hikikomori

is best described not as a diagnostic category of mental illness, but as a pattern of behaviors involving social withdrawal.

Saito (2001) - - He believes the term hikikomori should not be used as diagnostic category because the term expresses only a condition or phenomenon, not a diagnostic category of mental illness. He suggests that hikikomori is better described as a pattern of behaviors involving social withdrawal. Further, he argues that hikikomori is not a psychotic illness, and that the avoidance and withdrawal symptoms are not related to negative symptoms that one might expect in a schizophrenic spectrum illness.

is best understood not as a specific problem but, rather, as the outcome of multiple kinds of social, medical or emotional problems.

I argue that hikikomori is best understood not as a specific problem but, rather, as the outcome of multiple kinds of social, medical or emotional problems.

is a crisis now visited on the wider family of Japan which is also playing out in the anguish that the Imperial Family discreetly confronts behind stone palace walls.

Frustrated and disaffected, many young Japanese just abandon their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of others wander like nomads outside the rigid traditional system, refusing to work, go to school, or accept job training. Even more disturbing—perhaps most disturbing—is the cadre of more than one million young adults, the majority of them men, who literally shut themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, taping shut their windows, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or years at a time. Thus, the anguish the Imperial Family discreetly confronts behind stone palace walls reflects a crisis now being visited on the wider family of Japan.

is a pathology, not an illness — not a problem of one or two years, but a very long-term problem.

This is a pathology, not an illness,” Okuyama explained the first time we sat down for lunch to talk about his failing family. “It's not a problem of one or two years, it's a very long-term problem.”

is a phenomenon that might offer clues not only to Japan's unprecedented breakdown, but also why the Japanese self seems so ephemeral.

Saito and I agreed that tracing the roots of hikikomori might offer clues not only to Japan's unprecedented breakdown, but could also help explain why the Japanese self seems so ephemeral. Why individual expression remains constrained by bullying, oppressive pressure, and demands for strict conformity even in these modern times. Why Japan—a nation so bold as to build its own Eiffel Tower, learn how to make pizza and play golf, listen to hip-hop, take up aerobics, flock to wine bars, and build a miniature Dutch village as an amusement park—never engaged in the political, sexual, and gender revolutions that once convulsed America and other Western nations. And why the mechanisms that might compel useful political and social change have been short-circuited, keeping gifted young men like Kenji and Jun and Hiro shut in and shut down—an arrow pointed deep inside each, pinning him in place.

is a phenomenon that will disappear only when Japanese society finally encourages individual expression.

Watanabe believes that hikikomori behavior will disappear only when Japanese society finally encourages individual expression. “Why does a sensitive boy have to feel so uncomfortable in this society?” she asks. “I feel it's because people in this nation are not happy, not happy as individuals. They try to be happy as a group, at the cost of the individual, which is the contradiction. You have to be happy first as an individual. You have to be honest toward yourself. But people are not honest to themselves in order to be honest to the group and to conform to the group.

is a problem that lies, to a large extent, less with the child than with the unhappiness of the mothers.

It's not with the children, the hikikomori children,” that most problems lie, says Hisako Watanabe, a child psychiatrist at Keio University Medical Center in Tokyo. “It's with the unhappiness of the mothers.” She believes the roots of this disorder can be traced to intergenerational tension, and to adults whose own childhoods were traumatically jarred by the national experience of Japan's finally having to embrace defeat in 1945. Soldiers returned from war and silently buried their guilt over battlefield atrocities, but their sins now visit a generation of atomic youth. This is why, in her clinical treatment, Watanabe told me, she often spends as much time working with parents as with their hikikomori children.

is a result of the fact that, in contrast to Western society where independence is valued, Japanese are not ashamed not to be independent.

In his clinic, where he comes in contact with hundreds of patients each week, Tamaki Saito's tangible experiences seem to bear out Doi's theoretical analysis of amae. In Western society, Saito told me, any “grown-up person should be independent. But in Japan, we are not ashamed not to be independent,” using a classical Japanese construction, the double negative, to emphasize with indirection. “After we have grown up, we depend on our parents sometimes, and sometimes our parents depend on us. This is a natural attitude for Japanese people.”

hikikomori, n.Definitions

hikikomori