“Hikikomori” and Dependency on Family: Focusing on Father–Son Relationships

Hikikomori is a Japanese term referring to the condition of being “shut‐in” or someone with that condition. Japanese national surveys indicated that the total number of hikikomori is over one million. This paper seeks to elucidate the “hikikomori” problem faced by families and connect those microscopic experiences to a macroscopic common problem related to some social backgrounds of Japanese society. For the study, I examined statistical data from national and KHJ (a nationwide organization of hikikomori families) surveys, and case studies of fathers of hikikomori sons. One of the main findings was that the common problem of families with hikikomori people is not the shut‐in condition of them, but the “dependency” of these adult‐aged children. Fathers' attempts to reduce the dependency included encouraging their sons to secure stable employment or connect them to adequate social security, such as public assistance. However, these efforts are often ineffectual because of social structural backgrounds: transformation of the labor market, inadequate social security, and the infinite duty of family to sustain children. This paper also focused on the policies of the “Japanese model of welfare society” as a political factor that reinforced the family dependency by developing a combination of workfare regime and familialism. The Japanese model of welfare society assumes that the employment of men as breadwinners would be stable. Instability of the employment of men makes the model dysfunctional. The expansion of the hikikomori problem as a family dependency problem is evidence of the dysfunction of the model.     

Can Cool Japan save Post‐Disaster Japan? On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of a Cool Japanology

This article considers Cool Japan in light of catastrophe, first theoretically through a phenomenological analysis of Cool Japan and Cool Japanology, suggesting that the study of Cool Japan itself is way of uncooling the object of inquiry, itself a reaction to the apocalyptic realities of everyday life since the dawn of the modern world. The article finishes with a sociological reflection on current events through a détourner of the sekai kei genre in Summer Wars' inclusion of two sociological types in its rendition of catastrophe. This article then is intended as a preliminary step to understanding the specificity and commonalities of Japanese cool power through an understanding of the phenomenon of cool and the contents to which cool often refers.     

Staying inside: social withdrawal of the young,Finnish ‘Hikikomori’

This article explores socially withdrawn young Finnish people on an Internet forum who identify with the Japanese hikikomori phenomenon. We aim to overcome the dualism between sociology and psychology found in earlier research by referring to Pierre Bourdieu, who provides insights into how individual choices are constructed in accordance with wider social settings. We focus on the individual level and everyday choices, but we suggest that psychological factors (anxiety, depression) can be seen as properties of social relations rather than as individual states of mind, as young adults have unequal access to valued resources. We scrutinise young people’s specific reasoning related to the social and psychological factors and contingent life events that influence their choice to withdraw. An experience of inadequacy, a feeling of failure and a lack of self-efficacy are common experiences in the data. This indicates that young adults who identify with the hikikomori phenomenon find external society demanding and consider themselves lacking resources such as education, social networks or the personality type that they see as valued in society and as essential to ‘survival’. They also feel that they cannot control their life events, which may mean that they receive little help in their everyday lives.     

Social work with youth in social withdrawal: in-home and beyond-home intervention modalities

This article discusses the characteristics and the process of in-home and beyond-home social work intervention with young people suffering from social withdrawal in the form of chronic self-seclusion at home. These young people are characterized by their socially avoidant behaviour and are deprived of the enjoyment of legitimate social status as a student, worker or trainee. As a way of confronting this problem, ‘start where the client is’ – an age-old social work intervention principle – can be read in a literal sense, i.e. taking home as a secure place for rapport-building and initial intervention with the clients to pave the way for further intervention beyond the home setting, both online and offline. Drawing on qualitative interviews with youth clients and social workers, it is argued that adopting a flexible, informal and tailor-made approach to working with youth in silent and invisible disengagement from the rest of society has to take into consideration spatial, relational and organizational dimensions of intervention modalities and possibilities if the goal of youth reengagement is to be achieved.