December 16, 2004
Dilacerator : A very Japanese problem
Fuck you... Many japanese with dilacerator disorder are brilliant and actually fall into the category of Otaku.
Massive comsumerism is dangerous to the human social order and having a worker drone working class makes it worse.
A very Japanese problem
Even I did not spend all day tinkering with my computer, as I managed to hop over to the couch and watch some TV. On BBC 2 tonight's edition of Correspondent focused in on a very Japanese problem: hikokimori, or the wave of teenage hermits that are popping up in Japan. What happens is that teenagers, usually male, close themselves into their rooms and stay there for years. Only in Japan could this happen.
It's a combination of parents putting extreme pressure on their children to succeed by forcing them to attend "cram schools," where kids go after school on weekdays and during weekends. The program showed some footage of a 3-day cram camp, where 13-year olds were kept up in class till 10 PM, after which they had to do an exam. Those who failed, had to do it over. And over. And over. Until they passed (or passed out?). The last kid went to sleep well after midnight. It's a system that is designed to bestow status by passing exams; actual practical merit, achievement or learning is irrelevant. Taking exams is not a test of knowledge learnt; it's just a test of how well you can pass certain kinds of exams.
So that's one part of it. The other part is the parents' reaction when their son decides to lock himself up. They showed footage of several households with a reclusive child. In one, a kid had locked himself up in the kitchen for three years. What was the parents' reaction? They started off by ordering food, and then broke down and built a new kitchen! How fucking insane is that? You could even hear the kid (now 17) playing video games in the old kitchen. Another instance was shown where they ominously declared that no-one knows how he eats or drinks. Then later, the mother was speaking and said she had a job during the day... well, guess what? The house is empty during the day. Perhaps he sneaks into the kitchen while there's no-one about? And finally, they managed to interview a less reclusive recluse, who had not left his room for a few years. His mother keeps putting trays of food at his door, and he was filmed eating dinner in his room. It was very neat and tidy. When asked what he does all day, he said he listens to CD's (he had a big stack), and playing games on his Playstation 2. And he orders stuff from the Internet. His parents are very conscientious in making sure he has everything he needs, yet he won't so much as talk to them. He says communicating is really hard.
Is it just me, or is the solution blazingly obvious? Cut off his food, drink, money and electricity. Throw the circuit breaker. He'll come out when he's hungry and thirsty, and then you can have a good talk to him. I mean, jeeez folks... this really isn't rocket science, is it? The truly amazing thing is that so many Japanese parents refuse to parent. The conflict-aversion in Japanese society is apparently so deeply rooted that even in such cases, where the solution is ridiculously clear, they still won't take the required action. Cue for parallels with Japanese economic malaise. It's also interesting to see that this parenting failure is cast as a psychological problem of the teenage hermits. Hikokimori is a disease, they say. I think it is, but it's a societal disease rather than an individual one.
One point the program missed completely is the actual numbers involved, or rather the implications of the numbers. In a population of around 130 million, they claimed that there are now more than a million teenage hermits. The Japanese population pyramid is already dangerously imbalanced, and losing a large part of the working-age population is going make the woes of the Japanese economy even worse. The dependency ratio (those retired relative to working age) is already one of the highest in the industrialized world, and the projections show it getting much worse in the next 50 years. Unfortunately, the site linked to above does not show the actual numbers per age band in a table, just the graph. So it's a bit imprecise, but assuming there are about 800,000 per sex in each one-year band in the 2000 numbers for ages 10-20, we end up with a total population aged 10-20 of around 16 million. If indeed one million kids are now living as domestic, well-fed, Playstationed hermits, that works out at 6.25% of the total, or more worryingly, 12.5% of the male population. That's pretty scary. There are of course waster kids in the West too, but having one sixteenth of your youth locked in voluntary confinement is a sign of a deeply dysfunctional society. And as I said before, the economic consequences will be dire; they're going to be uneducated, unmotivated and thinking they can get away with outrageous behavior. The loss of such a large percentage of the future working population would be an economic cataclysm in itself, but coming on top of the malaise of the Japanese economy, words begin to fail. Perhaps it's indeed easier to do what the Japanese do when faced with the economic and demographic abyss of their future: pretend it's not there. Ignore it. Hope it'll go away. Stay quiet. Don't rock the boat. All will be well. Consensus above all. No conflict please, we're Japanese.
UPDATE: I should have added this sooner, but Ron Campbell has more background on Japanese culture.
Posted by Epiphany at 09:33 PM | Comments (56)
Va. Boy's Defiant Words Draw Police Response
This could have been me.
By Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page B01
When the two plainclothes Loudoun County sheriff's investigators showed up on her Leesburg doorstep, Pamela Albaugh got nervous. But when they told her why they were there, she got angry: A complaint had been filed alleging that her 11-year old son had made "anti-American and violent" statements in school.
She was aware of an incident at Belmont Ridge Middle School in which her son, Yishai Asido, was assigned to write a letter to U.S. Marines and responded, according to his teacher, by saying, "I wish all Americans were dead and that American soldiers should die." Yishai and Albaugh deny that the boy wished his countrymen dead.
Albaugh, a U.S. citizen, and her husband, an Israeli citizen who manages a Leesburg moving company, say the investigators' visit and the school's response were a paranoid overreaction in a charged post-9/11 environment. But law enforcement officials say the terrorist attacks and the Columbine school shootings require them to consider whether children who make threats might post a danger to their classmates. The case illustrates the balancing act that schools and law enforcement must find between the free speech of minors and community safety.
Albaugh described her son as a rambunctious student who has long opposed armies of any kind. He refused the Veterans Day assignment and told his teacher that the Marines "might as well die, as much as I care." Whatever was said, the words had been the source of anguished conferences, phone calls and, ultimately, a day of in-school suspension.
Albaugh thought the whole thing was resolved in school until Investigators Robert LeBlanc and Kelly Poland showed up last week. What followed, she said, was two hours of polite but intense and personal questioning.
They asked how she felt about 9/11 and the military. They asked whether she knows any foreigners who have trouble with American policy. They mentioned a German friend who had been staying with the family and asked whether the friend sympathized with the Taliban. They also inquired whether she might be teaching her children "anti-American values," she said.
Toward the end of the conversation, Albaugh's husband, Alon Asido, arrived home. Asido said the pair then spent another hour talking to him, mostly about his life in Israel and his more than four years in an elite combat unit there.
Before the investigators left, one deputy said their "concerns had been put to rest," Albaugh said.
"It was intimidating," she said. "I told them it's like a George Orwell novel, that it felt like they were the thought police. If someone would have asked me five years ago if this was something my government would do, I would have said never."
Loudoun County Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson confirmed that investigators visited the house. "Whenever there is a complaint that a child in a school is using language that is threatening or with violent overtones, we have an obligation to look into it," he said. "We can't ignore something like that and have something tragic happen down the road that we could have prevented."
Simpson declined to comment on details of the complaint or the kinds of questions investigators asked. "If you're looking at what [the school] said he said, I have to think you'd see where we came up with those questions," he said.
A schools spokesman declined to comment, other than to release, at Albaugh's request, a one-page letter from Yishai's file that explained his suspension.
His parents said the boy's words were those of a confused adolescent, whose views of the world are still being formed. They believe that authorities were called partly because he has a foreign-sounding name and accented English from years of living abroad. The family lived in India, Europe and Israel before moving to the United States in 2000. The couple have four children, with both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, enrolled in Loudoun schools.
Albaugh said that Yishai is not violent and that the school could have used the classroom incident as a "teachable moment," helping him learn to say what he was feeling in a less offensive manner.
Instead, Yishai said he has learned that it is not worth challenging authority. "At the end of the day, you lose," he said, adding: "All of these freedoms and things they're supposed to uphold, they bash them."
The Columbine shootings, in which a teacher and 12 students were killed by two other students in Colorado in 1999, has changed the way schools view violent words uttered by their students, said Ronald D. Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center. In this case, he noted, no one was arrested, no charges were filed and the case was closed.
"Sometimes the questions might be somewhat uncomfortable. But the final outcome was that [the investigators] got there and realized there was no 'there' there," he said. "We should give credit where credit is due."
Georgetown law professor David Cole said Yishai's statement in class is protected by the Constitution.
"There's no indication from the student making an anti-American statement that violence to the school would follow," he said. "The FBI and government officials should be investigating real terrorists, not children who criticize the United States."
Posted by Epiphany at 07:39 PM | Comments (18)