Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  Morrissey was the ideal pop idol for this new age, which prized emotional literacy but was wary of neediness. Despite the occasional glimpse of it in his song lyrics, he mostly avoided the self-hating timidity that is the other side of abandoning your heart to another. The source of his personal allure was that he seemed able to bare his soul without becoming a social casualty; he could crown himself the king of the losers but address his people from a place of strength. While the shyer and shoegazing types from other indie bands lost career momentum because attention did not sit well with them, Morrissey reveled in it. It was unusual to encounter someone so secure in his misanthropy—someone who, in an age that made the search for intimacy and empathy its chief preoccupations, refused them both. He was a fittingly paradoxical figure to emerge at the end of a long but inconclusive war against shyness. For Morrissey showed that it was still okay to be shy, that shyness could even acquire an inverted glamour, as long as you could make it look like a form of cultural dissidence, a sort of quiet defiance against the square world.

  After the Smiths broke up in 1987, Morrissey’s taedium vitae became such a confidently delivered shtick that it swerved into self-parody. He told one interviewer that he lived above “the slimy, unstoppable urges.” The great thing about music, he told another, was that it was “communication with people without the extreme inconvenience of actually phoning anybody up.” For those messages not conveyable in song, he conversed by fax. Appearing on Desert Island Discs, he said he couldn’t wait to be a castaway. His chosen luxury was a bed because “going to bed is the highlight of my day . . . I like to be hidden and I like to sink . . . It’s the brother of death.”45

  But people like Morrissey, who put their shyness to work in the service of a pitch-perfect persona that walks a tonal tightrope act between self-pity and self-confidence, are rare indeed. He thrived as an isolate and a malcontent; most of us do not. Someone so coolly and effortlessly above the fray is a seductive role model for a shy person, one that stops you from having to confront your own “low level of rewardingness to others.” Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexceptional and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.

  There are no accolades for reaching this kind of accommodation with the world, for being mediocre at being ordinary. Other people never applaud you for not seeming shy, probably because they are more worried about fooling you with the same trick. No one hails Bobby Charlton for doggedly wrestling with shyness all his life. Even now he prefers to give interviews over the phone and dreads public speaking, despite being able to talk very well without notes and often with feeling. Not for him the defiant stance of the self-confidently shy, just an admirable getting on with life and living, which is its own form of gallantry. He never talks about his shyness and has written two books of autobiography that ignore it completely. He will only admit to wishing he had worked harder at school “so today I would be able to explain myself better.”46

  8

  The New Ice Age

  In 1990 a newly qualified psychiatrist, Saito¯ Tamaki, began working in the outpatient program in Sofukai Sasaki Hospital in Funabashi, just outside Tokyo. He soon noticed that many parents were coming to him with one very similar problem. Their teenage or young adult children, usually the eldest or only son, had stopped going to school or work. They had locked themselves in their bedrooms, taped the windows shut and refused to come out, except to go to the toilet or to collect the meals that their mothers left on trays outside their doors. They often slept through the day and spent the night watching TV, listening to CDs, playing computer games, and self-medicating on shochu, Japanese vodka.

  The retreat of these young people could last for years, well into their twenties or even thirties, in what Saito¯ called an “adolescence without end.” Parents often felt responsible for and ashamed of what had happened to their children, so the problem went underreported, and the numbers were hard to gauge. This is the methodological bind when measuring any form of shyness: by its nature it is more likely to be unspoken and invisible; absence of evidence is, however, not evidence of absence. But since Saito¯ came across as many of these recluses as he did schizophrenics, of which there were about a million sufferers in Japan, he boldly estimated that there were a million such young recluses as well. Using a word that had been floating around since the 1980s, meaning “to withdraw or shut oneself in,” he named these young people hikikomori.

  In 2001 the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare officially named hikikomori a social problem, defining them as young people who refused to leave their homes for six months or more. Outreach workers, called rentaru oneesan, or “rental big sisters,” were employed to visit them. In a country with a high proportion of only children, these surrogate siblings tried to coax the hikikomori out of their homes to live in halfway-house dormitories where they could learn to interact with their peers over games of cards or volleyball.

  In the 1980s the Japanese had identified the widespread problem of karoshi, “death by overwork.” The hikikomori looked like similar casualties of Japan’s single-track educational and career escalator, which became even more brutal with the bursting of the Asian economic bubble in the early 1990s. Fewer young people could now rely on the jobs-for-life system of shushoku katsudo, the mass hiring of new graduates by the big firms, and had to enter a precarious new world of low-wage, dead-end work. Those young people who felt alienated or left behind by this new social contract usually had families affluent enough, in this still prosperous nation, to feed and shelter them even if they brought no money into the household. In a country with high rents and cramped living space, twenty-something Japanese often still lived with their parents anyway. The sociologist Masahiro Yamada, in a pithy but pitiless phrase, called them “parasite singles.”1

  Many believed the hikikomori could only have emerged in Japan, within the unique collective mentality of the Shimaguni, or “island nation.” Some traced the problem back to the samurai warrior tradition of training in solitude so that others could not see one’s weaknesses. Others linked it to the elaborate and anxiety-inducing politeness that rules daily life in Japan, where people whisper when speaking into phones in the street, public toilets are fitted with “sound Princesses,” which drown out the noise of peeing with a fake flushing sound, and the pervasive habit of bowing even extends to vending machines, which bob deferentially as they deliver your drink. The Japanese word for “shy,” hitomishiri, literally means “coming to know people” and refers specifically to the moment a baby learns to tell its mother apart from a stranger and cries when held by the latter. It is seen as a healthy stage in the child’s development, and shyness, by extension, is often kindly viewed.

  The high-functioning cousins of the hikikomori are the otaku, the young nerds who have fueled Japan’s market for computer games and comic books and who are often found in the maid cafés of Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district. Here waitresses dress up as French maids, an image fetishized in anime and manga, and play Connect 4 or jan-ken (rock-scissors-paper), kneel by the table to stir milk and sugar into patrons’ coffee, and even spoonfeed them while addressing them as “master.” The success of the 2004 novel Densha otoko (Train Man), about a shy computer programmer who meets a beautiful sophisticate on a train when he stands up to a drunk harassing her, was clearly fed by the same kind of wish-fulfilling fantasies.

  The work of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has often explored these themes of withdrawal and loneliness among his young compatriots. His novel After Dark is set near one of Tokyo’s nighttime districts (probably Shinjuku’s Kabukichō, the “Sleepless Town”) on a single night from midnight to 7 a.m. Its subjects are those who, after the last train to the suburbs has gone, withdraw to the secluded booths of all-night diners and karaoke bars. At the novel’s center are two hikikomori-like young women, Eri and Mari, who are sisters but who
do not talk to each other. Eri has been sleeping for two months, doing the minimum she needs to keep alive without intravenous feeding, eating the meals left on her desk and going to the toilet when no one is around. Mari was bullied at school, which made her throw up her food and gave her crippling stomach aches, so in her mid-teens she simply stopped going. She has now recovered but still lives largely at night and is drawn to the Alphaville Love Hotel. Here couples stay by the hour, choosing their windowless room from large photos and numbered buttons on display in the foyer.

  Like many of Murakami’s novels, After Dark is both typically Japanese and more widely suggestive of the existential anomie in any modern capitalist city, with its fraying of community, weak social links, and itinerant living. The discreet Japanese love hotel, where the bill is settled by using an automated cash machine or by passing money to a hand poking out from behind frosted glass, is not so very different from the global non-place of the budget chain hotel, a smart-card, chip-and-pin world that allows us to complete our transactions without speaking to a soul. These are the kinds of anaesthetized, anonymous places that shy people often find consoling because they are so benignly indifferent to us. They allow us to be in public and in private at once, ignored and invisible but with humanity all around us, like semi-gregarious ghosts.

  Saito¯ Tamaki certainly did not think the hikikomori were the result of a purely Japanese pathology. He saw them instead as part of a problem faced by all postindustrial societies ruled by free market economics, where young people have to cope with casualized work and an uncertain future. The difference lies in how and where their alienation shows itself. In the West, in a culture that values mobility, confining teenagers to their homes—“grounding” them, as Americans say—is a punishment. But in Japan children are taught from an early age the distinction between the safe, intimate space of uchi (inside) and the intimidatingly formal world of soto (outside); the routine of taking one’s shoes off on entering a home underlines this sense of transition into another realm. Saitō claimed that hikikomori were also emerging in South Korea and in parts of Europe, such as Italy and Spain, where many young people still live with their parents. In Britain and the United States, alienated youths are more likely to be on the streets.2

  For Saito¯, the hikikomori are simply a local symptom of something more general: a modern life that isolates us from one another. Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, points to a similar phenomenon in America that he calls “cynical shyness.” The most likely sufferers are friendless young men who, finding it hard to form relationships, retreat into a fantasy life and dehumanize the people who reject them. Such a sensibility infected the “trench coat mafia” of Littleton, Colorado, a group of disaffected young men at Columbine High School from whose number Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold emerged to shoot their teacher and twelve of their classmates dead. In 2007, Carducci told a meeting of the American Psychological Association that those responsible for the eight deadly high school shootings in the last ten years had all been cynically shy. Time magazine reported Carducci’s findings under the headline “When Shyness Turns Deadly.”3

  A commonly diagnosed phobia in Japan is taijin kyofusho: “fear of interpersonal relations.” Those suffering from taijin kyofusho worry that their presence upsets others, either through excessive eye contact, blushing, body odor, or breaking wind. It is especially common among young men, the group most likely to become hikikomori.

  Phobias are real feelings, but they are also ways we think and talk about those feelings. They allow us to cut up the rich tapestry of human misery into patchwork pieces that can be given a name and a set of symptoms. Similar kinds of phobia recur in different historical times and places, but subtly altered and going by different names. Taijin kyofusho has been diagnosed in Japan for over a century, but it was only in 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association added the somewhat similar “social phobia” to the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III).

  A young South African psychiatrist, Isaac Marks, first diagnosed social phobia in the mid-1960s while working at London’s Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley Hospital. In a review of the Maudsley’s phobic caseload he observed that roughly 8 percent of the patients were anxious about social situations and would tremble when they became the focus of attention. Their symptoms did not quite fit the most common diagnosis, agoraphobia. Agoraphobics worried about being in crowds, but theirs was more a fear of being crushed or enclosed by a mass of people than, as with the social phobics, a fear of the judgmental gaze. Agoraphobia was suffered mostly by women, but social phobia did not discriminate by gender and had its own symptoms, including a whole set of fears of doing things in front of others: eating, drinking, vomiting, blushing, speaking, and writing.4 Marks’s findings, however, were meant to be tentative, and he had mixed feelings about the fact that they led eventually to the inclusion of social phobia in the DSM.

  The DSM has long been influential in America, where your health insurance will pay to treat your mental illness only if you have a diagnosis with a DSM code. But DSM-III’s aim was to bring global uniformity to psychiatry. It succeeded brilliantly, being translated into many languages and becoming the standard reference work for mental disorders around the world. Shyness began to enter clinical nomenclature, along with official means of measuring it: the Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale, the Social Reticence Scale, the McCroskey Shyness Scale. Each scale had its itemized checklists and scores, giving an ill-defined and vague set of feelings the gloss of measurability. Those judged on the McCroskey scale, for instance, were invited to agree or disagree with statements like “I don’t talk much,” “Other people think I am very quiet,” and “I am a shy person.”

  In Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, Christopher Lane suggests that the publication of DSM-III was a key moment in psychiatry: the start of a biomedical turn which now saw mental illnesses mainly as disorders to be treated with drugs. The Freudians had been losing clout since the 1960s because their treatments seemed long, labor-intensive, and only erratically effective. In 1993 a drug initially intended as an antidepressant, Paxil, was marketed in the United States as alleviating what the DSM now referred to as “social anxiety disorder.” “You know what it’s like to be allergic to cats, or dust, or pollen. You sneeze, you itch, you’re physically ill,” one advertisement said. “Now, imagine that you felt allergic to people.”5

  Drugs designed for other purposes were soon redeployed and pressed into service. Prozac and Zoloft, better known as antidepressants, were also found to alleviate social anxiety. So were Oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” meant to increase bonding between parent and child, and Quetiapine, used initially for schizophrenia. Within the pharmaceutical industry this rematching of drugs to diseases was known as “condition branding.” Critics called it “disease mongering”—part of an ominous aspiration to rid society of the introverted or awkward. The war against shyness, it seemed, had opened up a new front in the huge hinterland of the unhappy.

  The historian of science Ian Hacking has argued that what he calls “transient mental illnesses”—those, such as social phobia, that seem to bubble up only at particular moments in history—are partly a product of the discourses that allow them to be named, described, and observed. In a kind of looping effect, doctors create these disorders with their diagnoses and treatments, and patients unconsciously define themselves accordingly. But this does not mean that transient mental illnesses are simply a result of voguish taxonomies; they are also real, felt afflictions. Mental illnesses are transient not just because we find new names for the same feelings but also because certain feelings find an “ecological niche”—a hospitable habitat in which to thrive at a particular moment. The symptoms shift as the opportunity to manifest them shifts. For instance, many of the fears that Marks’s social phobics had in the 1960s about writing in public—secretaries scared they would be unable to take shorthand,
others afraid to enter a bank in case their hands shook while writing a check—have since been overtaken by technology.6

  “What is become of all the Shyness in the World?” wrote Jane Austen, anticipating this idea, in a letter to her sister Cassandra in 1807. “Moral as well as Natural Diseases disappear in the progress of time, & new ones take their place. Shyness & the Sweating Sickness have given way to Confidence & Paralytic complaints.”7 A century or so ago the mentally distressed suffered fainting fits, convulsions, or dissociative fugues; now they suffer from clinical depression, eating disorders, or social phobia. In each age the symptoms are real enough, and so presumably is the misery.

  All forms of mental illness exist on a continuum with what we need, for our own sanity, to see as normality. There have been times in my life when I have avoided queues and crowds, locked myself in my office and ignored knocking on the door, or failed to answer the ringing telephone. But when does sadness tip into pathology? I have so often seen the symptoms in others—young people unable to walk beyond the threshold of their own front door for weeks at a time, hyperventilating at the idea of entering a packed room, floored by the thought of eating or drinking in a public place—that it has crossed my mind that modern life might indeed be an enabling niche for the anxious and the shy.

  In the keynote address at the first international conference on shyness, organized in Cardiff in 1997 by the British Psychological Society, Philip Zimbardo argued that shyness was becoming an epidemic. Noting that the number of people identifying as shy in his Stanford Shyness Survey had risen to 60 percent, he feared the arrival of a “new ice age” of noncommunication. He blamed the illusion of contact offered by e-mail, the Internet, and mobile phones, even the replacement of cashiers by ATMs, all of which loosened the “social glue” of casual contact.8 By the year 2000, he predicted, it would be easy to go a whole day without talking to anyone else.