QuoteHikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?
By William Kremer and Claudia Hammond
BBC World Service
As many as a million young people in Japan are thought to remain holed up in their homes - sometimes for decades at a time. Why?
For Hide, the problems started when he gave up school.
"I started to blame myself and my parents also blamed me for not going to school. The pressure started to build up," he says.
"Then, gradually, I became afraid to go out and fearful of meeting people. And then I couldn't get out of my house."
Gradually, Hide relinquished all communication with friends and eventually, his parents. To avoid seeing them he slept through the day and sat up all night, watching TV.
"I had all kinds of negative emotions inside me," he says. "The desire to go outside, anger towards society and my parents, sadness about having this condition, fear about what would happen in the future, and jealousy towards the people who were leading normal lives."
Hide had become "withdrawn" or hikikomori.
In Japan, hikikomori, a term that's also used to describe the young people who withdraw, is a word that everyone knows.
Tamaki Saito was a newly qualified psychiatrist when, in the early 1990s, he was struck by the number of parents who sought his help with children who had quit school and hidden themselves away for months and sometimes years at a time. These young people were often from middle-class families, they were almost always male, and the average age for their withdrawal was 15.
It might sound like straightforward teenage laziness. Why not stay in your room while your parents wait on you? But Saito says sufferers are paralysed by profound social fears.
"They are tormented in the mind," he says. "They want to go out in the world, they want to make friends or lovers, but they can't."
Symptoms vary between patients. For some, violent outbursts alternate with infantile behaviour such as pawing at the mother's body. Other patients might be obsessive, paranoid and depressed.
When Saito began his research, social withdrawal was not unknown, but it was treated by doctors as a symptom of other underlying problems rather than a pattern of behaviour requiring special treatment.
Since he drew attention to the phenomenon, it is thought the numbers of hikikomori have increased. A conservative estimate of the number of people now affected is 200,000, but a 2010 survey for the Japanese Cabinet Office came back with a much higher figure - 700,000. Since sufferers are by definition hidden away, Saito himself places the figure higher still, at around one million.
The average age of hikikomori also seems to have risen over the last two decades. Before it was 21 - now it is 32.
So why do they withdraw?
The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there.
One such force is sekentei, a person's reputation in the community and the pressure he or she feels to impress others. The longer hikikomori remain apart from society, the more aware they become of their social failure. They lose whatever self-esteem and confidence they had and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever more terrifying.
Parents are also conscious of their social standing and frequently wait for months before seeking professional help.
A comic strip from Welcome to NHK! Welcome to NHK! was a novel, comic book and cartoon that focused on the life of a hikikomori A second social factor is the amae - dependence - that characterises Japanese family relationships. Young women traditionally live with their parents until marriage - men may never move out of the family home. Even though about half of hikikomori are violent towards their parents, for most families it would be unthinkable to throw them out.
But in exchange for decades of support for their children, parents expect them to show respect and fulfil their role in society of getting a job.
Matsu became hikikomori after he fell out with his parents about his career and university course.
"I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me the way I didn't want to go," he says. "My father is an artist and he runs his own business - he wanted me to do the same." But Matsu wanted to become a computer programmer in a large firm - one of corporate Japan's army of "salarymen".
"But my father said: 'In the future there won't be a society like that.' He said: 'Don't become a salaryman.'"
Like many hikikomori, Matsu was the eldest son and felt the full weight of parental expectation. He grew furious when he saw his younger brother doing what he wanted. "I became violent and had to live separately from my family," he says.
One way to interpret Matsu's story is see him as being at the faultline of a cultural shift in Japan.
"Traditionally, Japanese psychology was thought to be group-oriented - Japanese people do not want to stand out in a group," says Yuriko Suzuki, a psychologist at the National Institute for Mental Health in Tokyo. "But I think especially for the younger generation, they want more individualised or personalised care and attention. I think we are in a mixed state."
But even hikikomori who desperately want to fulfil their parents' plans for them may find themselves frustrated.
Andy Furlong, an academic at the University of Glasgow specialising in the transition from education to work, connects the growth of the hikikomori phenomenon with the popping of the 1980s "bubble economy" and the onset of Japan's recession of the 1990s.
It was at this point that the conveyor belt of good school grades leading to good university places leading to jobs-for-life broke down. A generation of Japanese were faced with the insecurity of short-term, part-time work.
And it came with stigma, not sympathy.
Job-hopping Japanese were called "freeters" - a combination of the word "freelance" and the German word for "worker", arbeiter. In political discussion, freeters were frequently bundled together with "neets" - an adopted British acronym meaning "not in education, employment or training". Neets, freeters, hikikomori - these were ways of describing the good-for-nothing younger generation, parasites on the flagging Japanese economy. The older generation, who graduated and slotted into steady careers in the 1960s and 1970s, could not relate to them.
Japanese men celebrating with fists in the air University graduates at a job-hunting fair in February... but freeters, neets and hikikomori find themselves on the periphery of Japan's labour market
"The opportunities have changed fundamentally," says Furlong. "I don't think the families always know how to handle that."
A common reaction is for parents to treat their recalcitrant son with anger, to lecture them and make them feel guilty for bringing shame on the family. The risk here is that - as with Hide - communication with parents may break down altogether. But some parents have been driven to extreme measures.
For a time one company operating in Nagoya could be hired by parents to burst into their children's rooms, give them a big dressing down, and forcibly drag them away to a dormitory to learn the error of their ways.
Kazuhiko Saito, the director of the psychiatry department at Kohnodai Hospital in Chiba, says that sudden interventions - even by healthcare professionals - can prove disastrous.
"In many cases, the patient becomes violent towards the staff or the parents in front of the counsellors, or after the counsellors have left," he says.
Kazuhiko Saito is in favour of healthcare professionals visiting hikikomori, but he says they must be fully briefed on the patient, who must know in advance that they are coming.
In any case, the do-nothing approach has been shown not to work. Tamaki Saito likens the hikikomori state to alcoholism, in that it is impossible to give up without a support network.
His approach is to begin with "reorganising" the relationship between the patient and his parents, arming desperate mothers and fathers with strategies to restart communication with their children. When the patient is well enough to come to the clinic in person he can be treated with drugs and therapy. Group therapy is a relatively new concept to Japanese psychology, but self-help groups have become a key way of drawing hikikomori into wider society.
For both Hide and Matsu, the journey to recovery was helped by visiting a charity-run youth club in Tokyo known as an ibasho - a safe place for visitors to start reintroducing themselves to society.
Both men have made progress in their relationships with their parents. Matsu has been for a job interview as a computer programmer, and Hide has a part-time job. He thinks that by starting to talk again with his parents, the whole family has been able to move on.
"They thought about their way of life in the past and in the future," he says. "I think that before - even though they were out working - their mental attitude was just like a hikikomori, but now they're more open and honest with themselves. So as their child I'm very happy to see them change."
Many parents of hikikomori visit the ibasho even though their children may never be well enough to come with them.
Yoshiko's son withdrew from society very gradually when he was 22.
At first he would go out to buy shopping, but she observes ruefully that internet shopping means this is no longer necessary and he no longer leaves the house. He is now 50 years old.
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
Before it became a pay site I used to read the Asahi English Language News. It had a lot of stories like this. Being from Detroit I thought they were comical that "Little Suki won't leave the house" was an actual news story. For a child to make the news in Motown, he has to at least kill someone, preferably his teacher.
TL;DR
...but there's no indication that this sort of thing is restricted to Japan, right?
There's no reason to leave your home anymore. Unless you want to.
Quote from: Caliga on July 05, 2013, 01:31:32 PM
TL;DR
...but there's no indication that this sort of thing is restricted to Japan, right?
The BEEB had it's usual not just boys and not just in Japan boxes. Not just boys:
QuoteWhat about the girls?
Hikikomori are seen as predominantly male - Tamaki Saito says males occupy 70%- 80% of the group
However, an internet survey by NHK found just 53% to be male
Andy Furlong at the University of Glasgow speculates that female withdrawal into the home seems so natural to Japanese society that women hikikomori may remain unreported
Not just Japan:
QuoteHikikomori - just a Japanese thing?
Hikikomori has entered the Oxford English Dictionary as "In Japan: abnormal avoidance of social contact"
But Saito Tamaki believes it is also a problem in Korea and Italy
After a 2002 BBC documentary, Saito received a flurry of emails from British parents who said their children were in a similar condition
Andy Furlong points out that young people in Western societies frequently "take time out" in gap years or have "false starts" on careers or courses without attracting stigma
He adds that the preconditions for a hikikomori-like problem are falling into place in Europe, with 50% youth unemployment in some countries, forcing young people to continue living at home
CdM was right all along; fans of Anime are a threat to society:
QuoteOtaku v hikikomori
An overlapping group of people with the hikikomori, otaku are "geeks" or "nerds"
They are known for their obsessions, especially manga cartoons and anime
"Otaku" is the formal word for "you" in Japanese - it's thought that the term came about from the tendency of socially awkward manga fans to use over-formal language
In press coverage, both otaku and hikikomori have been linked with serious sex crimes
I wonder if any of the chick hikkomoris are hot. A hot girl who is willing to never leave a room :hmm:
Jesus Christ. These people need to get out more.
Quote from: The Brain on July 05, 2013, 01:43:11 PM
Jesus Christ. These people need to get out more.
:lol:
Quote from: Caliga on July 05, 2013, 01:31:32 PM
TL;DR
...but there's no indication that this sort of thing is restricted to Japan, right?
In the west it's called Social Anxiety disorder.
I was a hikikomori for about six months back in 2011. I made a joke about it when I was watching Welcome to the NHK, whose protagonist exemplifies the phenomenon, and who tries to get back into socio-economic swing by making a hentai game with his weird fucking neighbor, when I called the show Ide and Lettow Write a Porno.
In truth, I was never as bad as that dude, or true hikis, because I don't have crippling social anxiety. But I was going a little nuts there for a while.
Quote from: Savonarola on July 05, 2013, 01:25:29 PM
Before it became a pay site I used to read the Asahi English Language News. It had a lot of stories like this. Being from Detroit I thought they were comical that "Little Suki won't leave the house" was an actual news story. For a child to make the news in Motown, he has to at least kill someone, preferably his teacher.
When it's a million little Sukis that won't leave the house it's news.
I was kind a like that. Still am to some degree.
Quote from: Razgovory on July 05, 2013, 02:54:56 PM
Quote from: Caliga on July 05, 2013, 01:31:32 PM
TL;DR
...but there's no indication that this sort of thing is restricted to Japan, right?
In the west it's called Social Anxiety disorder.
Yeah I don't really understand the need to use a Japanese term here. Seems to obscure more than it conveys.
Disagree. "Social anxiety disorder" isn't a noun. It's a good loan word.
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
Quote from: garbon on July 05, 2013, 10:17:59 PM
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
I didn't think about that while I was writing it. :P
It isn't something you call a person. "That guy's a social anxiety disorder."
I guess "shut-in" works, but has somewhat different connotations (suggesting that the person is elderly or otherwise medically unfit).
QuoteOne way to interpret Matsu's story is see him as being at the faultline of a cultural shift in Japan.
"Traditionally, Japanese psychology was thought to be group-oriented - Japanese people do not want to stand out in a group," says Yuriko Suzuki, a psychologist at the National Institute for Mental Health in Tokyo. "But I think especially for the younger generation, they want more individualised or personalised care and attention. I think we are in a mixed state."
But even hikikomori who desperately want to fulfil their parents' plans for them may find themselves frustrated.
Andy Furlong, an academic at the University of Glasgow specialising in the transition from education to work, connects the growth of the hikikomori phenomenon with the popping of the 1980s "bubble economy" and the onset of Japan's recession of the 1990s.
It was at this point that the conveyor belt of good school grades leading to good university places leading to jobs-for-life broke down. A generation of Japanese were faced with the insecurity of short-term, part-time work.
This.
It is the root of a lot of other Japan's problems to.
So much of Japan's culture is still based on everyone living in pretty immobile small communities. Most Japanese keep the same friends from middle school throughout their entire life. But the world of course is a different place, people move around more, you don't generally inherit your parent's business.
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 02:07:25 AM
Quote from: garbon on July 05, 2013, 10:17:59 PM
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
I didn't think about that while I was writing it. :P
It isn't something you call a person. "That guy's a social anxiety disorder."
I guess "shut-in" works, but has somewhat different connotations (suggesting that the person is elderly or otherwise medically unfit).
Whereas hikkomori suggests nothing to most people.
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 02:07:25 AM
Quote from: garbon on July 05, 2013, 10:17:59 PM
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
I didn't think about that while I was writing it. :P
It isn't something you call a person. "That guy's a social anxiety disorder."
I guess "shut-in" works, but has somewhat different connotations (suggesting that the person is elderly or otherwise medically unfit).
You can use the older term, Agoraphobic.
The Call of Cthulhu RPG is a classic when it comes to phobias. An old favorite is making PCs who go insane get fear of confined spaces, fear of clothing and fear of being alone. Hilarity.
Quote from: garbon on July 06, 2013, 08:08:58 AM
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 02:07:25 AM
Quote from: garbon on July 05, 2013, 10:17:59 PM
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
I didn't think about that while I was writing it. :P
It isn't something you call a person. "That guy's a social anxiety disorder."
I guess "shut-in" works, but has somewhat different connotations (suggesting that the person is elderly or otherwise medically unfit).
Whereas hikkomori suggests nothing to most people.
Keeping anime words out of the English Language is always desirable.
I'm still upset they renamed "Number Place" puzzles "Sudoku". :mad:
Quote from: jimmy olsen on July 05, 2013, 08:58:55 PM
When it's a million little Sukis that won't leave the house it's news.
Yes, you're right. As you probably know, the Asahi Shimbun tends to understate issues and doesn't have the hype that America's fine media outlets usually provide. I didn't know this before going to Japan, and I assumed, based on their reporting, that it was relatively few isolated incidences rather than a larger phenomenon.
How prevalent is Hikikomori in Korea?
Quote from: Ideologue on July 05, 2013, 08:50:48 PM
I was a hikikomori for about six months back in 2011. I made a joke about it when I was watching Welcome to the NHK, whose protagonist exemplifies the phenomenon, and who tries to get back into socio-economic swing by making a hentai game with his weird fucking neighbor, when I called the show Ide and Lettow Write a Porno.
In truth, I was never as bad as that dude, or true hikis, because I don't have crippling social anxiety. But I was going a little nuts there for a while.
I saw that "Welcome to the NHK." The premise of a shut-in who goes on all sorts of wacky adventures seemed flawed to me.
Still,
The Continuing Adventures of Ide and Lettow might work as a short story.
The premise of a shut-in who stays shut-in seems boring. :P
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 11:53:37 AM
The premise of a shut-in who stays shut-in seems boring. :P
The Stranger wasn't bad. ;)
Orson Welles was a social butterfly. :unsure:
Or you mean the Camus novel?
Quote from: Peter Wiggin on July 06, 2013, 12:00:16 PM
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 11:53:37 AM
The premise of a shut-in who stays shut-in seems boring. :P
The Stranger wasn't bad. ;)
Meursault goes on all sorts of wacky adventures in the first half of the novel. :frog:
While this sounds insane, there was a month or two in the early 90s when I gave up all human contact to be the god-king of a virtual British Empire. :(
QuoteThe Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex
Unless something happens to boost Japan's birth rate, its population will shrink by a third between now and 2060. One reason for the lack of babies is the emergence of a new breed of Japanese men, the otaku, who love manga, anime and computers - and sometimes show little interest in sex.
Tokyo is the world's largest metropolis and home to more than 35 million people, so on the face of it, it is hard to believe there is any kind of population problem at all.
But Akihabara, an area of the city dedicated to the manga and anime subculture provides one clue to the country's problems.
Akihabara is heaven for otaku.
They are a generation of geeks who have grown up through 20 years of economic stagnation and have chosen to tune out and immerse themselves in their own fantasy worlds.
Kunio Kitamara, of the Japan Family Planning Association, describes many young Japanese men as "herbivores" - passive and lacking carnal desire.
It seems they no longer have the ambition of the post-war alpha males who made Japan such an economic powerhouse and no interest in joining a company and becoming a salary man.
They have taken on a mole-like existence and, worryingly, withdrawn from relationships with the opposite sex.
A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex - a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.
I met two otaku, who believe themselves to be in relationships with virtual girlfriends.
This girlfriend is actually a Nintendo computer game called Love Plus, which comes as a small portable tablet.
Nurikan and Yuge take their girlfriends, Rinko and Ne-ne, on actual dates to the park, and buy them cakes to celebrate their birthdays.
"It's the kind of relationship we wish we'd had at high school," says Nurikan.
In the game he is a 15-year-old, though in reality he is 38.
"As long as I have time, I'll continue the relationship forever," says Yuge, who is 39.
"As she's at high school, she picks me up in the morning and we go to school together. After school we meet at the gates and go home together... In the game I am 17."
Yuge says he often puts Ne-ne - or the games console containing her - into the basket of his bicycle, then he takes photographs of them at his destination.
Though Yuge would like to meet a real woman, and Nurikan is married, they say this is easier than having a real girlfriend.
"At high school you can have relationships without having to think about marriage," says Yuge. "With real girlfriends you have to consider marriage. So I think twice about going out with a 3D woman."
Nurikan says he keeps Rinko a secret from his wife, and hopes he never has to choose between them.
It's hard to avoid feeling that otaku are in a perpetual state of childhood and are quite comfortable with their lives this way.
Exactly why they have retreated into fantasy land is not obvious.
Tokyo-based social commentator Roland Kelts says many young Japanese men are pessimistic about the future. They don't believe they will match their parents' wealth and don't want to commit themselves to relationships.
"If you compare China or Vietnam, most of those kids on scooters going to nightclubs, and dancing their heart away and perhaps having sex - they know it's getting better, they know they are probably going to rock their parents' income," he says. "No-one in Japan feels that way."
Several surveys have shown that even when Japanese men and women are in relationships, they have very little sex. In one survey just 27% said they had sex every week.
Marriage rates are also plunging, and very few babies - only 2% - are born out of wedlock.
Japan's demographic timebomb is also linked to the lack of immigration.
In Britain one in eight people were born abroad, compared to one in 60 in Japan. But immigration in Japan is still heavily restricted, despite a dearth of some qualified workers.
In Britain there are 60,000 healthcare workers from overseas, while in Japan - where there is a serious shortage of nurses - there are only 60.
Japan has managed to preserve its unique culture in an increasingly globalised world but could that very sense of identity stand in the way of solving its population problems?
Or is it just time for Japanese men to grow up, have more sex and make more babies?
I have been to Akihabara. I remember one of the department stores there had a floor dedicated to dolls. They had all manner of dresses and accessories; including a long rack of doll lingerie. You could get doll teddies, doll thongs, doll garters and the like. Even by the standards of Tokyo it was very, very strange.
As long as I can paint tiny men made for kids all is well with the world.
Better dressing up dolls in lingerie and dating computer games than shooting up schools, I guess.
Society of Too Many Rules. The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin...
Does the presence of this social sickness in Japan, indeed in an even more degenerate stage than it has yet reached in the collapsing West, suggest that collapse is not intrinsic to Christendom, but in fact endemic to progress itself? Distressing if true, for then Japan points the way to our own sexless future of poverty and despair.
I guess collapse is intrinsic to everything. It's the rule of entropy. More complex forms always eventually degenerate into simpler ones. I don't suppose societies or religions are immune to that.
Actually, I do wonder if we are seeing Japan slowly collapsing.
Quote from: Savonarola on October 24, 2013, 04:05:57 PM
While this sounds insane, there was a month or two in the early 90s when I gave up all human contact to be the god-king of a virtual British Empire. :(
......
I have been to Akihabara. I remember one of the department stores there had a floor dedicated to dolls. They had all manner of dresses and accessories; including a long rack of doll lingerie. You could get doll teddies, doll thongs, doll garters and the like. Even by the standards of Tokyo it was very, very strange.
Wasn't that par for the course with proto-paradoxians back then?
I saw the Japanese 'thing' earlier today on the bbc website and instinctively thought of posting it here.
Yeah, that is odd, very odd, though there's One or Two here who seem to heading down that road. :hmm:
Quote from: mongers on October 24, 2013, 05:23:34 PM
Yeah, that is odd, very odd, though there's One or Two here who seem to heading down that road. :hmm:
I am not! :mad:
Quote from: Savonarola on October 24, 2013, 04:05:57 PM
While this sounds insane, there was a month or two in the early 90s when I gave up all human contact to be the god-king of a virtual British Empire. :(
That sounds fun. Do go on.
Quote from: PDH on October 24, 2013, 06:12:43 PM
Quote from: mongers on October 24, 2013, 05:23:34 PM
Yeah, that is odd, very odd, though there's One or Two here who seem to heading down that road. :hmm:
I am not! :mad:
:D
Quote from: Ideologue on October 24, 2013, 04:48:12 PM... Japan points the way to our own sexless future...
Why do you think they invest so much in robotics?
They've got it all planned.
Yeahhhh... That second article is dumb and typical of the way the west paints japan. Otakus are a minority and not really the problem. Lots of otherwise pretty normal seeming people also have little interest in such things as sex.
These days akihabara is an over rated tourist trap. Nothing too special. Though the maid cafés are creepy.
That japan is specially anti immigration is also a bit of an odd view which is way too prevailant overseas. The trouble is the Japanese census doesn't include "temporary" residents (even those who have been here for years) and it doesn't distinguish between Japanese ethnicity and Japanese citizenship .
That healthcare workers statistic sounds very odd. I know there is a program that beings Filipino nurses to japan. I recall it was newsworthy a few years back for not bringing as many people as predicted- they couldn't pass their Japanese tests- but surprising if it is under 100
Quote from: Ideologue on July 06, 2013, 02:07:25 AM
Quote from: garbon on July 05, 2013, 10:17:59 PM
Disorder isn't a noun? :huh:
I didn't think about that while I was writing it. :P
It isn't something you call a person. "That guy's a social anxiety disorder."
I guess "shut-in" works, but has somewhat different connotations (suggesting that the person is elderly or otherwise medically unfit).
What's wrong with recluse? :mellow:
It's fine, although a recluse is someone has a connotation of someone who actively shuns people, rather than simply can't handle them. :hmm:
Japan is a fascinating country.