ON PAPER, at least, the phenomenon known as hikikomori does not look like a threat to the foundations of Japanese society. The word means simply social withdrawal and, in its early stages at least, the condition is as banal as a teenage sulk.
The typical hikikomori is a young man living at home who abandons his work or education, refuses to see his friends and retreats into his bedroom. He spends all his time alone, playing computer games, browsing the internet and emerging only for late-night shopping expeditions to refresh his supply of comics.
For periods of a few days at a time, such episodes are familiar to parents all over the world. But in Japan they have taken on the proportions of an epidemic.
More than a million Japanese, four in five of them young men, are believed to be suffering from long-term hikikomori. A third of them are over 30; a quarter of them have been living alone in their bedrooms for more than ten years.
Since identifying the condition five years ago, psychiatrists have come to recognise the misery which it causes to individual sufferers and their families. But it also represents a demographic time bomb, with devastating implications for Japan’s already troubled economy and overburdened welfare system.
With ever-increasing life expectancy and a shrinking birth rate, Japan is already in danger of running out of young people to man its industries, pay its taxes and support its growing retired population. If it is not tackled, hikikomori threatens to remove a million or more productive workers from this already dwindling pool.
“Economically this is a great burden,” said Shinako Tsuchiya, an MP who heads a parliamentary group investigating the problem. “Hundreds of thousands of adults are not working. When their parents grow too old to look after them, they will become a burden on the welfare system. We have to take measures to help people return to society, and prevent young people falling into a hikikomori state.”
Beginning this year, the Government is to multiply eightfold the amount of money that it spends on social services for parents in an effort to tackle the problem. But even this increase, from 300 million yen (£1.7 million) to 2.3 billion yen (£12.8 million), is regarded by those affected by hikikomori as wholly inadequate “The most you can say is that it’s better than nothing,” said Masahisa Okuyama, who runs an organisation of parents of hikikomori children. “Hikikomori are incapable of earning their own living, but they and their families are not entitled to any help from the Government.”
Mr Okuyama’s son has been a hikikomori for ten years and he knows as well as anyone the devastation which the condition can cause across entire families. The problem typically begins with bullying at school or betrayal or abandonment by a close friend.
“The kind of boys who become hikikomori are the sensitive, intelligent ones, with parents who are liberal and overprotective,” he said. “The kind of parents who read the Asahi newspaper (Japan’s equivalent of The Guardian).”
Refusal to go to school or to work is followed by increasing withdrawal and moodiness, and often aggression against parents. “In the West, family violence suggests the violence of a husband to his wife or children,” said Tamaki Saito, the psychiatrist who coined the term hikikomori. “In Japan, it is the violence of children against their parents.”
The causes of the condition are only vaguely understood, but it is clear that it is a peculiarly Japanese phenomenon. The intense pressure to achieve academically and conform to norms in school, at work and in society are cited as explanations. Hikikomori are those who snap under the pressure and, rather than competing, choose to withdraw from society altogether.
Affluence is a precondition, because without parents to feed them and provide them with a roof above their heads, most hikikomori would starve. But the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy has created a world in which, for the first time since the war, a lifetime of employment is no longer guaranteed.
Unlike Britain, it is normal for Japanese children to live at home until they marry. “People sometimes say that this is just a problem of self-indulgence and that is a very big misunderstanding,” Dr Saito said. “But the cultural background is very important. You don’t get this problem in developing countries, because people there have to work to live. This is a Japanese problem, uniquely so, because in Japan people expect to be supported by their families after they grow up.”
True social withdrawal is not just a passing phase. The most extreme case known to Mr Okuyama is a man of 53 who has been living in his room for 30 years. Hikikomori can be talked out of their rooms, but it requires persistent and dedicated work by counsellors and social workers. At present this work is done by networks of volunteers, many of them hikikomori parents, hopelessly ill-matched to the scale of the problem.
“Hikikomori are not mad or stupid,” Dr Saito said. “They are shy, gentle, clever people and this is a problem for all of us. A society that abandons the weak, and only values the strong — that’s no society at all.”
TACKLING THE PROBLEM
The Japanese Youth Development Association estimates that there are 600,000 to 1.6 million hikikomori.
A survey completed in July last year by the Japanese Health Ministry found that more than a third of hikikomori were over the age of 30. An earlier survey conducted by a group representing parents of hikikomori found that more than 70 per cent of sufferers were over 20. Symptoms normally appear around the age of 15.
Online counselling is the latest approach being adopted to help sufferers. Despite the belief that Japan’s increasing dependence on artificial forms of communication is one of the root causes of social withdrawal, counsellors report that hikikomori have tended to be far more forthcoming when communicating by e-mail.
