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 a pointless effort.When a youth withdraws from life, parents can act or respond in such a way that causes the child to become even more seclusionary.

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.

Lower income families do not have hikikomori children because a socially withdrawing youth is forced to work outside the home if he cannot finish school, and for this reason isolation in the room stops at an early stage.

Middle class affluence in a post-industrial society such as Japan allows parents to support and feed an adult child indefinitely in the home.In general, the prevalence of hikikomori tendencies in Japan may be encouraged and facilitated by three primary factors: Historically, Confucian teachings de-emphasizing the individual and favoring a conformist stance to ensure social harmony in a rigidly hierarchized society have shaped much of the Sinosphere, possibly explaining the emergence of the hikikomori phenomenon in other East-Asian countries. A traditionally strong emphasis on complex social conduct, rigid hierarchies and the resulting, potentially intimidating multitude of social expectations, responsibilities and duties in Japanese society contribute to this pressure on young adults. The dominant nexus of the hikikomori issue centers on the transformation from young life to the responsibilities and expectations of adult life - indications are that advanced capitalist societies such as modern Japan are unable to provide sufficient meaningful transformation rituals for promoting certain susceptible types of youth into mature roles within society.Īs with many advanced capitalist meritocracies, there exists a great deal of pressure on adolescents in Japan to be successful and perpetuate the existing social status-quo. Young adults may feel overwhelmed by modern Japanese society, or be unable to fulfill their expected social roles as they have not yet formulated a sense of personal tatemae (the public facade) and honne (the 'true self') – both of which are needed to cope with the daily paradoxes of adulthood. Sometimes referred to as a kind of social problem in Japanese discourse, the hikikomori phenomenon has a number of possible contributing factors. Even the most casual search of English language materials will show that essentially the same phenomenon is found in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, etc. When a BBC program claiming that hikikomori was a Japanese phenomenon was aired in Britain, the BBC home page received numerous messages from viewers in the United Kingdom saying that they had personal experience with hikikomori and that it was hardly a phenomenon particular to Japan. While hikikomori has been claimed to be mainly a Japanese phenomenon, there are reports of similar phenomena developing in South Korea, Taiwan and China. Though acute social withdrawal in Japan appears to affect both genders equally, due to differing societal expectations for maturing boys and girls, the most widely reported cases of hikikomori are from Japanese families with male children who seek outside intervention when a son, usually the eldest, refuses to leave the family home. After the syndrome was officially recognized, the number of reported cases turned out to be in the low thousands. Saito later admitted in his autobiography ( Hakushi no kimyo na shishunki) that he made up this number to draw attention to the problem and that it had no factual basis. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals, or tōkōkyohi (登校拒否) in Japanese.Īccording to estimates by psychologist Tamaki Saito, who first coined the phrase, there may be one million hikikomori in Japan, twenty percent of all male adolescents in Japan, or one percent of the total Japanese population. While the distinctiveness of the phenomenon varies depending on the individual, some youths remain in isolation for years, or in rare cases, decades. The Japanese Ministry of Health defines hikikomori as individuals who refuse to leave their parents' house, go to work or school and isolate themselves away from society and family in a single room for a period exceeding six months. 9.2 Medical diagnoses for hikikomori behaviors.

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