Affliction

Beunos Aires, mein wunderkinder. Owing to the last of the A2s, various weddings, anniversaries and over-indulgent exploits to Brest (which is a town in the Northwest of France, by the way) and a villa with a swimming pool in the Algarve, I'm sadly going to be worked to death over the next couple of months, and so, to the disappointment of all of you millions of readers, Empathies is going to undergo a brief(ish) respite. However, the archive holds around 43 posts, so to counteract your sorrowful despair, you can wade in the clear warm tropical waters of my previous prose.

Or not. Your call.

If anyone has any holiday reading suggestions, they would be gladly received. At the moment, it's looking like Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy and Faust are going to have to be painfully spread out over two weeks in France. However, there will be many other distractions.. as I've already planned, heh heh heh. Actually, if the town named after a mammary gland isn't too many miles away from our seaside five-bedroom stone cottage with walk-in showers and three floors, I might succumb to a midnight town-sign-stealing adventure. After all, who wouldn't want a sign saying 'Brest' on their bedroom door? Okay, probably quite a lot of people. But for those easily amused, the prospect is priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard.

The main thing though, and we must remember to always keep a focus on the main thing, for danger of losing our way through this hazard-filled journey we call Life, is that this section of France is famous for it's cider.

Oh happy day.

And at 3 euros a bottle, it's a West Country paradise. And after a couple of bottles, it doesn't even taste all that bad. I know that true poets are supposed to sup (or guzzle) absinthe, but I believe it's stil illegal in le France, so that'll have to wait 'til the Scandinavian adventure.

Anyway, I must cut off my reminiscent reveries, for the sun is setting, and way still needs to be wended through the treacherous Eastern woods back to my cabin. It's a bit of a pain to have to tackle the wolves and gremlins in half-light.

And so, to leave you with a racist quote from the master of irony...

"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up"

- Oscar Wilde

Hikikomori

Hikikomori are a Japanese social phenomenon. The term refers to both the 'disorder', and the people who suffer from it. They are usually adolescents, or young adults, who withdraw from society and family in an extreme fashion, locking themselves in their rooms for periods of over 6 months, many known to carry on for 20 to 30 years. Obviously, by this time they wouldn't still be young adults. Doctors don't believe it to be a disease, but rather a social phenomenon, triggered by events in the lives of the affected. Pressures from schools and inability to express thoughts to family are thought to be primary factors, as well as broken romance.

One boy in Tokyo at 17 sits in his kitchen, silent and refusing to let anyone in. This has been the case for the past three years, when he was unhappy at school and begin to play truant. One day he walked into the kitchen, shut the door, and has been in there since. The family has since built a new kitchen, at first having to eat takeaways or cook off a makeshift stove. His mother Yoshiko takes meals to his door 3 times a day. The bathroom is adjacent to the kitchen, though he only bathes once in 6 months. Photos of the boy prior to his withdrawal show him as plump and cheerful. He was then taunted by a classmate who wrote hate letters and scrawled abusive graffiti about him in the schoolyard.

Western doctors are puzzled, for this seems to be a distinctly Japanese or Eastern condition, dissimilar to agoraphobia, which does occur in the West. Where the typical western father might kick down the bedroom/kitchen door and sort out the child, in Japan this is treated as a 'phase'. Social workers and courts rarely get involved, and it is considered as a problem within the family, not a psychological illness.

Japanese history, folklore and poetry celebrate the nobility of solitude, and until the mid 19th century, Japan had cut itself off from the world for 200 years.

Mothers and sons have an incredibly symbiotic relationship, often looking after their children until they are 30 or 40 years old.

Sufferers are most often male, specifically the eldest son.

There are over a million who suffer from the phenomenon in Japan...