Why is the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan being treated like a national crisis? Are there legitimate health concerns involved or is it more related to culture?
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Society is made of people.
If young men, that are the most important part of society (with young women), are retreating from life, it means that that society is going to fall down (the average age increase too much, you have to import immigrants from other countries etc etc)
Remember that the most part of hikimori is made of men, and we are biologically programmed to feel less empathy for them. Add then the fact that the western world is becoming more and more feminist (not the genuine version of feminist movements, but the current toxic one), the pressure on you is higher than ever (you have to graduate, find a good job with a nice pay, buy a house, improve your career…), you’re always in competition with people (even with people you don’t know)… unfortunately Social Darwinism is spreading and the disadvantage between people that won the genetic lottery (from different point of view) and the ones who lost the genetic lottery is increasing.
Cultural specific mental health concerns exist – hikikomori seems to a specific vairant of agoraphobia/social anxiety inexorably linked to the way Japanese society functions and the pressures that are put onto people.
So, sort of both – there is a legitimate mental health concern, but that is tied up in how the society functions and cultural expectations and norms. You can’t really separate any one condition from the cultural context surrounding it.
They don’t work, they don’t really consume. Health concerns are surface level, if there was a pill that made them go to work and buy things when they get home, they would be force fed. Culture does play in to why they’re despised but not why it’s a national crisis. It’s simply that a too great proportion of hikikomori would start creating problems for the way economies run, they effectively live like the elderly and we all know about the demographic issue of a rising proportion of elderly. Working-age people choosing to become functionally like the elderly, albeit with fewer physical health issues, is just making that issue speed up. We can’t have that, they must work, they must consoom.
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It’s a symptom of societal decay. If everyone became an hikikomori, the hikikomori generation would be the last one. If the entire US was Skid Row, it would be a cesspit closer to a 3rd world.
That’s my two cents I’m dumb af
When people choose to isolate from society in “masses”, something is clearly wrong with how that society works. That needs to be fixed or else with time that society will collapse.
(Im not going to talk about Japanese culture, because I am not Japanese)
>ELI5: Why is the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan being treated like a national crisis?
Answer: because it largely is
Japan is almost-unique among nations in that it has an aging population *but does not allow easy immigration*
Other (pretty much all, IIRC) developed nations have aging populations, but they “import” usually-younger immigrants that keep the wheels of the economy turning, between paying taxes and providing services.
Japan, broadly speaking, does not. They do not allow many long-term immigrants, for….various reasons. As such, Japan largely only has its “native” population to drive its economy.
You need workers working, to pay taxes and provide goods and services. Not just to grow your economy, but even to keep it stable. With an aging population, that means more and more people stop working and start requiring more resources, from pensions to healthcare. If you dont have people paying taxes to provide those pensions or to provide healthcare workers, it becomes more difficult to provide those.
There are increasing trends among younger (by this I mean young adults) people in pretty much all Developed countries where they just…give up? They stop striving to succeed and improve at work, they dont have children, they might not be interested in relationships at all. They just keep on keeping on, or take lower-pay and less-stress jobs and focus on hobbies, or withdraw from society as the case of Hikikomori.
While the above has an effect on individuals, it also has an effect on society. Fewer people having children means fewer workers down the line, which means less taxes to fund programs and fewer workers to staff them, which means the workers that are there are overstressed, which means they might choose to stop contributing, which means fewer workers, so on and so forth.
Japan has a sizable chunk of its workforce that “arent contributing as much as society thinks they should”, and that is a problem (for society). It isnt just men, either: many Japanese women arent getting married or having children, because they have (or want) to work instead.
One of the subreddits that has been getting recommended to me now often is r/lostgeneration. It’s a group of millennials and gen z folk who feel that their future has been taken away from them by the selfishness of previous generations, mostly the baby boomers.
The term Lost Generation was in use in Japan from the end of twentieth century when their economy began to drop from it’s metioric heights of the 80s and 90s. Opportunities for advancement and fulfillment were destroyed by the economic downturn but the culture of Japan still put intense pressure on its youth to sacrifice their life and their happiness for success many people felt they could no longer achieve.
So many of them, mostly men because Japan is very patriarchal so that’s where most of the pressure was, chose to withdraw. Better not to struggle if your only result is failure anyway.
It’s a concern because with fewer men our in the workforce there’s fewer people getting married and having children. It’s similar to the “millennials are killing X industry by not having kids/buying houses” thing. Plus the openings left on the job market have to be filled and that often means hiring foreigners and Japan is still very xenophobic. There’s a common insult in Japan that translates to “Stupid Korean”.
All of this piled on top of a society that already had a high suicide rate and is one of the only industrialized worlds that treats mental health *worse* than in America you have a major crisis in a society that is not set up to handle it.
Blaming this phenomenon solely on the Japanese culture is not accurate or even scientific. If it were a product of Japanese culture alone, then this would be the only culture in which we find hikikomori, and it is not. After hours of documentaries on it, my takeaway is that there are 3 contributing factors that play important roles in the outcome:
1. Society/Culture in which the young man lives
2. Parents enabling behavior
3. Hikikomori’s individual choices/reasons
I agree culture/society plays a role, as it does in many mental health cases (US included). But we need to acknowledge that these young men are being hugely enabled by their parents. In the documentaries I have seen, 100% of the hikikomori men were being completely supported financially by their parents. They lived rent free, with free unrestricted internet access, given gaming PCs or money to buy them, and also provided meals. I remember one interview subject saying he required his mother to prepare his meals and bring them to his bedroom so he wouldn’t have to eat at the table with his parents anymore-and this behavior had been going on for YEARS. This man was in his 20s, and physically healthy and was not so crippled by mental illness that he couldn’t cook his own food. He spent all his waking hours playing online games.
Personal responsibility and individual choice must also be factored in here. No one chooses to be mentally ill, but choice is involved when it comes to what you do about it. Millions of mentally ill people work jobs, get treatment, get therapy, and work really hard to either manage their symptoms or heal psychologically. The hikikomoris (for the most part) do not make these same choices. Personal responsibility should not be ignored.
Japan has an aging population and a declining birthrate.
The elderly of Japan are afraid that if their population continues to age and decline their economy is doomed to in inescapable collapse due to lose of work force. They are also afraid on almost a genetic level that if they become too weak China will invade and devour them.
Its a culture problem made much worse by unfettered capitalism. Basically the inherent conformist bias that Japan has lead to Japanese workers putting in countless hours of unpaid overtime because they are a afraid of leaving before their bosses and managers. This leads to them spending hours at the office working instead of doing things like socializing, dating, and having families. So a lot of Japanese men don’t have the time to get married and have a family. Then those that do have their life devoured by their jobs and spend almost 0 time with their family causing them to neglect their spouse and children creating family dysfunction. You get children growing up having an absent father figure who works all day and night who is so tired they have no idea who he is. So the kids get it their heads that work is a path to doom and they see the rat race as a soul devouring trap. Add in the problem of stagnant wages and the son cannot achieve what his father did despite getting a better education and working harder.
So they retreat from this becoming shut ins and hermits who do not participate in society.
Now Japan could fix these by enacting stronger labor laws and educating the next generation that they can’t let their lives be devoured by their work. They could also provide universal low to no cost daycare to encourage people to have children. They could force corporations to pay people more.
But because the corporations control the politicians and reforms that could relieve the problems would hurt short term profits they won’t happen.
Basically without a working class revolution Japan is fucked just like the US and every country with unfettered capitalism.
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