Hikikomori (pronounced hic-hee-kee-koh-moh-ree)
(1) A mode
of behaviour in which an individual becomes a recluse from society, typically
remaining isolated, sometimes for decades, in a single room at home.
(2) An individual
exhibiting this behaviour for a sustained period.
1990s: From
the Japanese noun 引きこもり
or 引き籠もり
(hikikomori), (literally “pulling inward; being confined”), from the
verb hikikomoru (引きこもる).
The construct was 引く
(hiku) (to pull, to draw back, to
withdraw) + 籠る or こもる
(komoru) (to shut oneself
away; to remain secluded; to stay inside).
So, the literal translation is something like “to withdraw and remain
shut in” but, used to mean “one who has withdrawn into seclusion”, the more
common verbal shorthand is “shut in” (in the sense of “acute social withdrawal”
or something in that vein). Although
once regarded as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, it’s not now thought
culturally specific, that perception a product of the condition and its extent
first being widely documented in Japanese publications. In Japan, the usual clipping is hikki.
Hikikomori is a noun; the noun plural is plural hikikomori or
hikikomoris.
The element
komoru is not recent; historically it
referred not only to people but also generally to the concept of “being shut
away or enclosed” or natural features such as a mountain at times when it was
encircled by clouds or a land mass visible only at low tide (a tidal island or
tombolo (a sand bar or path of dirt that connects this land to the coastline when
the tide falls)). More typically however
it was use of individuals opting for whatever reason to “remain indoors” (such
as those who, for religious reasons, might retreat to a mountain hermitage,
either for a period of contemplation (that might last a lifetime) or to escape
a society they had come to view as in some way “unsatisfactory”. The concept of hikikomori is different in
that those “afflicted” are not deemed to be motivated by a religious calling or
philosophical position but instead “suffering” a visceral reaction to the
condition of society or their life, manifesting as an urge to retreat from the
outside world to a “safe” enclosed space.
This aligns with the modern use in psychiatry.
So use of
the verb hikikomoru goes back
generations but the noun hikikomori came
into use only in the 1990s when the psychiatric sense was popularized in the
book Shakaiteki Hikikomori: Owaranai
Shishunki (Social Withdrawal: Adolescence Without End, 1998) by Japanese
psychiatrist Dr Tamaki Saitō san (b 1961).
For reasons both structural and historic, it’s rare for concepts in
psychiatry to have origins in Japan so hikikomori enjoys an unusual place in
modern nosology (the characteristics or scientific understanding of a specific
disease). Internationally however, hikikomori
“caught on” and became part of the standard jargon; that was not because there
was any particular interest in categorizing uniquely Japanese phenomena but
because clinicians in other places had for some time been aware the behaviour
was not uncommon in their countries. The
Western media soon took an interest in hikikomoru because editors knew stories
about “disaffected adolescents locking themselves in their bedrooms for years”
would be good productive clickbait, readers likely to be attracted by tales of
troubled geniuses or depressed emos.
The
companion terms are the English language acronym NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and the Japanese オタク (Otaku). Otaku (best
translated as “geek” or “nerd”, reflecting the bias in use towards computers or
other tech) emerged from fandom community associated with Macross (a Japanese science fiction mecha anime media franchise),
the use derived from お宅
(otaku) (you), from the honorific
form 宅 (taku) (home), thus the notion of Macross
being “your home” (ie one’s natural environment”). From the Macross obsessives, use extended to “obsessive
interest in something” (especially (and often exclusively) Japanese anime or
manga). While originally a derogatory
term, fandom communities “reclaimed” otaku as a self-descriptor although it
does continue to be applied disparagingly.
In the West, it tends to be neutral, used to refer to anyone with a strong
interest (obsessive or not) in anime or manga.
NEET is applied not to all those “unemployed” but only those thought
apathetic or who exhibit the characteristics of a hikikomori but in sub-groups,
the play on words with the English “neat” (in the sense “excellent, desirable;
interesting; cool”) prevails.
The
hikikomori came to be known as “the lost generation” and that it was a thing
identified in the 1990s and celebrated (in a sense, that can be the right word)
in Dr Saitō san’s 1998 book is interesting because it was the 1990s that came
to be known as “the
lost decade”). Although there
were of course the inevitable fluctuations in the growth curve, over the 40
years between 1949-1989, the trend for the Japanese economy in most indicative
measures (GDP (gross domestic product), GNP (gross national product), RPP
(relative purchasing power), AMWE (average male weekly earning), corporate
profits, exports, trade surplus etc) tended upwards and while, given the
country’s paucity of natural resources, that was an achievement in some ways
even more remarkable than the Wirtschaftswunder
(“economic miracle”) witnessed in the FRG (Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany; the old West Germany, 1949-1990)
over the same period, the stellar performance was not without consequences and
some of those consequences triggered reactions.
The strength of Japanese economy was by the 1980s producing notable
distortions in the world’s production and trading systems and that of course
affected currencies, as aspect of the international system distorted still
further by this happening at a time when currencies weren’t allowed to “float”
to the extent now familiar, governments and central banks (in some places, for
this purpose, the distinction between the two institutions not significant) sometimes
literally “setting the rate” by fiat.
All this required trips to Tokyo by the US Treasury Secretary to
negotiate the devaluation of the US dollar and it was in the 1970s & 1980s
the deindustrialization of the US economy really began, later forces such as automation, computing, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) proving most adept at
capitalism and AI (artificial intelligence) being building blocks in what continues
to evolve as the “new model”. US
politicians of course responded to this by inducing Japan, the FRG and others
running substantial trade surpluses with the US to shift some production to the
US and that to some extent reduced the imbalances but, factories and assembly
lines in the 1980s not being what they were a generation earlier, US employment
levels or incomes certainly weren't restored.
The
Japanese economy continued to flourish and the fear in the US was often
expressed as “Japan taking over the world”.
That this might be done by the use of Japanese money was a thought bad
enough but to add insult to injury, much of the money was in US dollars gained
by Americans paying Japanese companies for the sort of stuff once manufactured
in their now shuttered factories. Against
that threat, the world’s most potent military (a chunk of which was allocated
to the defense of Japan) and an impressive arsenal of thermo-nuclear weapons
able to be delivered anywhere on the planet was not a great deal of help. What was a help was economic reality because
by 1989 one part of the Japanese economy had developed into a
disproportionately large bubble; at this bubble’s peak, the notional value of
Tokyo real estate market was greater than the entire continental US. Although obviously not something that could
have been realized in the “real world” (ie had every piece of real estate in
Tokyo been offered for sale at its nominal valuation), the numbers were
indicative of one of economic history’s most notable imbalances. In a kind of national hubris (an exuberance
as “irrational” as anything seen since the Dutch “tulip bubble”), the
combination of extreme over-confidence by speculators and ultra-loose credit
policies by lenders had resulted in land values in Japanese cities (Tokyo the
most extreme example) coming to be decoupled from economic reality (and,
because of the “extrapolation effect” by which especially the value of
commercial floor-space was calculated within markets), ultimately, basic
mathematical reality too.
An
(extreme) example of a similar disconnection from reality would be Donald Trump
(b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) applying the metrics and methods of
valuation (that for decades have served him well) to news cosmologists had used
their new “big telescopes” to discover a “perfect Earth-like” planet (one of
the so-called exoplanets (any planet located outside of our solar system)) a
“mere” hundred light-years distant.
Obviously, this planet (or at least what it was a century ago). with an ideal
climate, ample resources, stable geology etc, would contain much desirable real
estate so the valuations attached to this unspoiled paradise would’ in other circumstances,
be high. There might be some uncertainly
if it couldn’t be determined if the place had inhabitants (on Earth such folk
have proved troublesome in land-grabs) but that’s just something speculators
have to “factor in”. The problem however
is that however desirable might be the exoplanet’s lands and seas, they’re a “stranded
asset” because of the distance from Earth; we cannot contemplate travelling a
single light-year, let alone a hundred.
So distance can be an intrusive reality, “stranding an asset”. That’s what the math in 1989 did to Japanese real estate values, the extrapolated numbers meaning floor space in office buildings became at once “the most expensive on the planet” and unrealizable as convertible into cash; the asset became stranded in its bubble. Still, the frothy days of 1989 must trigger a warm glow of nostalgia among the few able to take their profits and “exit” before the crash of 1990. When the “bubble burst”, the effects were profound because, unlike the Dutch “tulip bubble” now understood to have had relatively little long-term effect on the wider economy of the Netherlands, in Japan, the crash in the real estate market trigged a cascade of consequences affecting the stock market, over-exposed banks and the wider economy. In retrospect, that it was a bubble seems so obvious but then, in retrospect, much often does: In 1989, the cumulative value of the Japanese property market was four times that of the US (the latter with more than twice the population and 25 times the land mass); metropolitan Tokyo alone was worth more than the entire continental US and the 1.15 km2 grounds of the Imperial Palace were valued at up to US$5.1 trillion (greater than the entire state of California). So assets can become “stranded” in a number of ways but the concept is much the same: Whatever may appear the “book value”, if this number can never be translated to “real” economic value (not necessarily cash), that asset is stranded. The Gaza strip is less distant from New York’s Trump Tower than the desirable real estate on an exoplanet a hundred light away but, with a population tiresomely showing no wish to go somewhere else so sea-front resorts can be built, it may as well be as distant.
Four episodes of Welcome to the N.H.K. (note the “Parental Warning” advisor stickers).
Among the most intriguing of the anime projects was Welcome to the N.H.K., based on a series of novellas by Tatsuhiko Takimoto san (b 1978). Featuring a very anime-friendly cast of characters (with all that implies), as might be expected in a work about hikikomori, the text explored issues such as social isolation, depression, anxiety and existential dread but the novelty was the appearance of the mysterious N.H.K. (Nihon Hikikomori Kyoukai (Japan Hikikomori Association), a Masonic-like institution responsible for the increasing number of recluses “shut up” in their bedrooms. The hook is the tale is that the N.H.K. is the shadowy creation of NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)), the national public broadcaster.
What came to be called “Japan's Lost Decade” of the 1990s was marked severe economic stagnation, a “banking crisis” (bad loans left sitting on the books as if there was a prospect of repayment), a stock market collapse and deflation. Between 1989-1991 the Nikkei 225 prime index would slump from near 39,000 to around 6,600 and in an era when many governments were fretting about apparently “entrenched” inflation, in Tokyo, what was being observed was deflation. Central bankers at least know how to “fix” inflation (they engineer a recession), but deflation is a fabulous beast that convinces people not to spend because they know the same commodity will next week likely be cheaper; like the inverse process in an inflation-ridden state, deflation “feeds on itself” in a spiralling “feedback loop”. Solutions proved elusive. While central banks fighting inflation could continue raising interest rates until the pain of spending became too much for consumers, the concept of “negative interest rates” (ie one has to pay the bank to store one’s money) was of limited utility because savers’ “work arounds” to evade this would likely make the situation worse before it induced them to open the purse-strings. Pulling the textbook off the shelf, after blowing off the dust, Japanese governments embarked on “fiscal stimulus programmes” that (with borrowed money) sustained banks continuing to loan to anyway insolvent borrowers, this creating both “zombie banks and “zombie companies”; institutions “not alive yet not quite dead”. If anything is likely to stifle efficient resource reallocation in an economy, it’s having “zombies at scale”. In a quirk of the uniqueness of the Japanese economy however, although government debt is now somewhere between 210-240% of GDP (the methods of calculation can vary) this is said “not to be a problem” because so much of the debt is in Yen and locally held (a benefit of all that saving induced by living in deflationary times). Like the US government debt of US$40 trillion odd (120-135% of GDP), it may take some time before it’s confirmed whether or not these numbers are “a problem”.
All this
happened in conjunction with GDP consistently under 1% and an aging population
(a demographic trend that had become structural and continues to this day) and
while those “salary men” in employment tended to remain so (although suffering
“career stagnation”), the young, despite graduates being the most educated in
history, faced what was dubbed the shūshoku
hyōgaki (employment ice age), the jobs available for most being low paid,
unstable and often non-permanent. For a
generation brought up with high expectations and a sense of unlimited possibilities,
it was an unpleasant welcome to the new decade that would come to be called
“the lost decade” and even that proved optimistic; by early in the twenty-first
century the use had been updated to “lost decades” as the sluggishness
persisted. While it had come to be
understood things were not going back to what they were in the happy days of
1989 (because what then was “was not real”), the young in particular still
longed for something better.
Some
continued their longing and some “just gave up”. It was in the 1990s the “lost decade”
produced the “lost generation” that came to be called the hikikomori,
withdrawing from a society that seemed to offer little other than a dreary,
meaningless existence. By becoming
recluses hardly ever leaving their bedrooms, maybe that was just another form
of meaningless dreariness but at least it was on their terms and lent life some
sense of “control”, illusory though that may have been. According to Japanese researchers, the number
of hikikomori had by 2024 grown to over a million and the phenomenon has, on a
smaller scale, been noticed in other countries.
In Japan, having a million-odd modern-day hermits sitting in their
bedrooms refusing to face the outside world remains unlikely to do much to
stimulate the economy or the rapidly declining birth-rate. Indeed, in mid-2026, the Ministry of Internal
Affairs and Communications disclosed the population of domestic citizens had
for the first time fallen below 120 million, a 0.76% decrease from the previous
year; with 670,467 births against 1,593,475 deaths, deaths are outpacing births
by more than two to one.
Some have
argued there is an element of technological determinism is all this. Whether or not one chooses to label it
“internet addiction”, there’s no doubt the ecosystem of the web and apps
(especially hyper-realistic gaming) had made it possible as never before to
lead a kind of fulfilling life
without ever leaving one's bedroom. With
accommodating parents (an ample supply found in Japan) and a good internet
connection, the bedroom can become one’s universe, a place without the
awfulness one know lies beyond one’s four walls. There is nothing new about those who either
cannot cope with or have no wish to deal with the demands of modern society
retreating to the margins but, for the first time in history, it has become possible
for these recluses to exist in a rich, diverse, entertaining world that is
wholly virtualized; relationships and even love affairs able to be conducted
with AI (artificial intelligence) bots.
Because of the dynamics of the ways these bots can be constructed, many
users (and by, implication, many hikikomori) probably find these relationships
more satisfactory than anything experienced with one with a creature of flesh and blood; in many ways, for the tech industry, the COVID-19 pandemic was a “perfect storm”,
contributing to some finding social isolation as “normalized”. The Japanese
Government acknowledges hikikomori exists and defines it as something affecting
people who have stayed at home for at least six months.
Hikikomori is discussed in the APA’s (American Psychiatric Association) DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) but not as a distinct mental disorder. Instead, it’s listed as a behavioral or psychosocial phenomenon that may occur in association with a variety of psychiatric conditions (and even, in some cases, without any diagnosable mental disorder). In other words, the DSM treats hikikomori as a symptom rather than a pathology. That would make sense to clinicians (if not all behavioural sociologists) and in DSM-5-TR (2022), hikikomori is mentioned in the section dealing with “Cultural Concepts of Distress”, the characteristics including (1) marked social withdrawal, (2) remaining at home (often confined to one room) for at least six months and (3) an association with significant functional impairment. So, in the DSM, hikikomori is not classified as a separate diagnosis and clinicians are encouraged to consider whether the withdrawal is better explained by disorders such as: (1) autism spectrum disorder, (2) major depressive disorder, (3) schizophrenia spectrum disorders, (4) social anxiety disorder, (5) avoidant personality disorder or (6) OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). If a patient seems not a good fit for any of those, helpfully, the DSM includes (7) other psychiatric illnesses and presumably, that cohort will be thought diagnostically the most interesting. It would not be surprising if the profession settles on an acceptance of hikikomori as something transdiagnostic, a behavioral endpoint that can arise from various causes.
The Hikikomori: The Girl Who Couldn't Go Outside (2022) by Mark Vrankovich.
There is much thematic variation in hikikomori literature, ranging from the hopeful to the nihilistic. There are also redemption tales. In The Hikikomori: The Girl Who Couldn't Go Outside, Miko Nishimura san is a hikikomori who has become convinced she is the most insignificant person in Japan. Crippled by anxiety, she never leaves her bedroom, occupying just about every waking moment playing racing games (she’s a most modern girl) on her computer. However, a crisis ensues when the batteries in her wireless mouse die during a time when her parents are absent. It’s made clear not many things could induce Miko san to leave the house but not being able to continue her gaming was such a rare circumstance. Miko san should of course have had spare batteries to hand (or, better still, used a wired mouse needing no batteries) but what’s done is done and can’t be undone and she knew she was compelled to make the terrifying trip to the shop to buy new batteries. As courageously she ventures forth, what unfolds is a tale intertwining contemporary Japanese culture, ancient magic powers and the finding of love.
Although in the west there’s a long tradition of “the recluse” (from the briefly installed Celestine V (circa 1212-1296; pope Jul-Dec 1294) to the film star Greta Garbo (1905–1990) and the multi-faceted Howard Hughes (1905–1976)) when in 1998 Dr Saitō san published his book, it seemed in the West fashionable to see hikikomori as something culturally specific, an example of one of the tradition-bound syndromes that delight writers who regard “Japanese weirdness” as the last acceptable form of the “orientalism” that was for decades a standard paradigm of academic and popular analysis of stuff east of Suez. It’s still claimed (though increasingly unconvincingly) there are many of these “Japanese” syndromes relating to fields such as education, employment the family and attitude to psychiatric treatment but the modern view is that in these matters, between Japan and other cultures (certainly in East Asia), there are as many similarities as differences. It has also become clear hikikomori–like behaviour exists in clinically significant numbers in a number of countries including South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Spain, Italy, France, New Zealand, Canada, the US, Australia, the UK, Brazil and India. Despite that, it is still most associated with Japan because it was there first identified (a la the “Spanish flu” process of 1919) but there’s no doubt the conjunction of the nation’s “lost decades” and the subsequent overlays of (1) the internet, (2) social media, (3) the COVID-19 pandemic and (4) consumer-packaged AI algorithms that made possible “life-like virtual relationships” created economic and social conditions that made the phenomenon both more prevalent and visible.
