KENNETH ALAN ADAMS

The Poison System in Japan

n contemporary Japan, a horde of housebound hermits has emerged, postmodern pariahs who habituate the margins of society, "shut[ting] themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, taping shut their windows, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or years at a time."i This reclusiveness is known as hikikomori, a flight from others which is often precipitated by bullying, ijime, and is so widespread that Kosuke Yamazaki, a psychiatrist at Tokai University, has described it as "a social disease."^ Epidemiologists have demonstrated that communicable diseases are transmitted in specific ways, such as drinking from an infected well, or sleeping in an infected bed.^ Similarly, hikikomori, the product of social dis-ease, emerges from unique and identifiable institutions, from home and school, and it is our task to comprehend the interrelatedness of those experiences. The contention here will be that the child typically grows up in Japan in a father-absent family and establishes a codependent relationship with mother. This amae relationship is characterized by intense ambivalence generated by maternal frustration and immaturity. Unable to cope with the pressures of rearing a child alone, the mother inflicts her frustrations and needs on the child, that is, she injects her poisonous emotions into the child, and this maternal legacy, malignant and unacknowledged, lies dormant, preventing autonomy and functioning as the template for group relationships. The father's absence from the home was the unfolding of the older generation's flawed template intertwining with that of the child, as was the mother's faulty parenting. The growing child thus remains a partial person, tied to group functioning premised on, and permeated with, unresolved conflicts from the mother-child dyad.
The Journal of Psychohistory 40 (3) Winter 2013

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Codependency on the group becomes especially problematic in adolescence, when bullying, as the traditional means of maintaining group homogeneity, emerges in school and becomes a significant source of stress for those who differ from others in any way. A student's encounter with bullies at school often catalyzes futoko, "school refusal syndrome," the first step to becoming a social recluse.* Subsequently, the hikikomori barricades himself, or occasionally, herself, in the home to cope with "poison overload," the state in which the internalized residue, the poison buildup, of group life has reached a critical point. Bullying at school has pushed beyond the person's capacity to tolerate toxicity. The person defends against further pain by massive avoidance. Fearing human interaction and unable to exist autonomously, the hikikomori is flooded by poison overloadtoo overwhelmed to function within the group, too immature to move forward away from the group. Faced with this no-win situation, the hermit lacks the capacity^ to engage the social milieu and surmount obstacles. Instead, the hikikomori is paralyzed by growth panic^dread of movement beyond the stalemated status quo, and inadequate ego strength insures the continuation of codependency within the amae prison. HIKIKOMORI AND BULLYING Kobayashi Hirokatsu, a recluse for seven years, frightens his mother so much that "the only place she feels safe to sleep is in the car with the doors locked." Kobayashi's dreams of being "independent," yet, he wears "a face mask and rubber gloves" when he leaves his room, and says that venturing outside "feels as frightening as trying to step on a cloud."^ Kenji, another hikikomori, has "seldom left his bedroom in five years." When things are going well and he forces himself, "he can almost get to the front door of his mother's small Tokyo apartment before the fear overtakes him."^ Living with his 83-year-old mother, another middleaged recluse has "scarcely left the house in 30 years. "^ Approximately 80 percent of hikikomori are males, but a female voiced a sentiment that expresses the honne, true feeling, of most recluses. "I don't want to be an adult. I want to be a spoiled child."i In the past decade, it has not been the dependent, inner child of the hikikomori that has inflamed the public. Instead, it has been their violent exterior. Sadistic incidents perpetrated by recluses have shocked the nation: a bus hijacking left one dead and four injured;" a girl was kidnapped, imprisoned, and molested for nine years;^^ a youth attacked his mother and told his father he wanted his life insurance money, "So die;"^^ and 17 cases of random violence were sparked by homicidal rage.

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As one suspect said, "I wanted to kill people. I didn't care who."i* Such cases, however, are not the rule; hikikomori rage is usually directed at parents. Kosuke Yamazaki, professor of child psychiatry at Tokai University School of Medicine, argues that hikikomori frustration is "the leading cause of domestic violence in Japan, as lonely, isolated and troubled adult children lash out in a cry for help." Many of Yamazaki's patients have "expressed the fear that they would kill their parents by accident."^^ Yuichi Hattori, a clinical psychologist, concurs, saying that hikikomori are often "like three-year-olds who wander lost in the woods." He estimates that "60 percent of his clients have attacked one or both of their parents. "^^ After initial anxiety, the public perception of recluses moderated. A survey reported that 55 percent of Japanese youths had "gone through a hikikomori experience," and the status of recluse began to become semilegitimate.'^ Even as this normalization was occurring, however, the original estimate of a million recluses was revised radically upward. According to Devin Stewart, Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the number of hikikomori may be as high as 3.6 million people, or "about 3 percent of the entire population."i^ Hattori Yuichi, a noted psychologist and hikikomori expert, goes even further, estimating that "at least 60% of the Japanese population suffers from hikikomori without full withdrawal symptoms" and suggesting that hikikomori is "a national disease."^^ Bullying exemplifies the Japanese aphorismDeru kugi wa utareru, "The nail that sticks out, will be pounded down."^ Often the catalyst for hikikomori,'^^ it is so pervasive that "[m]ore than 80 percent of school-age children have both engaged in and fallen victim to bulljnng."^^ Implicit approval of ijime is "ubiquitous in schools and society at large. "^^ Bullying teaches the indispensable lesson that all Japanese must learn "it is a crime to be different, "^^ a lesson which has been learned so well that "only 40 percent of junior and high school students" believe that those who bully are at fault.^^ If, as deMause suggests, school is a group-fantasy of "humiliation, "^^ bull5ng is the cudgel for achieving that end. In recent years, ijime has fomented controversy because of an epidemic of "bullycide," bullying that leads to suicide. One estimate concluded that since 1985 "at least 200 students" have committed suicide because of buUying.^^ Bullycide's notoriety peaked in November, 2006, when 43 students sent letters to the Ministry of Education complaining of bullying and threatening to kill themselves.^^ The year before the avalanche of letters, the official count

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of ijime cases was 20,143; afterwards, using new guidelines, the total was 124,898.2^ Both teachers and students inflict ijime humiliation. Teachers demean students, saying things such as, "I advise you to take out an insurance policyan imbecile like you is better off dead, "3 or making sexual suggestions, "You've got to have sex because your music lacks oomph. I'll lend you a hand;"3i They hit, slap, and assault their pupils.^^ They tell them to urinate in class, use snot to punish them, and force them to run in the nude; they lift schoolgirls' skirts, fondle their breasts, and rape them.^^ Student bullies intimidate other students verbally and online with taunts that include death wishes: "You should die. I'll poison you;"34 They denigrate students as poison: "You germ!" "You're 0157!" (E. coli O157:H7, the cause of food poisoning)^^ They extort money from students, pull down their pants, force them to expose their genitals, beat, kick, and punch them; they set them on fire and kill them.^^ Bullying focuses on difference, and "foreigners" are frequent targets. A boy whose great-grandfather is American was told by his teacher, "Your blood is filthy, jump from your condominium and die." The boy now suffers from "convulsions and nausea and has said he wants to 'change his blood' and that he does not deserve to live."^'' Student bullying can be even more extreme. Yuhei Kodama was "bullied by a jeering crowd of his classmates," shoved around the school gym, and ended up "suffocated in a closet, where he had been stuffed upside down into the center of a rolled-up gym mat." His crime? He came from a wealthy family that had only been in the area for 17 years.^^ An extraordinary instance of targeting divergence was the harassment of Princess Aiko, the only child of the Crown Prince and Princess of Japan, who was so traumatized by ijime that she refused to go to school.^^ A twelve-year-old who jumped to her death was only potentially different. She suicided after receiving a note from a classmate which read, "I won't be your friend anjmiore and will spread rumors unless you come to the same preparatory school with , "40 me." POISON CONTAINMENT AND THE POISON SYSTEM Japan has long been notorious for the supremacy of the group over the individual.''! One researcher calls attention to the "suffocating nature of Japanese society with its relentless pressures to conform; "^^ another alludes to fierce pressure to conform which fosters "strong in-group feeling and suspicion of the outside. "^^ Schools are the front line of conventionalism. In fact, Miyamoto Masao, formerly of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, argues that the real purpose of education in Japan is "obedience

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to a group." He suggests that this is achieved through psychosocial "castration," in essence, by separating group-dependent children from their self-extensions in the peer group when they are at odds with group norms, thus forcing them to feel "cut off from the group," nakama hazure.'^* So powerful is the influence of the collectivity in Japan that the concept of personhood itself may be moot. As the poet Tamura Ryuichi put it, "O because/We are not individuals/We are the herd, the group/We are the group personified."*^ Historian Patrick Smith has noted that bullying does not end at graduation. "In one form or another it is part of every nihongin's existence from schools days onward."*^ Hiroyuki Araki, a Japanese intellectual, recognized the devastating capacit-y of the group vis--vis the individual. "Should the individual try to express his self ever so slightly," he said, "the merciless severity of the group will crush him."*^ This intimidation compels an individual to function as a poison container for group unhappiness and rage.*^ A bully forges a collection of people into an ingroup*'the embodiment of goodness, by criticizing and attacking the shortcomings, the badness, of a split-off social alter that is attributed to a scapegoat. This badnessnoxious emotional residue from childrearing in a given psycho-class, is injected into the victim to contain the poison. The victim as poison container then embodies the outgroup,^ an antigroup that is the personification of whatever is defined as evil. Proximity to the victim is unwise. The toxin is contagious, so avoidance is vital to protect one's social purity.^^ In this ritual of boundary definition via scapegoat vilification, difference, of any sort, becomes the target, as group trance functioning dominates shared group life. Spontaneously or deliberately, the group condemns divergence as a violation of "group"ness, of "we"-ness, and punishes the offenderthe container of the projected and contaminated social alter. In shared group-fantasies and personal encounters, poison is injected and contained throughout society in "the poison system." Minority groups, females, the poor, and children function in every society as poison containers, and Japan is no exception. Cultural traditions habitually derogate their lower-status members and thereby facilitate the emotional equilibrium of social elites. Yet, from time to time, the normal poison index requires recalibration. Poison eruptions may occur and go uncontained, spewing venom into the collective life of the group. Over time, these noxious outbursts are incorporated into existing group-fantasies to become another shared "resource" to draw upon in the constant effort to maintain homeostasis. Such eruptions are inevitable during times of

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major social upheaval until the creation of a new normal. At that time, individuals and groups trying to manage their pollution problems have access to them through the media and participation in group life. Orthodoxy defends the status quo in every society and injects poison into those who challenge convention. Thus, at the macro level, conservative politicians attack foreigners, derogate women, and despise racial and ethnic "others." Or, in the microcosm, a father brings home his poison overload from work to pick a flght with his wife or kick the dog. Similarly, outgroups, deviants, and the downtrodden manage their poison problem by injecting others less capable of defending themselves. Hence, a hierarchical "poison cascade" flows from top to bottom in society and within small groups, but in "poison return," or "the poison return loop," injected poison at the bottom is redirected upward toward various leaders, a strategy that is omnipresent in families, the political system, and throughout society. Accordingly, an older sister tells her younger sibling, "you were hatched, not born," and the sibling retaliates by spitting at her sister. Or, a politician demeans a subordinate, and in reprisal, he posts a photo-shopped nude of his boss on Facebook. When poison containment is unobtrusive or undercover, it is the equivalent of "blowing off steam," which sometimes has unintended consequences, but when it surfaces into open challenges to or critiques of authority, the potential for "poison index recalibration" exists. In Japan, bullying ordinarily proceeds along customary lines, but occasionally it involves the primary, unprovoked injection of poison into a higher status individual. In such instances we can speak of Lilliputian poison injection, that is, the rich, the attractive, the envied, brought low by the group. THE FAMILIAL ORIGINS OF HIKIKOMORI Husband-absent and father-absent, the Japanese mother-child dyad is parasitic. Japanese mothers "seek to find whatever meaning and satisfaction life has to offer in their relationships with their children," and this quest for significance through an offspring fosters an intense, "arguably claustrophobic and erotically-charged intimacy." Despairing of the possibility of closeness and erotic fulflllment with their husbands, who are away or drunk or sullen or violent or uninterested, they "use their sons as pacifiers" to slake their needs for "companionship, sensory contact, meaning, and sensual pleasure." The needs of the child to mature and become autonomous "are neither recognized nor salient." Instead, it is mama's needs, "hidden in an ideology that stresses the importance of the group and the family," that are prioritized, as okasan "binds her children to

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her. "^2 The mother-son relationship is intensely eroticized and is pivotal in the creation of what is known in Japan as the maza-con, "the mother complex." The amae paradigm is premised on intensifying the motherchild relationship. This is accomplished, according to writer Sano Yoko, when mothers "cultivate" childishness and dependence in her children. Sano cautions that "Japanese mothers are flirting with their own sons," instead of directing their sexual impulses to "a more appropriate person. "^^ Such erotic intimacy can lead to incest or to the marriage clinic of Dr. Yasushi Narabayashi, who reports that "60 percent of his patients" are troubled by a "no-touch syndrome," that is, they refuse to have any physical contact with their wives "for fear that it will lead to sex."^* Instead of loving their wives, these men are afflicted with the "I love mummy" complex. Unable to fall in love with female peers, these men are "Mummy's boys," whose hearts are "filled with their mothers."^^ Missing from this account is the frustration and rage that Japanese mothers endure. Essentially imprisoned with their children for years, these ofukuro, "honorable bags," find themselves caught in the currents of Japan's changing times. Divorce is now accessible, and so is employment, and consequently, unlike the past when children were seen as the fulfillment of every woman's dream, today they are increasingly described in terms of 'the three Kskitsui, kitanai, and kikenthesome, filthy, and dangerous,'"^^ a possibility made even more likely for Japan's growing numbers of single moms. Mothers increasingly experience their relationship to their offspring as an impediment to the realization of their dreams, yet they endure the years of childrearing, "usually without assistance and respite," and when they feel stressed and besieged, "they inject their resentment and fury" into the children.^' This poison injection undoubtedly increases when children go off to school and kyoiku mamas, "education mothers," seeking reflected glory in the accomplishments of their offspring, push them toward academic success, and "take out their frustration, rage, and fear on their offspring with an overdetermined intensity when they make mistakes or seem inadequate."^* Mothers describe these frantic emotions toward their children as "the beginning of hell," like "going mad," "a nightmare," and wish to die, or to drown or smash the children who poison their lives, while others act out their rage by hitting, kicking or beating their progeny.^^ Japanese life is premised on inexorable and omnipresent pressure to conform. The pressure begins with maternal efforts to anticipate the infant's needs and provide for them before the child is aware of them. In the process, individuality is thwarted. Instead of the child having the freedom

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to experience the world tabula rasa, maternal omnipresence and the (m)other's projections of the child become the template for ontological development. Not entitled to its own experiences, the child encounters an inauthentic, other-defined reality based on maternal subjectivity. Denied the opportunity for sensory engagement in the unfiltered ebb and flow of existence, the child experiences a predigested, conformity-predisposed world where self and mother are amorphous, where permeable, partial self-definitions (including maternal anger and desire) and inchoate inner urgings (including infantile rage and impulse) are jumbled together higgledy-piggledy and become the distorted prism through which the child comprehends reality. A self-other hodgepodge, amae, is the result. These are the familial dynamics that undergird the explosion of reported child abuse in Japan, and the subsequent long-standing fear of domestic violence. Mother injects poison into the child through childhood and adolescence, and eventually the child reaches a tipping point. Perhaps spurred on by bullying at school, perhaps simply energized by continued poison injection within the family, the child explodes and attacks family members, especially motherthe chief injector of lethal emotion. This interaction between mother and child is the origin for the poisonous feeling that Japanese children experience toward the group. Mother and child form the first group, a group of two, and beneath the public veneer of equanimity, lurk darker, inchoate longings and rages. Mother is good and bad, mama and the Dragon Mother, evoking intense longing and affection, side by side with fear, anxiety, and loathing. The child cannot endure the terror of being destroyed in such a relationship and therefore splits off a portion of the self to form a social alter^^ with which to survive when terror threatens annihilation. In terms of the issue of ijime, mother is the first bully in the child's life. One flees the Dragon Mother by creating the social alter and injecting it into others to attack, while clinging frantically to loving, caring, mama; and one runs home to her, too, after the bullies at school do their worst; and when the poisonous rage toward mother grows too intense, the only escape is to barricade oneself in a room; and sometimes even that barrier is breached, and homicidal impulses are acted out. In the throes of their misery, most hikikomori are said to feel, in a particularly apropos metaphor, "trapped inside of a seemingly endless tunnel."^! Ontogenetically, such a passageway would be the birth canal, implying that the hikikomori feels like an infant, trapped inside a suffocating space, struggling to be born.^^ Serendipitously, the confession of a man who admitted committing a double homicide employs a similar trope.

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The man told investigators that he executed the crime because he had "nowhere to stay." Elaborating, he continued, "My father and sister robbed me of my space to live in."^^ In essence, this is the epiphany of the hikikomori, children robbed of their space to live, breath, or develop by a mother, robbed of herself by the previous generation, in a society premised on seemingly endless sacrifice. In an "Era of Decline" characterized by "a panic of the mind,"^* isolating oneself in one's room to avoid poison injection and preserve a shred of personhood, may, from one perspective, seem to be a heroic act of protest against conformity. From another viewpoint, however, it is the epitome of growth panic. As Marshall Korenblum, Associate professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto put it, "these youngsters are afraid to grow up." They are "essentially going on strike, refusing to confront the challenges of adulthood and thereby avoiding the risk of failure."^^ POISON AND POPULAR CULTURE For the psychohistorian, popular culture can function as barometer for gauging the reaction to maternal poison injection. By examining Japanese manga and the celebration of protest anality, it is easy to observe the group-fantasy reaction to amae childrearing and the rage against the group-other that it inculcates.^^ Recluses hide in their homes to escape the torture of interaction with others, and the essence of the pain of those interactions involves poison injection. Hikikomori have been pushed beyond the tipping point by bullying and experience poison injection overload, isolating themselves in their homes and locking the doors. Anal group-fantasies in comic books express the rage of first encounter with poison injection and the ecstasy of release. The stories demonstrate the joy of contamination and degradation of the other by means of the poison injection loop, as in the old axiom, "I'm rubber and you're glue/Everything you say bounces off me/and sticks on you." Anal protest is "the immature cry of the oppressed child yearning to be free," protesting group intrusiveness into personal space by dumping "the emotional pollution of repressed hatred into containers outside the self," thus "cleansing and elevating the self, while dirtying and degrading the other. "^^ Japanese children rage against the loss of independence and freedom that amae childrearing fosters. The rage is directed indiscriminately at the world that impinges on the individual, at the group that enforces the dictum, "the nail that sticks out will be pounded down," and at the first enforcer of groupism, the Dragon Mother. "Japanese anal protest occurs when autonomy has been systematically overwhelmed by

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groupism, when appeasement has been deliberately invoked in conjunction with terrorism in the service of maternal management. "^^
Kenneth Alan Adams, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, is a Contributing Editor to i^e Journal of Psychohistory and has been writing about Japan for a number of years.

ENDNOTES
1. Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Greated Its Own Lost Generation.

New York: Vintage Books, 2006, p. 9. 2. Ibid., p. 54. 3. See, for example, the pioneering works of Dr. John Snow in ending a cholera epidemic in London by tracing its transmission to a particular water pump, or the results of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Simmelweis in lowering infant mortality by disinfection, i.e., hand-washing. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How it Ghanged Science, Gities, and the Modem World. Riverhead Books: New York, 2007; Ignaz Semmelweis, The Etiology, Goncept, and Prophylaxis of Ghildbed Fever, trans, by K. Codell Carter. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. 4. Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun, p. 52. 5. See Erik H. Erikson, Ghitdhood and Society, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, pp. 247-274. Erikson describes the importance of experiencing a ratio of trust over mistrust for the child to achieve the ego strength necessary to function effectively within social settings. This issue is especially pertinent for Japan. 6. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, pp. 94-95. 7. Jonathan Watts, "Japan's teen hermits spread fear," The Observer, November 17, 2002. 8. Michael Zielenziger, "Deep pessimism infecting aspects of Japanese society," Knight Ridder Newspapers, December 18, 2002. 9. Michael Hoffman, "Escalating agoraphobia a festering social problem," Japan Times, April 15, 2001. 10. Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun, pp. 17, 75. 11. "Cops storm hijacked bus, detain knife-wielding boy," Japan Times, May 5, 2000. 12. "Kidnapper's prison term cut," Japan Times, December 11, 2002. 13. Phil Rees, "Hikikomori violence," BBG News, October 13, 2002. 14. "Social isolation leading to violence / Recent spate of random attacks carried out by introverts of all ages," Yomiuri Shimbun, July 11, 2009. 15. Michael Zielenziger, "Deep pessimism infecting many aspects of Japanese society." 16. Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun, p. 72. 17. Kaori Shoji, "Multitasking recluses find route to respectability," Japan Times, July 11, 2006. 18. For the original estimate, see Phil Rees, "Japan: The Missing Million," BBG News, October 20, 2002. For the revised estimate, see Devin Stewart, "Slowing Japan's Galapagos Syndrome," Hufftngton Post, April 29, 2010. 19. "Psychologist Hattori Yuichi Describes the Japanese Family and the Hikikomori Epidemic," The Family Fomm, No. 7, June 2007.

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20. Quoted in Jared Taylor, Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the 'Japanese Miracle.' New York: Quill, 1983, p. 92. 21. "Social withdrawal acute among young: survey," Japan Times, April 13, 2001; Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun, pp. 50-53. 22. "80% of kids either bullies, victims," Japan Times, June 27, 2009. 23. Shoko Yoneyama, "The Era of Bullying: Japan under Neoliberalism," Asia-Paciflc Journal, Vol.1-3-09, December 31, 2008. 24. Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001, p. 286. 25. "Majority of schoolchildren don't believe those who bully classmates are at fault," Mainichi Shimbun, November 7, 2006. 26. Lloyd deMause, Foundaons of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 138. 27. Shoko Yoneyama, "The Era of Bullying." 28. Ibid. 29. "Bullying up by six times under new poll criteria," Japan Times, November 16, 2007. 30. Ken SchooUand, Shogun's Ghost: The Dark Side of Japanese Education. New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1990, pp. 73-74. 31. "Schoolgirls' woodwind instructor tells them sex is good for their musical talents," Mainichi Shimbun, November 29, 2007. 32. "Teacher hits 83 students on head for being late," Yomiuri Shimbun, July 12, 2008; "Teacher slaps whole class of elementary school students in face," Mainichi Shimbun, ]anuaty 12, 2008; "Boy, 9, concussed after teacher assaults him," Yomiuri Shimbun, December 23, 2007. 33. "Teacher told student to urinate in classroom," Yomiuri Shimbun, May 30, 2007; "Primary school teacher uses kisses, snot to punish students," Mainichi Shimbun, October 27, 2010; "Teacher who made schoolboys strip at knifepoint charged," Mainichi Shimbun, February 28, 2008; "Ex-school baseball club members to seek damages for being forced to run naked," Mainichi Shimbun, April 5, 2008; "Teacher quits after punishment for lifting up schoolgirls' skirts," Mainichi Shimbun, December 11, 2007; "Nagasaki high school teacher sacked for squeezing schoolgirl's breasts," Mainichi Shimbun, December 17, 2007; "Elementary school teacher gets 30 years for raping pupils," Japan Times, March 19, 2010. 34. "High school girl busted for poisoning classmate," Mainichi Shimbun, March 13, 2007. 35. Sheryl WuDunn, "For Japan's Children, A Japanese Torment," New York Times, September 8, 1996. 36. "Police end student extortion case with three more names," Japan Times, June 6, 2000; "Student who committed suicide had trousers pulled down on day of death," Mainichi Shimbun, November 16, 2006; "Bullying caused boy's suicide, high court rules," Japan Times, March 29, 2007; ""Three boys busted for beating 'cheeky' junior high school students," Mainichi Shimbun, December 11, 2006; "Students arrested for beating classmate to death," Mainichi Shimbun, November 21, 2009; "Students face charges for setting teammate on fire," Yomiuri Shimbun, December 6, 2007; "2 teens face criminal prosecution for fatal bashing of student," Japan Today, Qctober 13, 2007. 37. "Lawyers aid schoolboy harassed over American heritage," Japan Times, October 9, 2003.

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38. David E. Snger, "Student's Killing Displays Dark Side of Japan's Schools," New York Times, April 3, 1993. 39. "Princess Aiko unable to go to school after boys treated her harshly," Mainichi Daily News, March 5, 2010. 40. "Parents sue state, educators over daughter's buUying-linked suicide," Japan Times, November 18, 2006. 41. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "Protest Anality in Japanese GroupEantasies," Journal of Psychohistory 15 (No.2 Eall)1987: 113-145, esp. p. 113. 42. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and other Japanese Cultural Heroes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 91. 43. Ezra F. Vogel, Japan's New Middle Class, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1963, p. 124. Also see Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1976, p. 28. 44. See Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons, pp. 285, 287. 45. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, eds.. The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 227. 46. Patrick Smith, Japan: A Reinterpretation. New York: Vintage Books, 1997, p. 80. On bullying in school, see also Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons, pp. 291-2. 47. Quoted in Jared Taylor, Shadows of the Rising Sun, p. 119. 48. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 244, 447. 49. John J. Macionis, Sociology, 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 168-169. 50. Ibid. 51. Poison anxiety is an important component of traditional Japanese life. The phrase, Kuro wa mi no doku," means "Anxieties are poison to a person," and Doku wo motte doku wo seisu, is "Control poison with poison." Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings. Norman: Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965/1987, pp. 169, 174. With regard to poison, or contamination, avoidance, "in few cultures is it [purification] taken as setiously and is it as much a part of daily life as in Japan." Conversely, "every form of pollution, including wounds, sores, blood, death, and even simple uncleanliness is to be feared." Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask, p. 9. In World War II, the Japanese "declared themselves to be neither physically nor intellectually superior to others, but rather inherently more virtuous." And their "sublime virtue" was "purity." John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 205. 52. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "The Phallic Planet," Journal ofPsychohistory 28(No.l Summer) 2000: 24-52, esp. p. 31; Muriel Jolivet, Japan: The Childless Society?, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 77-106, 182. 53. Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994, pp. 112-113. 54. On sexlessness, see Eric Prideaux, "Until dearth us do part," Japan Times, December 12, 2004. 55. Richard McGregor, Japan Swings: Politics, Culture and Sex in the New Japan. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1996, p. 248. On incest, see Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest," Joumai of Psychohistory 19(No.2 Fall) 1992: 123-164, esp., p. 156; Kenneth Alan Adams, "The Sexual Abuse of Children in Contemporary

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

Japanese Families," Joumal of Psychohistory 34(No.3 Winter) 2007: 178-207, esp. pp. 187-196. Muriel Jolivet, Japan: The Childless Society?, p. 42. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "The Phallic Planet," p. 32. Ibid. Muriel Jolivet, Japan: The Childless Society?, pp. 10-30. Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 100-106. "Social recluse problem." Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 244-317. "Shut-in says he killed family because they took his space," Japan Times, November 24, 2004. Roger Pulvers, "In an'Era of Decline,' let's look to youth to quell 'panic of the mind,'" Japan Times, February 8, 2009. Marshall Korenblum, "Shutting Themselves In," New York Times, January 29, 2006. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "Protest Anality in Japanese GroupFantasies," pp. 113-145; Adams and Hill, "The Graveyard of the Gods," Joumal of Psychohistory 17(No.2 Fall) 1989: 103-153. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "Protest Anality in Japanese GroupFantasies," p. 123. Ibid.

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