Shijo Maki and Healthy Copium Consumption

Let me introduce you to my waifu, Shijo Maki.

Unlike the rest of the characters in Kaguya-sama, most of whom have troubled backgrounds one way or another and probably need therapy, Maki is a girl with a generally healthy outlook on life and has a good emotional support system in the form of her friends and family. From what we can see, she has a father (168 6) and a twin brother (161 3) who care about her. She has a group of close friends who support her (4koma 5 1), and she even manages to befriend Kaguya (a girl she had beef with due to a family feud) due to the bonding experiences they had, namely going through a haunted house (125 4) and watching porn together (168 19, it makes sense in context I promise). Licitra-Kleckler and Waas (1993) found that in 11 to 12th grade adolescents, those who had a higher degree of support from their peers also tended to report fewer symptoms of depression: it can be said that Maki's wide support system provides her with a "safety net" from falling into depression than she would have without them.

As we can see from her character sheet, she is described as being similar to Kaguya in specs, boasting a high level of intelligence among other things. In the manga, this is shown academically in the form of her consistent placement in the top spots for every exam mentioned in the series so far (30.5 14, 111.1 4, 201.1 12), and athletically by how she picks up baseball batting very quickly (196 11).

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the manga, she found herself in the unfortunate situation of seeing her crush successfully asking her best friend out in front of her. This has been the cause of much suffering and stress for her, and much of Maki's appearances in the manga focus on how she deals with this stressor of hers. Licitra-Kleckler and Waas (1993) also found that 11 to 12th grade adolescent girls generally had a higher reactivity to stressful life events than boys of the corresponding age would have, and thus this event probably comes as a larger source of stress for Maki than if it had happened to Mikado, for example.

From this panel, it is evident that Maki sometimes engages in unconstructive rumination (repetitive thinking about things in the past regarding the causes and consequences of events and feelings). She can't stop thinking about what she could've done, and across the manga, we don't really see this train of thought be resolved in any way: it's in the past, and she can't do anything to change the "what could have been"s regarding Tsubasa. Rumination is a key factor in the onset and maintenance of depression — and even following remission from depression, rumination can still remain as a symptom (Watkins et al., 2007). Furthermore, one theory also proposes that when a person intensely ruminates in a negative fashion, it repeatedly increases the magnitude of those negative emotions in a sort of positive feedback loop, to the point that they may engage in dysregulated behaviours in order to distract from that rumination such as binge-eating and non-suicidal self-injury (Selby et al., 2008). It seems that Maki's negative rumination can be deleterious to her mental health, and may lead to many negative outcomes if left as is.

However, rumination in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing; there can be constructive outcomes to doing this depending on whether the rumination is actually helpful: one of the major benefits that it can bring when done correctly is that it can actually help people "to come to terms with traumatic and upsetting events" (Watkins, 2008). Unlike characters like Osaragi, whose relationship with Iino deteriorated due to her obsession with Ishigami, Maki somehow manages to be able to cope with her emotions without resorting to the use of dysfunctional behaviour to distract herself from it. Let's take a further look at Maki's sense of self, as well as several coping mechanisms that she uses to deal with a source of stress.

Maki's sense of self

In the Iceguya chapter where we are introduced to the concept of personas, Akasaka uses Maki as an example when he explains how the concept of one's self can change in the presence of different people. Different people change in different amounts between situations; some people's sense of self is highly consistent between scenarios, while others (like Kaguya) change greatly when faced with different people. Evidently, Maki is of the latter category; the way she treats her brother, her friends, Kashiwagi and Tsubasa, as well as other people online are all significantly different, as can be seen in the above panel. Psychologically, we would say that Maki has a high self-complexity: she has many different traits that selectively become dominant in different scenarios.

Having a high self-complexity like Maki does can be a buffer for the effects of stress. Linville (1985) found that in people with a low self-complexity, stress predicts depression and illness, but this is not true for people with a high self-complexity. This can explain why her stress about Kashiwagi and Tsubasa doesn't generally "leak over" to her interactions with other people such as Kaguya: although she's shown to be persistently gloomy when she sees Tsubasa and Kashiwagi together, her refined self-concept allows her to compartmentalise this "part" of her solely to these interactions, and as such the gloominess she experiences does not develop into full blown depression and illness. Outside of the immediate context of Tsubasa and Kashiwagi, her interactions in most situations are normal, because that particular "aspect" of her isn't brought up. On the other hand, when the situation is brought up somehow, it causes that "aspect" of her to boot up again — when a stressful event happens, for those with high self-complexity, it affects the self-aspect most closely tied to that stressor (Linville, 1985).

Coping methods

Venting to friends

At first, part of Maki's usual circle of friends (namely Erika and Karen) about the things that cause her stress. Unfortunately, Maki can't talk to Kashiwagi about this particular stressor as she is part of the problem. However, this ended up failing as Erika was blissfully unaware of her feelings: Erika unintentionally hurt her when trying to comfort her, since she heavily misjudged the situation as being sad that her best friend was taken away (4koma 11). The lack of people who would listen to her problems is probably part of why we see her collapse during her proper debut as a character (chapter 98). But what she does do is find two new companions in the form of Shirogane and Ishigami — her first two character chapters, 98 and 109, both involve her talking her problems out with them.

Simply talking about things that cause stress can help people adjust to these stressors, one of the reasons being because they allow for a reduction of intrusive thoughts (Lepore et al., 2000). Even though talking things out with Shirogane and Ishigami doesn't actually allow her to reach an actual solution to this stressor, and she's still stuck with the problem, we don't see these thoughts make her collapse completely like in 98 again, and over time, she bounces back relatively quickly even when the thoughts do get to her (193 10). And indeed, in chapter 161 we see that Maki seems to have come to the conclusion that this stressor cannot be removed — as long as she loves one and is best friends with the other, there's nothing she can really do about it (161 5). However, by the time we reach chapter 193, Maki has gone from the one seeking advice from the two to be able to give advice back, which goes to show that this coping strategy of her worked, and netted her two more friends besides. It's not just venting to friends either — if chapter 196 is any indication, merely hanging out with them serves as a form of stress relief too.

Travelling

Chapter 161 is a(n in)famous chapter where Maki claims that she is in India to "seek enlightenment" when it becomes increasingly obvious over the course of the chapter that she was finding ways to distract herself by doing touristy things. A restful vacation may act as a buffer for post-vacation stress (Strauss-Blasche et al., 2002), and even though we don't get an indication whether Maki's India holiday succeeded in this regard (chapter 162 p.1 sees her talking with Kashiwagi normally, for what it's worth), it goes to show that she at least tried to do so.

Eating food

One other thing we see her doing when crying about Tsubasa is eating: in both the manga proper and the 4koma we can see her eating while crying about him. Binge eating can be an expression of a form of desire to escape from self-awareness (Heatherton & Baumeister, 1991); this works because when the eater wants to avoid intrusive thoughts, they focus on readily available stimuli, and thus do not have the self-regulations towards eating a normal person would have. But as we can see in these scenes, she doesn't overdo using eating as a coping mechanism to the point of where it can be considered binge eating since her portions are normal sized — one of the diagnostic criteria for binge eating in the DSM-5 is whether the person eats "an amount of food that is definitely larger than what most individuals would eat in a similar period of time under similar circumstances" (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Although not an ideal method of coping, Maki manages to keep her usage of eating as a coping mechanism within healthy boundaries.

Sutra copying

Finally, Maki also mentions once that sutra copying is a method of stress relief that she utilises. There seems to be scant scientific evidence for the amount of stress relief that this provides. After a bit of research, here's one possible way to show that sutra copying may provide stress relief: Isono et al. (2014) describes finding an increased prefrontal cortex blood flow in participants copying sutras, irrespective of how experienced they are at it; the authors correlate this with an increase in higher-order brain functions. However, other studies such as Simpson et al. (2001) seem to correlate a higher level of anxiety to to a lower prefrontal cortex blood flow; together these studies may provide a weak correlation between lower levels of anxiety and sutra copying. And in any case, copying sutras doesn't seem to be affecting Maki negatively, nor is copying sutras an unhealthy coping mechanism.

Conclusion

Maki is a well-adjusted young girl who overall uses healthy mechanisms to cope with her emotional stress that her love life causes, and that's why I love her. Other characters in the manga would do well to emulate her mechanisms for the sake of their mental health.

References

Akasaka, A. (2015). Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Shueisha Young Jump Comics. Retrieved from https://guya.moe/read/manga/Kaguya-Wants-To-Be-Confessed-To/.

Akasaka, A. & Iida, G. (2018). We Want to Talk About Kaguya. Shueisha Young Jump Comics. Retrieved from https://guya.moe/read/manga/We-Want-To-Talk-About-Kaguya/.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

Heatherton, T. F., & Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Binge eating as escape from self-awareness. Psychological Bulletin, 110(1), 86–108. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.110.1.86

Isono, H., Yokozawa, G., Kuroda, T., & Kumar, A. (2014). Measurement of cerebral blood flow when person is transcribing, silent reading and chanting the Hannya Shingyo. The Japanese Journal of Ergonomics, 50(Supplement), S298-S299. https://doi.org/10.5100/jje.50.S298

Lepore, S. J., Ragan, J. D., & Jones, S. (2000). Talking facilitates cognitive–emotional processes of adaptation to an acute stressor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(3), 499-508. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.78.3.499

Licitra-Kleckler, D. M., & Waas, G. A. (1993). Perceived Social Support among High-Stress Adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Research, 8(4), 381–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/074355489384003

Linville, P.W. (1985). Self-complexity and affective extremity: Don’t put all your eggs in one cognitive basket. Social Cognition, 3, 94-120. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1521/soco.1985.3.1.94

Selby, E. A., Anestis, M. D., & Joiner, T. E. (2008). Understanding the relationship between emotional and behavioral dysregulation: Emotional cascades. Behaviour research and therapy, 46(5), 593-611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2008.02.002

Simpson, J. R., Snyder, A. Z., Gusnard, D. A., & Raichle, M. E. (2001). Emotion-induced changes in human medial prefrontal cortex: I. during cognitive task performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 683–687. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.98.2.683

Strauss-Blasche, G., Ekmekcioglu, C., & Marktl, W. (2002). Moderating effects of vacation on reactions to work and domestic stress. Leisure Sciences, 24(2), 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400252900176

Watkins, E., Scott, J., Wingrove, J., Rimes, K., Bathurst, N., Steiner, H., Kennell-Webb, S., Moulds, M., & Malliaris, Y. (2007). Rumination-focused cognitive behaviour therapy for residual depression: A case series. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45(9), 2144–2154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2006.09.018

Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163-206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163

Back