Hikikomori - A Social Problems of Japan

Hikikomori

A "hikikomori" (roughly, "pull inside") is a teenager, young adult, or sometimes an adult into his or her 30s and 40s who will rarely or ever leave the home or even the bedroom for an extended period (months, years, or indefinitely). Most hikikomori (apparently around eighty percent) are male. However, the extent of the problem in terms of hard numbers is unknown since families tend to keep the situation discrete. A report by Rees for the BBC (2002b) gives an often-heard estimate of over one million. This is an astounding figure and in fact one that is difficult to justify.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months. While the degree of the phenomenon varies on an individual basis, in the most extreme cases, some people remain in isolation for years or even decades. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals, or futōkō in Japanese (an older term is tōkōkyohi. 

Estimates on the number of hikikomori defined as person who has been sequestered in his room for more than six months with no social life outside the home varies from between 100,000 and 320,000 and between 1 million and 2 million. Some come out of their rooms occasionally for meals with their parents or a run periodically to convenience stores for food. Some have lived in their rooms for 15 years or more.

 

Hikikomori Rooms

The Ministry of Health estimates that approx. 50,000 hikikomori live in Japan, about one third of which are aged 30 and older (Larimer 2000).

In August 2010, Oxford English Dictionary recognized Hikikomori as a word. A survey of hikikomori around that time found that in 23.7 percent of cases the condition began when the men were in their 30s and it was caused by workplace relations. Teens made up 33.9 percent of the cases and men in their 20s made up 38.9 percent. 

In general, the prevalence of hikikomori tendencies in Japan may be encouraged and facilitated by three primary factors:

1. Middle class affluence in a post-industrial society such as Japan allows parents to support and feed an adult child in the home indefinitely. Lower-income families do not have hikikomori children because a socially withdrawing youth is forced to work outside the home.
2. The inability of Japanese parents to recognize and act upon the youth's slide into isolation; soft parenting; or even a codependent collusion between mother and son, known as amae in Japanese. 
3. A decade of flat economic indicators and a shaky job market in Japan makes the pre-existing system requiring years of competitive schooling for elite jobs appear like a pointless effort to many. While Japanese fathers of the current generation of youth still enjoy lifetime employment at multinational corporations, incoming employees in Japan enjoy no such guarantees in today's job market. (See Freeters and NEET for more on this.) Some younger Japanese people begin to suspect that the system put in place for their grandfathers and fathers no longer works, and for some, the lack of a clear life goal makes them susceptible to social withdrawal as a hikikomori.