese men's relation to their mother, etc.

At a deeper level, the author suggests that the absence of monotheism and the lack of a universal religion in Japanese culture may explain Japan's ethical relativism, the situational nature of its moral values, and the lack of compassion for victims. Elderly ladies have to fight their ways to find a seat in the metro, and homeless people camping rough in Ueno Park are usually fed hot soup by Korean Christians, not by native Japanese. I wish the author had developed this intuition a bit further and explained why, in contrast to Korea, Christianity never took hold in contemporary Japan. One obvious reason, judging by novels from Ayako Miura, Toyoko Yamazaki or Kappa Senoo, is that Christianity was considered as alien and anti-patriotic in Japan, whereas it became closely associated with the movement for independence and then with democratization in South Korea. But to my opinion, there is nothing intrinsic in Japanese culture that defies or rejects Christian beliefs, and Japanese make superb Christians. Anyway, a few pages on this topic would have been welcome.

So is Japan really a hikikomori nation? For Zielenziger, many Japanese behaviors can be attributed to the deepest desires of this island country just to be "left alone". Japan's isolation has not stopped with the end of the sakoku era and the opening of ports to foreign influences and exchange. Japan remains a closed society, admitting little strangers and forcing strong individuals to either conform or flee into exile. At the national level, America's embrace has the effect of barring the country from going out on its own and finding its place under the sun. But the author pushes the analogy too far, and provides a picture of Japan that is far too gloomy and pessimistic. His attempt at providing a detailed case study of a social phenomenon and to link it to a broader explanation at the macro level fails on both counts. In my opinion, Japanese contemporary novels or movies are better at capturing the zeitgeist than this journalistic account, and reading it to the end was by and large a waste of my time.

While it was not written necessarily with that intent, this is one of the best assessments of Japan's contemporary search for meaning and identity that I have seen in a long time. Disparate trends involving the hikikomori, depression, suicide, the parasitic singles and the crass materialism in acquiring expensive European bags are integrated and understood as symptomatic of a more basic struggle for national direction.

I recall earlier works such as Neil McFarland's Rush Hour of the Gods to explain Japan's explosion of religious sects after WWII when the Emperor was demystified. I recall the explosive growth of the Nihonjinron literature in the early 1970s when Japan tried to determine if it was possible to be Japanese and Western at the same time. Now, this work is another benchmark suggesting that an entire generation may have been lost due to the inability of Japan to reconcile with its past and create hope for the future.

When I lived, studied and worked in Japan in the early 1980s, I began to pay more attention to those Western writers who critiqued dimensions of what was still, at that time, the "Japanese miracle", such as Jon Woronoff. Ethnocentric, very probably. But their unpopular critiques shed light on dimensions of Japan's society and economy that I had begun to detect independently and that were unwelcome by those Westerners who mixed in expat society and interacted only with a Japanese elite, as well as by Japanese who cherished this new status in the world. As a result, I was probably less surprised than many of these individuals by the prolonged struggle to recover from the excesses of those years.
It was with that background that I picked up and read Michael Zielenziger's book and read the critiques on this page. Just because it is written by a Westerner does not make his observations less valid -- that argument is part and parcel of the "ware ware Nihonjin" or "we the Japanese" phenomenon that the author himself describes with amusement: the astonishment that someone who has lived for a decade in the country can utter a simple, declarative sentence in Japanese, for instance. Sometimes, as inhabitants of other countries have realized, an outsider can focus more clearly on parts of society that others neglect, miss or choose to ignore as uncomfortable. They have less at stake and can afford to be frank (crucial in writing about Japan, where "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down").
It's in this context -- Zielenziger's description of the plight of many disaffected younger Japanese and his analysis of what may be causing this -- that the book is a valuable addition to the list of works about contemporary Japan. Some parts are hackneyed (the chapter on women, or on the Japanese fixation on brand names) but even these help him build his case that there is a social malaise that is linked as much to something within Japanese society as it is to the external post-crash environment.
The problem with the book comes when he attempts to move beyond description and a first-order analysis to that deeper look at causation. It just isn't there; his thinking is clumsily laid out, sometimes incoherent and hard to follow.
I don't think that comparing Japan to South Korea is irrelevant (both have had traumatic war experiences, are Confucian societies that have a similar sense of "us" and "them" with respect to outsiders; to argue that Japan is meaningfully different is another example of "Japanese as more unique than any other nation" thinking). But he doesn't go beyond the superficial description in any meaningful way. The result? The book ends up feeling incomplete and spotty.
Primarily interesting to people who have only a nodding acquaintanceship with contemporary Japanese society, and who are prepared to read more widely than this to obtain a rounded picture.

The enervating impact of Japan's lingering economic recession since 1990 is the subject of this fascinating if somewhat cursory look at a generation of socially dysfunctional young men (and some women) known as "hikikomori". In American society, they would be looked upon in patronizing terms as slackers since their withdrawal amounts to sponging off their dispirited parents and remaining hidden from the work force. According to author Michael Zielenziger, the irony in Japan is that the majority of them are not limited by any diagnosable medical condition like depression or agoraphobia but by a broader, more culturally-driven disappointment in recognizing their inability to keep up with what society expects from them. Contrary to enduring Japanese tradition, these outcasts simply cannot submerge their true identities for the greater good of conformity.

Zielenziger has spent seven years as the Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder newspapers, so he has been able to observe this marginalization phenomenon firsthand by interviewing dozens of the hikikomori, whom he argues rather simplistically are the creative visionaries that the nation seems to lack in pivotal positions of influence. Without such visionaries, the author feels Japan is strangulated by the accepted post-WWII triangle of business, bureaucracy and politics. The thinking has become severely outdated as it motivates past behavior to combat current economic and social woes. The primary cause, according to Zielenziger, may be the unprecedented speed by which Japan recovered from WWII, once a glorious success story but in hindsight had translated into a perceived spiritual and philosophical vacuum that has not provided any emotional foundation for the technological advances of which the country bases much of their current pride. As we all know, Japan has never coveted individualism, and those who have been tempted to strike out as independent thinkers have been discouraged due to the macro-level lack of confidence within the national consciousness.

The hikikomori is but one personification of this downward trend that Zielenziger analyzes here, as the country has seen an encroaching pervasiveness in alcoholism and suicide, as well as tumbling marriage and birth rates and an increasing fetishism for brand-name luxuries. The author shrewdly observes the accountability of the U.S. in enabling such a mindset through its dominant role in Japan's military defense and willing acceptance of Japan's virtually free access to U.S. markets. But all is not lost in Japan, as the author points to the inevitable passing of the aging generation that has valued conformity and the growing recognition for an actionable solution to alleviate the economic plight with new, creative thinking. With his eminently readable book, he certainly makes a compelling case for encouraging such visionaries to rise in a country that needs them badly.

I bought this book as an impulse buy at Borders because I was intrigued by the topic. While I have read a few books on Japanese society, I had not done any extensive reading on hikikomori (youths, predominately males) that shut themselves away from the world and parasaito, young women who live at home and make a sizable income, yet are more interested in procuring the next Dior handbag over a husband.

The book is well researched and well written. Rather than stand back and observe, Zielenziger attempts to get inside their minds to explain what compels these youths to choose (or default to) such atypical paths in a society that puts strong emphasis on the "norm". At times, Zielenziger does almost too good of a job, as at certain points during my reading I came away with a feeling that from this vantage point, Japan is hopeless and incapable of correcting its societal ills. If the only solution to the spider web society is to drop out completely, how will anything change?

I found the book got a little dry near the end, and did not read the chapters on South Korea and Christianity with the same intensity and interest with which I devoured earlier chapters, but I believe this was mostly due to the limits of my own interests. For those interested in Japanese society, sociology, and psychology, I would highly recommend this book. But, as another reviewer stated, it is not a primer on the Japanese for those who have done no other reading on the topic.

However, it does have quite a few useful insights into a society that operates on completely different standards from what we're accustomed to in the West. You won't come away after reading this book and be able to say that you completely understand the Japanese psyche, but it will give you a better understanding.

The book starts well as journalism, describing interviews with hikikomori and people that deal with them.

Unfortunately it then embarks on a long and unconvincing thesis trying to attribute what may well be a country specific syndrome to national cultural traits.

A large proportion of this is shallow navel gazing, conventional wisdom in Japan which are regurgitated by Japanese and inanely repeated by the author.

A lot of it is tied to national features or historical events for which close parallels can be found in many, sometimes most other industrial societies without the consequences attributed to them.

Sometimes the internal logic is inconsistent. We learn, for instance, that in East Asia belief systems are deeply enmeshed in people's world views and incredibly persistent, but also have faded away leaving a vacuum, but are also superficial restrictions on deeper national traits, traits that can be complimented by the adoption of a more suitable belief system.

Punctuating this are comments with a painful lack of understanding of macro economics or even finance. This may explain, despite an unconvincing declaration to "avoid putting America on a pedestal" he glibly repeats the recommendations of financial magazines as if they provide deep insight. In light of the events of the next year, this is only more painful.

Zielenziger rather thoroughly describes the problems (cultural conservatism, social isolation, lack of support for working mothers) but his analysis and conclusions are strangely Eurocentric.

Some of his claims do not appear to be burdened by logic at all. For example, he states that high rates of suicide in post-soviet Belarus are caused by high availability of guns and that collectivism of the Japanese is somehow linked to their polytheism.

But other aspects of the book are more disturbing. Zielenziger appears to genuinely dislike Japan and the Japanese. He condemns Japanese secularism and religious tolerance and suggests that a lack of a single absolute religious doctrine is in part to blame for their problems. The language he uses to describe Japanese homes, social interactions, and Shinto rituals is surprisingly negative.

In discussion of Japanese and Chinese 19th century isolationism, he glosses over European imperialism entirely. The only thing he has to say about the Opium Wars is that they "opened Chinese markets", but he devotes pages and pages to Christian missionary activity.

Overall, the book has few redeeming qualities. If it weren't for its support for women's rights, it could have been as easily published in 1946 as in 2006.

Zielenziger offers an admirable study here, presenting in accessible language and engaging prose an intriguing profile of male hikikomori. While his analysis of hikikomori is substantial (though he avoids pursuing the issue of why most hikikomori are male), the rest of what he has to say is underwhelming.
For two-thirds of his project, Zielenziger rehashes arguments already made by Yumiko Iida and Partrick Smith, among others, that the triangulation of history, politics, and culture in Japan has had a number of deleterious effects on its populace. In contrast to these other scholars, however, Zielenziger seems to have an ulterior motive; I feel he comes off as but another white, intellectual apologist (Smith's "Chrysanthemum Club") seeking to explain why the Japanese no longer wear kimono or recite poetry under the moon. Claiming, for instance, that Japan is a "unique" country with a "unique" culture and a "unique" people, all of which are incomprehensible to a foreigner like him (reaffirmed by the final sentence of the work), Zielenziger's rhetoric seems clouded by his own admiration for himself and for a lost Japan--one buried under Nike, Louis Vuitton, and concrete. What begins as a study of Japan's "lost generation" (ostensibly the hikikomori) ends up being a survey of the major failings of the Japanese people in highly generalized language: the Japanese are X, the Japanese do Y, "the Japanese mind" is Z. And this made me uncomfortable...
There is no denying Zielenziger is meticulous with his research, and uses a wide variety of sources to prove his points. I wonder, though, why he does not use any Japanese language source material (granted, I assume he has great reading ability in Japanese because his insightful interviews were conducted in Japanese). In relying on scholarship in English and translated works, Zielenziger may be missing out on a crucial body of primary scholarship.
Despite my complaints, Zielenziger's work is an engaging study. While I take issue with it on several levels, I'm glad I bought it and glad I read it.