International Affairs

Zielenziger – Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

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Zielenziger, Michael, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, Doubleday: New York, 2006. 340 pp.

While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men — the so-called hikikomori (literally, “pulling away, being confined“). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms — from friends, family, career, and society in general — for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.

In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV). Its particular set of symptoms didn’t appear in Western countries, nor in Japan’s Asian neighbours. Japan’s increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country’s economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.

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Lacking Perspective

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Things are pretty grim. Armed gunmen are getting bolder. Agents of the duly elected government are at risk, with many of them being assassinated in front of their families. Police officers are specifically targeted, often being kidnapped so they can be tortured to death. The message is simple: Join the side of law and order and you will be killed. The favorite method of execution is to behead the victim, a tactic favored by terrorists.

Sounds like the most overwrought prose from a journalist describing the situation in Iraq, or maybe the Palestinian Territories. But I’m talking about the drug war being waged in Mexico at this very moment. The Washington Post article behind that last link states that 600 people have died this year.

I doubt very highly that either their figures or analysis of the situation is accurate. I have reason to believe that things are much worse. StrategyPage.com states that over 1,200 people have been killed this year. What is most alarming is that the drug gangs are actively recruiting regular Mexican Army deserters, men that have had training in combat, weapon use, and who are able to plan and carry out complex operations.

There are a few questions about this situation that need to be asked. The most important is: How did the drug gangs manage to become so powerful that they are able to take over whole towns, defy the Federal government, and assassinate important officials?

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Thanks to Gateway Pundit

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  • Update: Today, Gateway Pundit‘s concludes descriptions of various participants, heroics of Iraq’s Mithul al-Alusi and Garri Kasparov with the understated: “Certainly, Prague is not short on heroes this week.”

Countering the posts we’ve been doing on Cuba and Venezuela, across the ocean Sharansky, Havel & Aznar organized “Democracy and Security: Core Values and Sound Policies.” (In Prague, June 5-6, hosted by Prague Security Studies Institute, Jerusalem-Based Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute For Strategic Studies and Madrid’s Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies.) Gateway Pundit is covering it and includes a moving speech by Lieberman and a rather rousing one by Bush – described by Gateway Pundit as “Bush Rocks the Czernin Palace”. The conference is full of people who have taken great risks and lost much for the cause of democracy and liberty.

This doesn’t seem to be getting the coverage one would think it should. For instance, dissidents from seventeen countries sat in the front rows for Bush’s speech – these people are, by their presence, interesting. The stories need not really say that Bush met with them privately or that he got a standing ovation – we understand why that is not news.

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Intelligence and Thuggery

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Highly intelligent people often have problems in predicting the likely behavior of thugs.

In his 1982 book Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design–a work whose relevance is considerably broader than might be imagined from its title–Gerald Weinberg briefly discusses a contemporary book called How Real is Real?–An Anecdotal Introduction to Communications Theory. Although he finds value is many aspects of this book, Weinberg strongly objects to a passage in which the author (Paul Watzlawick) suggests ways in which communications theory could have been used in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. Watzlawick suggests that the authorities should have used “Erickson’s confusion technique” as follows:

Utilizing the same channels of delivery as the abductors, it would have been relatively simple for them to deliver to the mass media fake messages, contradicting the real ones but similarly threatening the life of Patricia Hearst if they were not complied with…Very quickly a situation of total confusion could have been set up. None of the threats and demands could have been believed, because every message would have been contradicted or confused by another, allegedly coming from the ‘real’ abductor.

Weinberg responds:

It’s very difficult for me to believe that Watzlawick ever thought critically about this idea for fifteen seconds, but its naivete is typical for this genre of speculative systems writing.

…and goes on to suggest that a good way to consider the possible real-world consequences of ideas like this is to imagine a movie (specifically, a thriller) based on the situation and the proposed actions, and to imagine how the plot might develop.

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So farewell then, Tony Blair

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Tony Blair’s so-called resignation was possibly the most inelegant exit made by any British Prime Minister. By no means the first leader to go before his term was up (of the post war ones Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher did), his was most the most prolonged and agonizingly dull. By yesterday morning, when the BBC Russian Service called to ask if I would take part in a discussion to be broadcast that afternoon, all I could do was to groan. Hasn’t he gone yet? We are waiting for the announcement, chuckled the producer.

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