Forget cars and consumer goods, Japan's latest great export is lazy young bums
MSN-Mainichi Daily News, Jan 26
...according to Spa! (1/31), the Land of the Rising Sun is sending out what it calls sotokomori -- lazy, young bums who travel overseas and congregate only with other like-minded Japanese who draw on the almost national trait of being hikikomori, or withdrawing from the world.
Sotokomori are almost exclusively in their 20s or 30s, making quick cash through high-paying jobs, then head off to live in cheap haunts overseas. But instead of broadening their horizons and learning more about other lands, these Japanese only hang out with their fellow countrymen, almost always at Japanese-owned businesses and spend their time talking about their homeland.
"In Japan, you can pick up a quick 1 million yen working part-time and then using that money to fund a long-term stay in a country like Thailand, Cambodia, India or Nepal, where the prices are cheap," travel writer Yuji Shimokawa, who coined the sotokomori tag and has followed the trend for a while, tells Spa! "These people who go overseas and then become hikikomori are the sotokomori tribe. They have no interest in traveling, or the towns or country that they're living in. There're loads of these people who don't even leave the rooms they're staying in for days at a time." ...
