Hikikomori: The Postmodern Hermits of Japan
I have a theory about Western and Japanese nerds. It&#x27;s not really worked through, so don&#x27;t get too angry if something is wrong.<p>In the western, and especially American, stereotypical school environment of the &#x27;90s, the bookish nerds were social outcasts and bullied. There was a strong connection between nerdyness, not fitting in and intelligence. The nerds sat at home and learned programming on their own. Of course it turned out intelligence is very useful. The nerds ended up producing a lot of valuable things, such as much of the internet.<p>In Japan, there wasn&#x27;t the same too-cool-for-school attitude, and the smart kids did alright socially. Good for them, but it meant they didn&#x27;t spend their high school and college years programming alone. That eventually hurt the Japanese tech industry, who couldn&#x27;t just hire self-taught programmers and had to wait for the school system to figure it out or teach their employees to program from scratch.<p>Back in school, there will always be social outcasts of course, but in Japan, the average &quot;nerd&quot; was no more intelligent than people in general, maybe the opposite. I think they were more artistic than their western counterpart. The Japanese nerd-sphere were making amazing amateur manga (dōjinshi) back when art on the western web was little more than scribbles in Ms Paint. Sadly for them, making manga porn doesn&#x27;t pay like programming. With no way to support themselves and no social status, the Hikikomori hide from the outside world.<p>What makes all this interesting for us is that the west appears to follow in Japan&#x27;s tracks. Today&#x27;s high school students are much more diligent and better behaved than 20-30 years ago. Meanwhile nerd culture isn&#x27;t as intellectual any more. Japan has a group of online right-wingers that love to harass opponents. They are called netto-uyoku and are just like the alt-right, except they appeared a decade earlier, and their racism is directed at Koreans and Chinese.<p>I have no doubt we will see a wave of Hikikomori in the west. They may be different. Maybe they will live alone and survive on delivery food instead of living with their parents.