Video: Hikikomori - modern followers of the ancient Japanese tradition of asceticism or just idlers?
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Hikikomori translated from Japanese means "being in solitude." This term in the land of the rising sun is called a new social phenomenon that has spread among adolescents and young people. In the past few years, cases have become more frequent when young people decide to lead an ascetic lifestyle, voluntarily condemning themselves to seclusion within the four walls of their own room. Today, hikikomori has acquired the scale of an epidemic, since more than a million people have already chosen a similar life path for themselves!
Studying, a successful career, friends, lovers and even parents - hikikomori do not need anything or anyone. Or … practically nothing! Everything that makes up their sphere of interest is the Internet; less often, exiles leave for the world of books and television. Hikikomori rarely perceive their own asociality as a problem. Many of them have an organic need to protect themselves from the life around them: some go headlong into their hobbies, others try to solve psychological problems through loneliness.
The life stories of many hikikomori teenagers are similar. So, on the network you can find a story about a 17-year-old boy who has not been on the street for three years. Before that, he went to school, but his relationship with classmates did not work out. Once, having come from school, the guy closed himself in the kitchen, his parents did not attach much importance to this. Since then, he has not come out. His mother leaves food for him at the door three times a day, the parents were sympathetic to their son's position in life … and built a new kitchen!
Scientists call such voluntary exile not so much a psychological as a social phenomenon. In Japanese culture, loneliness has never been perceived as something unnatural for the human being. Until the middle of the 19th century, this country remained fairly closed from the Western world, culture, history, folklore - the themes of solitude and asceticism are everywhere. Many are inclined to see in modern hikikomori hermits of a bygone era, people who voluntarily leave the vanity of modern life!
If Japanese youth spend hours of solitude in front of a monitor or TV screen, then Brooklyn artist Joe Fenton spent 10 months creating a large-scale art project "Loneliness" with a pencil, and then with a lead and paints!
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