fantasy

"If you travel to Japan you might see an interesting cultural phenomenon: middle-age well-to-do business men spending a inordinate (in my opinion) amount time and money buying anime comics and toys (which are everywhere). To a Western mind this seems very unusual and at times when considering all the peculiar idiosyncrasies of this culture I even wonder if modern Japanese culture is in the middle of mass psychosis. I am not saying that you cannot find such escapism in the West, there is plenty of it here, as well, from Wiccan godessess who talk to the trees in their backyard, to hardcore Trekkies, to religious head-laying tongue-speaking fanatics, to sugarcoated reality everyone sees on tv everyday. But how important is fantasy to psychological well-being? Or should I say, just how damaging is reality to a mind?
They teach prisoners of war and those who are subjected to sensory deprivation, for example, to "find their happy place" in order, I assume, to forestall or prevent a complete nervous breakdown of the mind. All over the world children are told fairy tales, either in the form of books, stories, or Disney cartoons, or are told fictinal explanations to natural phenomena.

Does this then imply that reality is a stressful thing for a child and can damage its psyche if not buffered against with make-believe stories? And what of adults? Or should I say, and what of adults under normal, everyday circumstances?
It is clear to me that fantasy world provides a buffer against reality that might be otherwise psychologically damaging to the psyche. What is not clear to me is when the use of fantasy is overused, or is unwarranted. In the case of the Japanese businessman: is his reality so harsh as to warrant such flights of fantasy to preserve his psychological well-being? An even better question, is the harshness(or stressfullness) of his reality equivalent to the degree of his fantasy? And on the flipside, can the degree of fantasy tell us about the harshness (whether real or perceived) of the reality of the individual?

What I am getting at is: can we simply live and work and think in reality? Wouldn't a world be a better place if all people actually functioned in reality? Should we make more effort in bridging the gap between the inner world and the outer world? Because I see that this gap getting bigger and bigger, as if people are pushing away against reality.
And for those with "creativity"argument , can't we be creative and real at the same time?"

I don't think it's the case that reality is too harsh for the Japanese businessman, but that reality, with all it's social conventions, restrictions, and mindless routines--real or percieved--seems rather dull and monotonous for the middle-aged well-to-do Japanese businessman. Escaping into a thrilling anime story is a way to feel, if only superficially, the emotion and excitement deficient in one's day-to-day life.

I think this is a symptom of modern day alienation, which is, in turn, the effect that modern societies and their political economies have on individuals. For so many, the goal is to get the credentials to get a good-paying job to afford to have a life of plenty. The problem is plenty of what?

"...modern man lives his life according to what others expect him to be rather than on what he really is"
"...the mask of uniformity merely disguises real feelings"
modern man is "taken away from [his] true self by his subservience to artificial needs"
~The Philosophy of Rousseau, Ronald Grimsley