hikikomori

Adolescence without End

Sait Tamaki

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London

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translators introduction
How to Diagnose an Invisible Epidemic
Jeffrey Angles

When first published in 1998, this book struck a major nerve in Japan
and quickly became a best seller. Although the author, Sait Tamaki,
is currently well known as a major cultural critic and one of the foremost Japanese experts on the psychological problems of youth, at the
time he published this book he was still relatively unknown. Sait
had graduated from the medical school at Tsukuba University in 1990
with a grounding in Lacanian psychiatry and was working as a therapist in Sfkai Sasaki Hospital in Funabashi, just to the east of Tokyo,
when he was struck by a recurring problem among his patients. As
he describes in this book, he found himself amazed at the numbers
of parents and relatives who came in to consult with him about children who hid themselves away, retreated from school and work, and
refused to go outside. These adolescents and young adults had ceased
interacting in society and instead stayed nervously cooped up at home
with few connections to the outside world. These were not just people
suffering from depression, although depression might be linked to their
afflictions. Rather, they were suffering a specific, interlocking series of
symptoms that could not be easily fit under a single, easily identifiable
medical cause. The more Sait looked into the problem, the more he
realized there were untold numbers of young adults throughout society
who were living in these sorts of conditions, and over the next several
years he dedicated himself to studying, analyzing, and understanding
the lives of these people.
As he explains in this book, he and other psychiatrists presented

| vii

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papers and gave lectures about withdrawal and similar, related conditions, but the psychiatric institute in Japan, for the most part, failed
to treat withdrawal as a distinct issue and instead treated individual
cases on an ad hoc basis. In this book Sait argues, based on his
own clinical experience, that the current diagnostic tools available in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth
Edition or DSM-IV (the diagnostic manual published by the American
Psychiatric Association and used throughout much of the world) do
not account especially well for the cases that he and his colleagues
found. The term social withdrawal, or shakaiteki hikikomori, as it is
translated into Japanese, does in fact come from the DSM-IV; however, it appears there as a symptom and not as a diagnostic category.
Sait emphasizes that there are many withdrawn young people in
Japan who do not seem to be suffering from any other primary mental
disturbance. For this reason, he urged the Japanese public and psychiatric world to start thinking about social withdrawal as a distinct
phenomenon. In this book he attempts to define the condition, using
precise language and case studies. By providing a name and definition for the phenomenon of withdrawal, Sait worked to bring it to
public attention and provoked a firestorm of debate among psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors.
Indeed, the publication of this book caused a surge of media attention and launched Sait to a position as the foremost expert in
Japan on youth culture and the problem of withdrawal, in particular.
His clear, easily understandable description, as well as his urgent insistence that withdrawal is a growing problem that threatens to reach
epidemic proportions, made him a media sensation. Popular journals began requesting articles from him, and he became a frequent
speaker on television. Since then, he has availed himself of this media
attention to spread knowledge about the condition and to make the
word hikikomori (withdrawal) known throughout the nation. It was
largely due to Saits success in the media that this word burst into
popular circulation and appeared on the lips of journalists, writers,
and critics throughout the nation. In short, this book and Saits subsequent work and media appearances brought a condition that had
been hidden in back rooms and apartments throughout Japan a
silent epidemic of sufferingto the attention of the public.

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translators introduction | ix

In this book Sait does not hazard a guess at the total number of
adolescents and young people in Japan who might be living in a state
of social withdrawal, but elsewhere, in numerous articles and collections, he has speculated that the number of people living in a state
of withdrawal is probably around or even over 1 million.1 This is an
astounding number given that in 2000, the population of the entire
Japanese nation was approximately 127 million; in other words, just
shy of 1 percent of the entire nation might be living behind closed
doors. This number has proved controversial, and some have accused
Sait of engaging in scare tactics, attempting to earn attention for his
own work on withdrawal with this dramatic and often-quoted number. In fact, Sait himself is the first to admit the difficulty in accurately gauging the number of shut-ins, or hikikomori as they quickly
came to be called in the Japanese media, and he has stated that his
numbers were initially based only on guesses and his own clinical experience.2 Still, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare
conducted a survey of public health departments and psychological
well-being social centers throughout the country, attempting to locate the number of people living in a state of withdrawal that was
not caused by a particular psychological ailment, such as schizophrenia. They located 6,151 people who, in the space of a year, had come
or called for consultation with problems that seemed to fit that description. Of them, 57.8 percent were above twenty-one years old,
and 23.3 percent were in a deep state of withdrawal that had lasted
for more than five years.3 This is not an overwhelming number, but
needless to say, shut-ins do not readily come to doctors to present
themselves for treatment, and the parents taking care of children in
withdrawal are often too ashamed to talk about them with the outside
world. This suggests that the numbers discovered by the Japanese
government are only the tiniest tip of the iceberga hint at a much
larger problem kept mostly out of view.
Sait has also quoted a study by the organization Rainbow (Niji),
run by Ogi Naoki, a frequent speaker on the Japanese educational
system and adolescent problems, such as bullying, rebelliousness, and
truancy. In 2001 Rainbow published the results of a survey of 2,934
ordinary citizens, primarily people who had come to attend Ogis lectures. According to this survey, 94.9 percent of respondents knew the

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word hikikomori, 29.2 percent claimed that they knew a young person in withdrawal in their close circle of friends and acquaintances,
and 3 percent said that they had a hikikomori child in their own family. Ogi used these results to speculate that the total population of
people in withdrawal in Japan ranged somewhere between 800,000
and 1,200,000 people a number that Sait saw as support for his
own estimates of the overall hikikomori population.4
Clearly, these numbers are in no way, shape, or form scientific,
considering that they did not come about through a random sample
of the Japanese population; however, the very nature of the condition
renders the actual number of cases exceedingly difficult to pin down.
As Sait points out in the new preface that he wrote for this English
translation, the Japanese government has recently engaged in a number of more scientific surveys. For instance, in 2010, the Japanese
Cabinet Office conducted a survey that produced an estimate of
nearly 700,000 people in withdrawal in Japan. Still, Sait argues that
because so much shame is associated with withdrawal, the epidemic
is likely even more widespread than that. Whether or not one chooses
to argue with Saits estimate of 1 million people, the unmistakable
point he makes in his many publications is that there is a disturbingly
large number of people living shut off from society, and because of
that, they are almost invisible and exceedingly difficult to account
for. More importantly, the problem almost never improves on its own,
and since most people in withdrawal are not receiving treatment, the
multitudes of people in withdrawal will only continue to grow.
Saits work not only helped make the hikikomori issue well
known to Japanese readers, situating people in withdrawal as the
objects of knowledge for the general population, it also gave people
who had withdrawn from society a term that they could use to talk
about themselves, thus positioning them as subjects. Sait has written
elsewhere that his patients sometimes commented that before they
encountered the word hikikomori, they did not have a name for their
own actions and suspected that they were alone in their reclusive
behavior. This simply led to a greater sense of regret and despair that
only aggravated their situations as lonely, hurt individuals. 5 Likewise, families did not have terms to describe the behavior of their
reclusive members, but Saits 1998 book and the subsequent surge

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translators introduction | xi

of media attention gave them vocabulary to talk about the subject and
let them know that others like them existed throughout the country.
As a result, the last decade or so has seen the beginnings of something like a hikikomori identity, as people have started to identify
themselves with the condition.
In Japan many people, especially those who are middle-aged
or older, are generally hesitant to talk about difficult psychological
issues to psychiatrists or counselors certainly more reticent than
North Americans or Europeans, who tend to see counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists as important health-related resources that one
should not necessarily be ashamed of. It is precisely because so many
Japanese are hesitant to talk about their personal problems that Sait
emphasizes repeatedly in this book that parents of hikikomori children should seek clinical help themselves, and they should try to join
networks for other families with similar problems, thus enabling their
own support and healing, which represents an important part of the
process. The need to talk about the problem of withdrawal requires
language, especially a normalized, clinical vocabulary that can be
used to talk about withdrawal without stigma. In this sense, this book
and the surge of media attention performed an important social function by giving the Japanese population terminology to talk openly
about this issue and how it affects their lives, families, and the nation
as a whole.
Interestingly, in this book Sait tends to avoid using the word
hikikomori to refer to the person in withdrawal himself or herself. Instead, the word tends to appear largely as a descriptor, as in the phrase
hikikomori seinen (withdrawn young man). It was around the time of
the publication of this book and Saits prominence in the media that
the word hikikomori came to be used as a noun to describe a person in withdrawal. Now, it is not uncommon to hear people in Japan
say things like These days, Ive been living a life of a hikikomori,
thus indicating that the term has gone from being an adjective to a
noun describing a person. For instance, Takimoto Tatsuhikos popular
2002 novel NHK ni ykoso (Welcome to the NHK), which inspired
an even more popular manga series of the same title, is told from the
viewpoint of a young man who declares right at the beginning, I
am a hikikomori, thus asserting his withdrawn state as something

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that speaks to the very core of his identity. (Interestingly, Takimoto

himself claims to be a hikikomori who has returned to society.) As
the issue of withdrawal and its prevalence in Japanese society has
become increasingly visible in recent years, it has become possible
for people to occupy the space of subject and take on a hikikomori
identity. What was once described just a few years ago as a condition
is increasingly read back into the interiority of the individual in that
condition.
In many ways this situation is perhaps not unlike the one described in Michel Foucaults La volont de savoir (The Will to
Knowledge), which recounts how certain categories established by
psychiatrists to describe what was then seen as aberrant and perverse
behavior were then read back into the interiority of the individuals
manifesting that behavior, thus establishing a new kind of identity
for them. The language of the category came to describe them as
people, and in this way the so-called perversion was implanted in
their very being. In some cases this identity underwent an inversion
as the people themselves started to adopt this identity publicly and
made it the basis of a social movement. For instance, the group that
medical doctors had identified as homosexuals adopted this label as
an identity that went mainstream and became the basis for political
identification and an equal rights movement that sought fairness in
the workplace and under the law.
Sait often emphasizes in this book and others that hikikomori is
not exactly an illness or a typology; it is a particular state that develops in conjunction with certain environmental factors and that can be
changed through improving communication with the family and the
surrounding world. If anything, it is a state that arises in response to
perceived setbacks on the path to emotional maturity and independence. The implication would be that one does not necessarily have
to read this back into the interiority of the individual as a sign of some
unchangeable element of his or her personality. At the same time, the
frequency with which this term has come to be used by the general
population and even by people in withdrawal themselves suggests
that there is a certain slipperiness in the word hikikomori that could
have important implications as discourse about withdrawal continues
to evolve. One sees hints of this in an article published in London in

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translators introduction | xiii

the Independent in 2001. The article tells the story of a young man
who lived holed up in his room until he happened across a television
program about Sait and his work on withdrawal. The young man
stated, I tried not to admit it at first, but I realized that there were
other people out there, experiencing the same thing as me. His parents urged him to go for therapeutic consultation, and he consented to
start treatment and eventually joined a day-care center run by Sait
where the young man could interact with other people recovering
from a similar situation. Finding similar people with whom he could
interact was the most important step in his recovery. He stated that
until then, I had no word for what I was experiencing, so I couldnt
explain it to anyone else. But now we have the wordhikikomori.
That is the most important thing.6
Through media reports like this one about the hikikomori situation in Japan, the word has slowly crept into English. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary published in 2010 includes an
entry for hikikomori that explains it as follows: In Japan: abnormal
avoidance of social contact; acute social withdrawal; (also) a person,
typically an adolescent male, engaging in this; a recluse, a shut-in.
The first example of its usage in the OED comes from an article published in the Japan Christian Review in 1998, the same year Sait
published this book. A quick examination of LexisNexis shows hundreds of articles published in the English-language media on the subject, but almost every single one is related in some way or another
to Japan.
This begs the important question of whether withdrawal or hikikomori is a specifically Japanese problem. As the translator of this book,
I have been hesitant to overuse the word hikikomori in the body of
the main text, fearing that the transliterated Japanese word would
give the impression that it is a problem confined only to Japana notion that Sait has repeatedly rejected. In part I, chapter 4, Sait surveys the opinions of psychiatric colleagues from around the world.
The opinions that he receives are too impressionistic and far too few
to be conclusive in any way, but he uses them nonetheless as evidence
to state that social withdrawal is not only a Japanese problemjust as
the origin of the expression in English would suggest. Withdrawal
is a process of the human psyche, but given that social withdrawal

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has to do with problems in adjusting to society, it only makes sense

that individual cases reflect issues in the surrounding society. In other
words, withdrawal is a universal phenomenon, but the particular form
in which withdrawal manifests itself in Japan does have to do with
Japanese or perhaps even East Asian culture more broadly. In the final
chapter of this book, Sait argues that the contemporary educational
system is a big part of the problem, especially policies that place students in intense competition with one another while maintaining the
outward illusion that the students are all supposed to be equal.
Some of the other factors that Sait has pointed to in his other
work have to do with the nature of the East Asian family and the
question of what it means to be an adult. (As Sait notes in the new
preface written for this translation, he has become aware in recent
years that Korea is another nation that is home to a large number
of people in withdrawal.) Sait has written about the role of the
family elsewhere, and perhaps some of those comments are worth
quoting at length. The following passage comes from the 2002 book
Hikikomori kyshutsu manyuaru (How to Rescue Your Child from
Hikikomori).
It goes without saying that in the West, establishing oneself as
an individual is a self-evident premise. I know that in the West,
the model of establishing oneself involves leaving the household.
I say this because when a child comes of age, he or she is often
compelled to separate from his or her parents and go off to live
as an individual.
In contrast, the image that Japanese have of establishing
oneself is a model that involves filial piety (oya kk). It is even
the case that children will live with their parents and take care
of them, and through that, they will become complete as a
person for the first time; in other words, they will establish themselves. Of course, the influence of Confucian culture, which was
first imported from China, then underwent far-reaching reforms
during and following the Meiji Period [18681912], is probably
quite large.
Another even more unique Japanese element is the culture
of amae [dependency or reliance] that Doi Takeo wrote about.7
Doesnt it seem that the kind of filial relationship that Japanese

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translators introduction | xv
see as most desirable involves mutual reliance and indulgence?
Establishing oneself does not necessarily involve leaving the
home, and there is a greater acceptance of people living together
under the same roof. For instance, one can see this cultural element at work in the rise of parasite singles (unmarried people
who continue to live with their parents even after they graduate,
relying on their parents for the basic conditions of their existence), which are said to number as many as ten million. If one
of the most desirable models of establishing oneself involves filial
piety, this probably means that the relationships will develop into
ones of dependence/indulging. . . .
On the other hand, if one were to look at the situation in
comparison with other Asian societies, first and foremost, one
must not ignore the economic component. In the past, I have
sent out questions about my hikikomori cases by e-mail to psychiatrists from all over the world. At that time, one psychiatrist
from Thailand sent me back the query How do they go about
putting food on the table?
This is a rather simple question or rather, one that is
quite straightforward. The reason I say this is because one of the
conditions for the rise in numbers of hikikomori is an economic
status that would allow the family to continue to support the unemployed child even after he or she becomes an adult.8

In other words, Sait proposes that there is a group of factors at work

in producing high numbers of hikikomori cases in Japan: the assumption that it is fine or even desirable for a child to continue to live with
his or her parents into adulthood, a cultural propensity to develop
relationships of dependency (amae) in which the parents take care
of the child and the child relies on the parents in an unequal and
sometimes codependent form of love, and a level of wealth that allows parents to take continue taking care of their children even when
the child has reached physical maturity. This combination of factors
works to allow certain children to stay in a position of emotional and
economic dependence, even immaturity. The result is a somewhat
higher likelihood that children will remain in a continued, artificially
prolonged state of adolescence.
There, in essence, is the relevance of this book for students and

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xvi | translators introduction

scholars of Japanese society and culture, and Japanese subcultures, in

particular. In this book Sait is careful to prudently limit the scope of
his focus to the definition and treatment of social withdrawal, rather
than engage in an overarching general critique of Japanese society,
which does continue to produce a majority of mature, relatively
well-adjusted individuals. Still, as he himself would note, there is a
particular combination of socioeconomic factors in Japan that, when
coupled with problems in the operations of the individual family and
a systemic failure to provide enough resources for the psychological
care of its citizens, has led to a rise in this condition. On the one hand,
Saits main position is that social withdrawal is not a phenomenon
found solely in Japan, and he is resistant to the view that somehow
Japanese society is itself pathological in naturea view dramatically
reflected, for instance, in Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created
Its Own Lost Generation, Michael Zielenzigers attention-grabbing
book about hikikomori published in 2006. On the other hand, if one
reads between the lines of this book, one finds the implication that
the nature of familial interactions commonly seen in Japan has helped
incubate the problem and therefore bears some reconsideration.
If the crux of the problem lies in the family and the withdrawn
individuals own perceived inability to cope with the world, this still
does not mean that parents should turn their children out, force them
to get a job, or try to make them grow up. Sait writes that such extreme reactions only produce heartache, failure, or worse yet, disaster. In the second half of this book, Sait lays out a plan that involves
modifying the nature of the parentchild relationship to restore
meaningful communicationin other words, helping the hikikomori
child interact with the parents in a more adult fashionas a step toward engaging with the world in a more meaningful way. This represents, in Saits eyes, a critical step toward emotional adulthood.
Clearly, parents and their modes of interacting with their children are part of the problem, but Sait never becomes accusatory in
this book. No doubt, one reason he did not lay blame explicitly with
problematic parentchild relationships has to do with the fact that
the principal audience consists of the families of hikikomori themselves. Sait argues that to resocialize a person who has gone into
withdrawal, it is essential to enlist the help of the parents and get

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translators introduction | xvii

them to change the modes of communication within the family, being

careful not to sound accusatory or make the withdrawn child feel
guilty. Such emotions are not helpfulthey only prolong the problem
or make the withdrawn child want to hide all the more. What Sait
sees as necessary are positive, concerted steps to move forward and
help the many thousands of people suffering in silence. It is for that
reason that he gives concrete steps to help families change their own
behaviors at the same time that they are seeking help for themselves
and their child. It would only be counterproductive to take the families of hikikomori children to task, saying that the culture within
their family represents part of the problem.
Because the original Japanese version of this book was a shinsho,
a paperback volume designed for a broad, nonspecialist audience, it
does not contain the rigorous citations one would typically find in
a medical journal or other research publications. At the end of the
original Japanese book is a short bibliography of selected articles and
monographs that Sait mentions in the text, but this does not include
citations for the works of the well-known American and European
psychologists whom Sait mentions in passing. As the translator, I
have not bolstered the text with footnotes in order to boost its academic rigor. Instead, I have left in place the original system of citations, simple as it might be, adding to the bibliography only a few
additional books that Sait has mentioned with special frequency.
It is also worth noting that Saits many press appearances, especially in recent years, are not limited to the issue of withdrawal.
He frequently appears in the press to comment on a host of issues
about adolescent development, unemployment, media, and other factors affecting the lives of young people. Since 1998, the same year
he first published this book in Japanese, he has been writing about
other subjects as well. In Bunmyaku-by (The Disease of Context),
Sait applied the theories of Jacques Lacan, Gregory Bateson, and
Humberto Maturana to his own clinical experience to provide a new
look at Japanese culture (and youth subcultures in particular) in the
context of the new postmodern flood of media and information, which
Sait saw as blurring the boundaries between the Lacanian realms of
the real and the imaginary in sometimes startling and even productive ways. In Shjo-tachi no senreki (The Combat Service of Girls),

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a special issue of the serial Pop Culture Critique also published in

1998, Sait provided a first look at the genealogy of the beautiful
fighting girl (sent bishjo), an archetypal figure in many manga
and anime that has come to represent the object of erotic fascination for many male, heterosexual fans. Sait developed this psychoanalytic foray into anime criticism in the 2000 volume Sent bishjo
no seishin bunseki, which has been translated as Beautiful Fighting
Girl by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson and also published by the
University of Minnesota Press. There Sait engages in an extended
rereading of the history and (frequently mistaken) cultural assumptions about anime-loving subcultures and the influence of media on
their imaginations. Although shaped by a sophisticated engagement
with critical theorists from the West, this work is also grounded in
common sense and his own down-to-earth observations gleaned
from actual members of the subcultures under examination. This
combination of theoretical sophistication, clinical observation, and
careful practicality, especially when it comes to Japanese youth culture, is the hallmark of Saits work as a cultural theorist, and perhaps
nowhere is that combination of factors on clearer display than in his
work on social withdrawal.
As one final note to this introduction, I would like to share a
personal anecdote. At the same time that I was giving this translation a final prepublication polish, one of the students studying at my
universityan American student who was quite quiet but far above
average in the classroom confessed to me during my office hours
that for some years, he had lived in a state of complete withdrawal
in his own home, shell-shocked and unable to engage with the outside world. This condition had started for him in high school, and
although he was a superior student, he dropped out for a time, maintaining only a minimal connection to society. Thanks to a loving family and some professional guidance, he recovered to the point that he
completed a GED and came to university. Struck by this unexpected
confession, I asked him if I could share the manuscript of this book
with him. A couple of days later, he came to my office to tell me that
he was overwhelmed when he read ithe was shocked at how similar his experiences were to the ones Sait had described in this book.

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For a long time the student had felt that he was alone, but the book
offered proof that there were others like him in the world.
This experience offered one more piece of evidence to both me
and Sait, with whom I shared this story, that the experiences described in these pages are not entirely limited to Japan. Although
the English-speaking world seems to be adopting the word hikikomori, rendering the word in transliterated Japanese instead of backtranslating it into the original English word withdrawal, it is clearly
not something found solely in Japan, and North American readers
should not simply gawk at it as a strange phenomenon that seems
only to happen elsewhere. It is my hope that this translation will
spark debates in the English-speaking world, as the original book did
in Japan, about the best ways to help all of the young people, regardless of their nationality or location, who are out there, hidden as they
suffer in silence.

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saito tamaki is a practicing psychiatrist and director of medical

services at Sfkai Sasaki Hospital in Funabashi, Japan. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including Beautiful Fighting Girl,
published in English by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011.
jeffrey angles is associate professor of modern Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University, where he directs
the Japanese-language program. He is author of Writing the Love of
Boys: Origins of Bishnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature
(Minnesota, 2011) and award-winning translator of Forest of Eyes:
Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of
Hiromi It, and Twelve Views from the Distance (Minnesota, 2012).

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