Michael Zielenziger

A journey inside modern-day Japan reveals the economic and social realities that have created a lost generation of Japanese young adults, examining the country's a high suicide rate, low birthrate, untreated cases of depression, young men who have become recluses from society, and young women who have rejected the traditional path to marriage and motherhood. 30,000 first printing.

How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

Shutting Out the Sun

Leafling

I don't read a lot of non-fiction. The only non-fiction I normally read is collections of personal essays, so this was a little bit of a struggle for me. But Japan and the hikikomori is a subject that has fascinated me for years.

Hikikomori are a group of Japanese young adults, generally male, who shut themselves out of society entirely. They choose to live in their rooms with little to no contact with anybody outside. This is a result of a rigid society and often intense bullying within the schooling system. Something that appears in Japan which is interesting: "Sekentei -- how one appears in the eyes of society, or the need to keep up appearances -- can powerfully constrain individual actions just as bullying does in the collectivist pressure cooker of contemporary Japan." So obviously it's fascinating to look at how a society is structured can influence people within it in extreme ways. I just don't know if this book is what I wanted to read.

I wanted to hear more from the hikikomori themselves and focus on their stories. Maybe I just wanted to read a piece of fiction about hikikomori, but I didn't get that. This book was mainly focused on the economy and sort of politics. This was all well and good at first, but it felt like Zielenziger was often repeating points he had already made. I kept just wanting it to end, which isn't a good sign.

Zielenziger took a few chapters to focus on some other interesting things that are sort of related. There are women in Japan who refuse to marry and have children, instead living at home and focusing on their careers. There was also the mention of extreme materialism, the birth control taboo, and the depression taboo. But then, by the end, the book strays even further than I had expected it to. It started talking about the effects of Christianity on Western society and how the lack of it influences Japan's society and lack of individualism. It was certainly interesting, but I'd like to see more research about it. And I'd like to see it in a book that isn't this one. He also brought up developing South Korea and did a lot of comparisons between the two countries. Again, interesting, but not exactly what I was interested in reading about.

Shutting Out the Sun was spot on about a lot of the things in Japanese society that would lead people to try to cut themselves off from society. While it's a fascinating topic, if the book had been less repetitive and stayed on track a bit more, I would have liked it a lot more than I did.

Full review: http://outlandishlit.blogspot.com/201...

Shutting Out the Sun How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

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