Unlocking Hikikomori: an interdisciplinary approach

This article provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which social isolation is constructed in institutional and public imaginaries. It examines the discursive devices that produce hikikomori subjectivities, with a particular focus on the existence of an enduring deviant construct. Despite largely existing in the private sphere, hikikomori are positioned as residing outside of the prevailing system of social relationships and as such are perceived as a threat to social order. Persistent psycho-medical and idiosyncratic cultural depictions of hikikomori continue to obscure those who are doing the defining. Such portrayals also re-assert enduring normative expectations concerning the social, civil and economic participation of young people. Through an interdisciplinary approach that blends sociological and cultural critique, this paper challenges the dominant discourses framing hikikomori, at the same time underlining the ways in which these limiting discourses act upon the self by reinforcing an individualised subjectivity, masking the network of institutions and cultural discourses that mediate this process. We assert that there needs to be a broadening of the concept away from the atomised individual to one that situates hikikomori within a social and cultural context, having significant implications for identity and notions of personhood in contemporary, digital Japan and beyond.