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Japanese post-modern social renouncers: An exploratory study of the narratives of Hikikomori subjects

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to transmit and comment on the authentic voices of socially withdrawn subjects and to contribute toward refining subjective inquiry in contemporary Japan. Here, I detail the cases of four individuals visiting Japanese Non Profit Organizations between August 2011 and August 2012. In accordance with my findings, I define socially withdrawn individuals as post-modern social renouncers. Hikikomori should not be reduced to a mental disorder but should be seen as an idiom of distress and a modality where one can recognize him/herself as a subject, or a mode of enjoyment. I suggest ways of improving qualitative methodology and directions for future research at the intersection of cultural history, anthropology, and subjectivity theory.

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Notes

  1. I won’t mention here the massive amount of articles published by Japanese journalists and researchers in Japanese newspapers and journals since the late nineties. For more details in the increase of these articles, see Figure 6.1 in Horiguchi (2012).

  2. Hikikomori in Japan is the phenomenon of social withdrawal that effects hundreds of thousands individuals, in which the individual shuts his/herself in their room generally at their family’s home for several months and even years without social relationships.

  3. More precisely a Chinese living in Canada (Chong and Chan, 2012).

  4. Ueyama (2001) was one of the first to write a book about his own hikikomori experience. During this meeting Katsuyama was here. He also wrote a book published the same year (in January while Mister Ueyama’s book was published in December) and another, more recently (Katsuyama, 2001, 2011).

  5. I met them with four other members of the Paris Descartes research team (Ōtake, 2011a). For practical and methodological reasons I decided to focus on their accounts available in a Japanese website related to school non-attendance (futōkō): http://www.futoko.org/special/special-30/page0802-703.htmlhttp://www.futoko.org/special/special-30/page0823-708.html

  6. ‘Sono toki ni, “17 nen tatte, yatto watashi no futōkō ga owatta, hitokugiri tsuita na” to kanjimashita ne.’

  7. Minna isshōkenmei ganbatten no ni, o mae wa nan ya!

  8. Although he said previously ‘the first year was like holidays’.

  9. Unpublished seminar (16 June 1965’s session) available online: http://gaogoa.free.fr/

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Acknowledgements

The author thank the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, for welcoming him during a first stay between 14 April 2011 and 14 June 2012, a second stay between 5 October 2012 and 1 December 2013, and a third stay from 4 April 2014 to 31 March 2015. This work was supported by the Japan Foundation [2010]; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Post-Doctoral Fellowship [short-term] for North American and European Researchers, through a Nominative Authority [CNRS], 2012); and Canon Foundation in Europe Fellowship [2014].

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Tajan, N. Japanese post-modern social renouncers: An exploratory study of the narratives of Hikikomori subjects. Subjectivity 8, 283–304 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.11

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