Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End

"This is a very lucid, clinical account of a hidden social phenomenon that the author, Saitō Tamaki—a psychoanalytically sympathetic psychiatrist—was the first to identify in Japan as hikikomori , literally ‘social withdrawal.’ It is about a generation of young people, aged about 18 and 35, in the late 1980s, whose parents came to him and said: ‘my child will not come out of their room. They’ve withdrawn completely from the world, they’ve given up. They’re taking all their meals in their room, and they will only come out for bathroom breaks.’ Tamaki uncovered this not as a localized urban phenomenon, but as an epidemic. Indeed, the government office of statistics in Japan estimated in the wake of Tamaki’s research and very widespread reporting, that there may be as many as 700,000 cases of hikikomori in Japan. Tamaki put it closer to a million. One wants to ask: what is it about Japan? Because it seems to be quite culturally specific. He suggested that one of the reasons it might have been more prominent in Japan is because there is a sealed-in culture of family honour, and shame, and perhaps a stronger imperative to keep the potential shame from the public gaze. Partly too, to protect the child. It took someone like Tamaki to give it widespread recognition. “They are in a state of suspension between the end of childhood, and an entry point into adulthood that they can’t seem to approach” But then, it was documented in Korea, too, and he also suggests that there are analogues in Western societies: an equivalent population in Anglophone countries, particularly among ‘Neets’—that is, those not in education, employment, or training. They may not be quite as withdrawn, but they are similarly aimless. They are in a state of suspension between the end of childhood, and an entry point into adulthood that they can’t seem to approach. This, I think, is really interesting in relation to burnout. For me, it cements the idea of burnout as being a malaise of inadequacy and a sense of failure. These kids are, in a way, so overburdened by the prospect of not achieving, of not fulfilling the potential that’s been transmitted to them in the educational system, in the employment system, by their family. There is so much anxiety about fulfilling the role that’s been legislated for them in their future that they’ve shut down. They’ve burnt out not so much as a result of what they’ve done, but as a result of a burden of expectation that they’ve internalized. That’s also part of what makes the difference between simple exhaustion—which we all feel—and burnout. Burnout has something to do with being overburdened by a set of self-imposed (or externally imposed, but heavily internalized) expectations. That’s a great question. It probably needs to be pathologised when withdrawal becomes a desperate, last-ditch measure: a means of escape, rather than a choice that’s embraced. One of the points that Tamaki makes that’s worth reiterating, is that hikikomori are never happy. You don’t ever come across a case— at least not in his book—where one of these late adolescents or adults in their twenties says, ‘you know, I’m sitting in my room, and I’m gaming, and listening to the radio, and having my meals on my own, and I kinda like it.’ None of them say that. They’re all caught in this hellish non-place and feeling empty of anything but a kind of deadened anxiety. And every day exacerbates the predicament, because it’s another day in which they fail to find a way out of the impasse. What Dickinson does is, well, she has various exits from the privacy of her own room available to her. The most obvious is marriage at various points in her life—although there’s suspicion among biographers that some of the epistolary lovers that she writes to are actually imaginary, rather than real. Maybe sort of composite figures. Anyway, she’s not posting these letters, and we don’t really know who these figures she’s writing love letters to are—but nonetheless, she has real-life opportunities to be courted. To have an apparently more expansive life in the form of a wife, and a mother. She explicitly turns down those opportunities. “She says that ‘no’ is the most passionate word in the language for her” In my biographical essay on Dickinson, I talk about the much older man, Otis Lord, who desperately wants to marry her, and she keeps up this very passionate correspondence with him. She talks about how much she loves him, but part of the way she talks about love is as a form of renunciation: ‘No, I won’t share your bed.’ She says that ‘no’ is the most passionate word in the language for her. Because that’s, in a way, what keeps passion alive; if you don’t actually consummate it, then it’s always—and this relates to an idea in of creativity itself in Dickinson that creativity—keeping imaginative possibilities alive. As soon as you choose a path, as soon as you choose a husband, then you’re giving up, in a way, on the imaginative possibilities of love. So what looks like withdrawing to her room to scratch out poems, is a way of preserving the infinity of her own mind. There’s a kind of imaginative richness in withdrawal for Dickinson that is absent from a pathological withdrawal."