2021/10/15

I went to Daiso, a Japanese famous “100 yen shop” and bought index cards. And immediately I wrote the things I thought as Yoshio Kataoka did… but it became quite a different thing if I had written actually. I tried to describe what I was thinking directly… I chose writing in English because I could keep on writing more easily. Now I don’t feel that is stressful. I wrote 6 cards today. I bought 100 cards and paid 100 yen, so I would use these cards completely for two weeks and a little.

In the morning, I had talked with Judith. I talked about the meeting I had attended on Wednesday, and also talked about the ex-hikikomori person who was a friend of mine. But when I tried to talk about him, I felt that I have a “limit” and I don’t know the problem of hikikomori, or I don’t have enough knowledge about them to explain to my friends. I should learn the problem of hikikomori to tell the others. “Why do they become hikikomori?”… In my opinion, that is related to this Japanese society’s atmosphere which is so stressful.

Japanese society has a very strong “Self-responsibility” principle (these English words might sound strange but we don’t have any proper words to describe this). So the hikikomori problem might be seen as “They like their lifestyle as hikikomori, and they should accept their life at their own risk even if they have troubles” by other people (of course, this can be a “straw-man argument”). But I heard various hikikomori’s life stories, They blame themselves because they can’t get out from their rooms and say “I want to die” or “I can’t see why I was born”. Their lives must be so hard. As I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol easily, they might have a strong dilemma because they can’t change their lives.

I was born an autistic person. I was concerned as a strange (or crazy) person and have lived a hard life. I know that outsiders have to live difficult lives in this Japanese society (but if they accept these outsiders, they obey obediently). Now is a hard time for outsiders like me. I don’t think that our future is quite hopeless because the study about hikikomori and autism still goes on. But if our minds weren’t changed drastically, we had to live our lives in this society with certain pain.