Every Society Needs a Pressure Relief Valve
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Every society needs a pressure relief valve for those who don't fit into society's approved slots or those who can no longer sustain "normal life." This need for pressure relief valves increases as "normal life" becomes more stressful and precarious, and as the status quo works tirelessly to deny that "normal life" has become a pressure cooker with no conventional escape.
The pressure relief valve can be officially or unofficially enabled, or it can be frowned upon / verboten. It can be positive or negative, both for the individual and society.
The more extreme the pressure, the more extreme the responses of those who can no longer take it.
When "normal life" is devoid of human connection, stripped of purpose and meaning, alienating and coarsening, with a bleak future of servitude and conformity, then we resign ourselves to it and try to fill the void with frenzied activity: manic travel, manic dining out, manic gambling, manic posting on social media, manic gaming, manic consumerism, manic bingeing, etc.
If these fail--and in some sense, they all fail--then we seek to escape, to withdraw, to move decisively away from the source of stress / pain of our current "normal life."
Tragically, taking one's life is one escape from "normal life."
In countries where legal and illegal drugs are easily available such as the U.S., then alcohol / drugs is one way to dull the pain of "normal life."
Not only is this destructive, it is not a complete escape. So there has to be some other real-world pressure relief valve, sanctioned, informally sanctioned, or unsanctioned by authorities.
Two methods of escape embedded in human nature have been assigned names in Japan; Johatsu (evaporated people) and Hikikomori (extreme social withdrawal). They've been named because they're common, and uniquely embedded in Japanese culture and society.
Longtime readers know of my lifelong associations with Japan: I studied the language, geography, history and literature academically, have visited Japan, have Japanese friends, stood amidst the ruins of my wife's grandmother's house in Niigata prefecture, a home she left as a teenage "picture bride" to join a husband she'd never met in Hawaii, informally "studied" the culture through its many classic films (Kurosawa's 1970 film Dodes'ka-den is a must-see) and watched Japanese TV programs, which are generally only available in two U.S. markets: Hawaii and Los Angeles.
You can learn a lot about a culture by watching its TV programs. For example, current Japanese police procedurals (mysteries) often feature the detectives questioning people living in homeless encampments to see if they happened to witness the crime in question. Wait, homeless encampments in Japan? Well, yes.
This article sheds light on the erosion of community in Japan:
Life at the heart of Japan’s lonely deaths epidemic: 'I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried'; They are an important reminder of what happens when community ties give way to social isolation.
Johatsu--suddenly vanishing into thin air to start a new life somewhere else, with zero connection to your previous life--is a global phenomenon embedded in human nature: when things become impossible, move on. But it has a special role in Japan as an informally accepted pressure relief valve.
Officially, 100,000 individuals are reported missing every year in Japan, and all but 11,000 are found. Those 11,000 did not wander off; they planned their evaporation, and may have hired "night movers" to aid their vanishing.
A substantial but unknown number of people vanish into thin air without being reported as missing. One of the authorities interviewed in this video estimated that over time, the total number of Johatsu may be as high as 1 million. Vanishing without a trace (47 minutes)
Hikikomori refers to the spectrum of social withdrawal, from complete withdrawal into the confines of a bedroom at home, never leaving the room or house, to those who go to work and go shopping but return home without any social contact.
Hikikomori is not an abstraction to me. There is a hikikomori two doors down from our house.
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