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Deep pessimism infecting many aspects of Japanese society By Michael Zielenziger TOKYO - Kenji has seldom left his bedroom in five years. On a good day, when he forces himself, he can almost get to the front door of his mother's small Tokyo apartment before fear overtakes him. "It requires a lot of courage just to go downstairs and get the mail," said the 34-year-old shut-in, who is thin as a twig and nearly as fragile. "I have two personalities: One who doesn't want to go out and one who does. They are fighting with each other constantly." Kenji's self-imposed confinement is surprisingly common in Japan today, after a decade of economic decline that has produced many worrisome effects. At least 1 million young Japanese adults, the vast majority men, imprison themselves in their rooms for months or even years at a time, according to Tamaki Saito, the first therapist to write a book on the subject. They sleep during the daytime and pace their rooms at night, hardly ever leaving except for a quick run to the 7-Eleven, if they can manage that. Counselors and psychiatrists say Kenji's reclusiveness, known here as "hikikomori," is an illness that exists only in Japan and was unknown even there until a decade ago. Hikikomori sufferers shut themselves off from siblings and friends, even parents, whom they sometimes attack in violent outbursts. Kenji's behavior is a symptom of Japan's decline. A growing number of professional counselors and other experts worry that the nation itself is becoming a lot like Kenji: isolated, apprehensive and unable to interact with the outside word. More than 10 years after the country's economic bubble burst, there is little prospect of a rebound. "I fear that Japan, as a nation itself, is becoming hikikomori," said psychiatrist Satoru Saito, who treats shut-ins and counsels families in his Tokyo clinic. "It is a nation that does not like to communicate. It is a nation that does not like to take risks. So what these young adults are doing is a mirror of what they see around them in adult society." The United States and other wealthy industrial nations are also being buffeted by rapid economic, technological and social change. But few nations are as wedded to conformity and resistant to change as contemporary Japan. In the past year, Knight Ridder has interviewed dozens of counselors, psychiatrists, sociologists and social thinkers; attended group therapy sessions with hikikomori patients; visited clinics; and interviewed families to document Japan's splintering social structure. Most of the patients did not want their full names used, to protect their privacy. These conversations suggest that the same forces that helped Japan achieve decades of strong economic growth after it was defeated in World War II - social coherence, shared goals and group conformity - now prevent it from moving forward, and its people are seeking social and psychological escape. Japan's decline eventually will affect the United States. Japan is America's closest ally in Asia, the fulcrum of American security policy in the region and home to a number of important U.S. air and naval bases. Japan's usefulness as an ally will decline as its more dynamic neighbors outpace it. Japan's trains still run on time, its streets are safe and most people live comfortably. Handguns are illegal, drug problems do not permeate schools or streets, and random violence is virtually unknown. Still, deep pessimism has infected many aspects of Japanese society: - Japanese are killing themselves in record numbers, more than 31,000 per year, three times the number who die in traffic accidents. Their suicide rate is the highest among industrialized nations and is steadily climbing. The rate among workers in their 30s has risen nearly 45 percent since 1996. - Japan's birthrate is among the lowest in the industrial world and still declining, because young women are avoiding marriage and refusing to bear children. By 2005, Japan's population will begin to shrink, a trend that demographers say will be nearly impossible to reverse. The labor force, likewise, will dwindle drastically. - Alcohol consumption is declining across the globe, but not here. Though alcoholism is rampant and accepted as a release from work and social pressure, it is almost never discussed by opinion leaders or at the workplace. - Japanese workers are increasingly dissatisfied with their lives, stressed out and depressed, and modern antidepressants have become legal only recently. A survey of 43 nations by the Pew Research Center, released this month, found that Japanese are far more pessimistic about themselves and their children's future than the people of any other relatively prosperous nation. - The demise of Japan's extended family structure is causing unprecedented strains. While divorce rates are low, couples are growing apart, living in sexless marriages, often in separate bedrooms. Stressed-out mothers force their children to study and go to "cram school" in order to pass competitive entrance exams to high school and college, while absentee fathers spend their time and energy at work. "Whether it's hikikomori, alcoholism or sexless couples, these are all different manifestations of the same problem," said Masahiro Yamada, a prominent sociologist. "These are all symptomatic of the social and psychological deadlock of Japanese society. "When you look around at Japanese society, you see that more and more people have just given up." Men such as Kenji appear desperate to fit into society. Yet when they pursue even modest individuality, they generate friction that leaves them burned out or too weak to cope. Though Kenji seldom leaves home, he agreed to speak about his condition after twice begging off, tearfully explaining on the telephone, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just can't come." When he finally did agree to talk, he said it was the first time in five years that he had left his apartment or spoken to anyone except his mother. After just two trips outside their apartment, he became angry and "unstable," his mother said. He since has retreated to his room again, and his mother refuses to let him come to the phone, speak to outsiders or be photographed. Kenji once was a mischievous child who loved playing third base. But he remembers being suddenly "frozen out" by classmates at his Tokyo grade school at age 12, when they inexplicably stopped talking to him. "First it was just the boys, but within a week it was the girls, too," he said. "I thought it would pass after the winter school vacation, but it didn't change at all. Since I wasn't a student who studied hard, without having any friends I couldn't find a reason to go to school. It was too painful." Today, some 20 years later, he talks about those events as if they had happened yesterday. Articulate and thoughtful, he managed to graduate from a nighttime high school, then took correspondence courses and passed the exam to enter university. But he found himself paralyzed, unable to leave his family's small apartment to attend classes. Now he spends his days reading newspapers, watching sports and thinking. "Maybe I think too much," Kenji admitted, his thin eyebrows fluttering nervously, a large old bruise visible on his left eyebrow as he rubbed his thinning hair. "After 21 years of being different, I don't mean to sound arrogant . . . but maybe I think more deeply than others." Psychiatrists describe hikikomori as a syndrome in which young adults, usually men in their 20s and 30s, shut themselves off from the world, away from friends, school or work, for six months or more. These individuals do not suffer from other known psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism or panic disorder. Hikikomori is different from agoraphobia, which occurs in the United States, whose victims fear leaving home to visit an unsettled social environment but can mix with friends or relatives in their homes. Counselors and sociologists said Kenji's behavior was an extreme effort to escape the suffocating pressure for conformity that was preventing Japan from coping with global changes and devising a new future for itself. "We were raised in a culture that didn't teach us to think for ourselves," said Dr. Hiroko Mizushima, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and also serves in Japan's parliament. "We were trained to fit in. But now we need to find a path that permits variable values," and allows more diverse thought and action. Many Japanese children wear identical uniforms to school. They are taught the same lessons on the same day from a government-mandated textbook, and they're trained to regurgitate facts, not to think for themselves. From early childhood, they're trained to fit into the group and to stomp out diversity, often through the cruelest kinds of social pressure. "This culture does not permit you to express your own individual feelings or thoughts, so you must hide them," said Yuichi Hattori, a California-trained counselor who treats hikikomori patients in his suburban Tokyo clinic. Brutal coercion to conform in school, along with pressure to attend cram school, or juku, often pushes young adults to the breaking point. "Japan is like a cult, and those who deviate get bullied," Hattori said. Many hikikomori sufferers said they lived in constant fear of judgment. "If I left my home during the day, my neighbor would just give me that look," said Nori, a 26-year-old shut-in who fell off the rails after he failed a university entrance examination. "It was as if they were staring right through me, like I wasn't a person. I just couldn't stand it." Eventually Nori responded by going out only after midnight, when he was sure no one else in his parents' apartment block would see him. Stress and fatigue also trigger the social isolation. Dai Hasebe dropped out of junior high school after his parents enrolled him in a juku designed to help him pass the competitive high school entrance exams. In elementary school, the 12-year-old hadn't gotten home until after 10 at night. "After a while, I just got tired," said Hasebe, now 19, who has spent most of the past six years secluded in his parent's three-room Tokyo apartment. "There was no particular incident," such as bullying or a harsh conversation with a teacher, that made him stop going to school, he said. "I was just relieved not to have a schedule." Hasebe now wears shoulder-length hair and a moustache and whiles away each afternoon building scale models in his bedroom. He constructs Japanese Zero fighter planes and French helicopters, draws precise diagrams of military equipment and designed a sort of 21st-century fantasy gladiator, a silvery pterodactyl with a rocket launcher that stands sentry in the entryway of his family's home. Hasebe hardly eats; his pants barely stay on his hips even when they're tightly belted. He said he would love to work in computer graphics or design airplanes. About once a month, he ventures out to a so-called "free space," an alternative school he has visited regularly during the past five years for a trace of social interaction. At the center, he uses a desktop computer to churn out new computer-assisted designs of futuristic aircraft. In some ways, Hasebe seems lucky, because he has found a social outlet. Many other shut-ins, such as Kenji, nurse psychic injuries 15 or 20 years after they first occurred. "Patients with hikikomori become totally isolated from human communities," counselor Hattori said. "The issues just fester." "All my 16 hikikomori patients have more than two personality states," Hattori said. "Their personalities get split by traumatic stress." Unlike classic schizophrenics, however, hikikomori patients don't lose touch with reality. Dr. Kosuke Yamazaki, a professor of child psychiatry at the Tokai University School of Medicine, thinks hikikomori reflects quintessential Japanese social values. "In Western societies, you suffer from antisocial behavior," such as slashing tires or shoplifting, he explained one afternoon in his hospital office. "Here in Japan, people suffer from nonsocial behavior," such as withdrawing from society Yamazaki thinks hikikomori patients' frustration is the leading cause of domestic violence in Japan, as lonely, isolated and troubled adult children lash out in a cry for help. "They behave like brutal tyrants," he said. Hattori said many of his patients often expressed fear that they would kill their parents by accident. "They say they have a personality that sometimes rages out of control," Hattori said. To demonstrate the way patients suffer, he introduced Mariko, a 22-year-old graduate of a two-year college who, he said, suffers from a mild form of hikikomori. She can hold down an occasional job, and went to some of her university classes. But she is unable to form emotional relationships, is frequently depressed and says social conversation completely fatigues her. She usually stays closeted in her bedroom. Sprawled on a red couch in Hattori's suburban clinic, the young woman was transformed during a counseling session from an intelligent young adult into a whimpering 5-year-old who kicked her legs peevishly. Sometimes she seemed torpid and tranquil, a needy child in search of love. At other moments she lashed out, saying she wanted to kill her father. "He's a coward. He's not respectable. I can never understand what he's thinking," Mariko said, speaking in a trance-like state. "I never see his emotions. He never played with me. I don't want to become like him." With Hattori's prompting, she vividly recalled a time when, as a small child, her father put ugly cicada bugs on her arm, frightening her as she watched television. During the three-hour session, Mariko often compressed her shoulders, narrowed her eyes and became flush-faced as she turned into a grade-school child and described trying to fit in without being bullied. "I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. I wanted to express myself, but I couldn't," she whimpered. "I played a role so I wouldn't be bullied by others, but I got very tired trying to keep up appearances. "When kids get bullied, the parents should understand, but they don't," Mariko explained through tears. "They yell at their kids and tell them to fit in. I only wanted to be regarded as a normal person." Mariko's violent anxieties are well understood by parents in the community center of Higashi-Omiya, a suburb north of Tokyo. One Sunday each month, more than 120 parents of hikikomori patients gather to discuss the illness and how they are coping with their angry, isolated children. Masahisa Okuyama, whose son suffers from hikikomori, founded the KHJ support network, which now has 31 chapters across Japan. Its name is formed from the initials in Japanese for obsessive neurosis, persecution mania and personality disorder. "Parents are also victims of this disease," explained Okuyama, a former advertising executive, who was beaten by his 27-year-old shut-in son. He abandoned the family's suburban home for a small apartment out of fear that his son would kill him. "He hates me, but the relationship between parent and child is so strong," Okuyama said. "He can kill me or I could kill him. Let's face it, we've been dissolved as a family." More than half the parents in the group said they'd been attacked by their children. One woman pulled up her sleeve and revealed an ugly black-and-blue mark, the result of being assaulted by her son. Another woman sleeps in her car for fear that her son will beat her. Around one table, a group of 11 parents discussed how best to reach out to their children. Most cooked dinner for their children and left food outside their bedroom doors. Some said their children left their rooms only when their parents went to bed. With tinges of guilt, many admitted that they found it difficult to communicate with their children when they were younger. Some fathers said they devoted so much time and energy to work that they had no choice but to neglect their domestic lives. "If I leave my work early, I would inconvenience my customers," one father said without apology. Some psychiatrists think that only "tough love" will cure hikikomori patients, and that if parents stop feeding and supporting their adult children they will be forced to abandon the sanctuary of their rooms. But these parents said it wasn't that simple. "If I don't feed my son, he'd just starve to death," one woman said. "I doubt I could let that happen." Kenji desperately wanted to find a way to rejoin society. "I sometimes look back and say, `How did I become like this?'" he said. Earlier this year, he wrote a letter to Okuyama, the head of the counseling group for parents, begging for help. "I just don't know what to do," he said in his letter. "I'm looking for a single ray of light." Okuyama responded with a friendly note describing the work of KHJ and inviting him to attend a meeting. But Kenji never went. Okuyama later admitted that "maybe it was too far a step" to suggest that Kenji leave his house and go to a meeting with hundreds of strangers. Psychiatrist Hattori said men such as Kenji weren't at fault, but were fighting a social order that created their illness. Japan, he said, "is like a community without escape. There is no way out. To survive here, you must conform to the will of the powerful. So all you can do is avoid conflict with other people by staying in your own room." "When you are raised by a wolf you grow up a wolf," Kenji said. "You can't go back into normal society. That's how I feel. Teachers tell you, `You are free to grow up and become what you want.' But adults can't show us any example where that's true."