RedHanded - ShortHand: Hikikomori - Japan’s Modern Day Hermits

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Societal recluses exist in every culture. But in Japan, the number of permanent shut-ins has risen to incredible levels. There are estimated to be around one million Hikikomori, or ‘modern-day hermits’, in Japan today, and the term has even been proposed to be included in the DSM-5.So what is it about Japanese culture that causes so many young men to never leave the house? Press play to join us in investigating why so many Japanese citizens choose to live their lives in almost complete social isolation.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

So in June 2016, two clinical psychologists named Alan Tio and Abolt Gore, published a proposal for a new disorder to the DSM-5. They talked about a 14-year-old Japanese boy who was suddenly and completely withdrawn from society. But just a year previously, he had been a totally average kid. He came from a stable home, he had nice parents, siblings that he got on with, and yet now he simply would not leave his room. He had become a Heikikimori, which literally translates to withdrawn in Japanese.

The term refers to the ever-growing number of Japanese citizens who flat-out refused to interact with society. A term first coined by Japanese psychologist Tamaki Sayota in 1998, The Japanese government estimates that now 700,000 of its citizens, at least, are living in this complete social isolation. Why? This is the shorthand. Firstly, what makes someone a hickikamori? Well, there are a lot of different definitions out there.

Some as simple as a modern-day hermit or indefinite adolescence. But we're going to get a little bit more specific. According to Professor Graham Yawston, there are several factors that add up to being defined as a hickikamori. The first is social isolation, obviously. Whether rejecting education or work, a hickikimori is someone who doesn't engage with wider society in any way. Secondly, there is a lack of socialisation, even within the home itself. Hikikikimori make a concerted effort to try and avoid any kind of social interaction, including with their own family. Thirdly, spending the majority of time within their own home.

Naturally, if you're trying to avoid the entire world, the best place to do that is in your house. Fourthly, there has to be significant functional impairment. There is no such thing as a functional hikikamori. By its very definition, a hikikikamori is someone who refuses to function as a part of society. And so, therefore, anyone who is self-sufficient can't really be one. Lastly, this all has to go on for more than six months.

Someone just having a bit of a wobble and living at their mum's for a few months does not a Hicikamori make. It really is a long-term lifestyle and one that the person has no intention of ending. There are also some misconceptions about Hikikimori that we should debunk right off the bat. It's widely assumed here, in the West. The Hikikikamori are just unambitious or lazy young men who refuse to leave. their bedrooms. We imagine something similar to the kind of chronically online gamer culture that you see in the US or the UK. In reality, though, many Hikikamori do leave their bedrooms. They just do so in a way that allows them to, crucially, avoid any kind of social interaction. We saw

an interview with one recovering Hikikikamori, who said that he slowly became nocturnal over several months. He began waking up after his parents had gone to bed, going downstairs, watching TV and going about his daily routine, before receding back to his bedroom 10 hours later, when his parents got up for work. And we listened to an interview with another recovering Hikikamori, who said that he, and others like him, did even go outside during their isolation, but he drew a distinct line between the limited social interaction needed to go out and buy like groceries or go for a walk, to engaging in society by getting a job or going to school. Another misconception is that Hikikamori are a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.

Actually, there are modern-day hermits all over the world. However, while it isn't uniquely Japanese, Japan, and specifically its culture, does seem to create more Hikikikamori than the average nation does. And it is hard to ignore that a key part of the culture that perpetuates Hikikamori, the Hikikikamori development, is the Japanese work mentality. A study in 2017 found that in a quarter of Japanese companies employees work more than 80 hours of overtime every single month for no extra pay at all.

And also, although Japanese workers have 20 days of annual leave, most only used half of it, with 63% saying that they felt guilty for taking paid time off. When I was in Venice over New Year's, we did a cooking class one day, and their other people on the cooking class were four other Japanese people. And I was talking to them and they were like, oh, you know, two of them lived in Austria and two of them were visiting them from Japan. And they were just like, yeah, we forced her to come because she has so much leave. She never takes it and we forced her to come on holiday with us to Venice.

And I was like, oh yeah, like I've read a bit about this because when we were writing the episode for this, I was doing some extra research into this kind of Japanese work mentality. and I was like, oh, and you guys have that thing called Premium Fridays. And they were like, how do you know about Premium Fridays? And I was like, it's my job to know strange things about unimportant things from other countries. But it's really interesting, basically what the Japanese culture tried to do after a young woman. I can't remember, I think it was a few years ago, basically killed herself after working herself into the ground. And the company received a huge backlash for it and the government said that it was going to make

every attempt to sort of curtail this overworking culture. And so one thing they introduced was this thing called Premium Fridays, which is basically the last Friday of every month, every Japanese employee is told to go home at 3pm. The problem is none of them do it. Yeah, right. And I was talking to this family about it, and they were like, yeah, absolutely.

The problem is nobody wants to be the first person to leave. And this is the thing we have to understand in Asian culture, especially in a culture like that, where it's about collectivism, not about individual, individualism like it is here in the West, if you're the first person to leave, it's like, oh my God, what are they doing? They're breaking with the group. They're breaking the whole system. And so what some Japanese companies have taken to doing in order to try and force people to leave is turning all the lights off. Oh my God. And cutting off the electricity. And I'm like, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And the Japanese couple who the woman from Japan was visiting, they live in in Austria and they were like, that was great. It's great. It's great. Fantastic. The Japanese even have a word for working yourself to death. It's Karoshi. And it's a legitimate term. It will be written on your death certificate as a cause of death. I was so shocked by that. Like, I was aware that there was a term for this. But the fact that they will literally write it as your COD on your death certificate is crazy. You could even dive a stroke or a heart attack or even suicide from the stress of your job, all of those things will be labeled as Karoshi.

In a way, it's good that it's being recognized. I was going to say that. At least they're not just saying, oh, well, you know, it was because of a heart attack. It's a heart attack induced by the work that you're being asked to do. So where does this work mentality in Japan come from? It's believed to have stemmed from Japan's economic miracle at the start of the 1950s.

This boom led to Japan becoming the second largest, economy in the world. And it's why their national flower is the cherry blossom because they bloom so fast. Well, there you go. So under this move, Japan doubled down on its typically Asian way of thinking, collectivism, the idea that the group is more important than the individual. And this went from the idea from the idea that the company you work for is more important than you. And that's why you have this kind of thing in Japan as well. It's called like the salary man. So in Japan, people, people tend to work for one company for their entire careers. And that company is more important than you.

So here people make memes and jokes about like, oh, when your boss tells you, oh, we're just like a family so that they can abuse you. There, it's like it's not even a joke. There it's not even covered up. And it's very likely that you were always going to work at that company ever since you were a toddler. It was always where you were going to end up. But what's really striking in Japan is despite how hard people work,

and I thought this is absolutely fascinating. Japan has the lowest productivity of all G7 nations as of 2017. So them working as hard as they are working doesn't lead to more productivity. It's actually the lowest productivity of G7. That is wild. And also, Japan has lost its spot as the second largest economy in the world to China. So it's clear that things in Japan need to change because they're not even benefiting from their workforce working themselves.

to death, especially as their population declines, because Japan is one of the countries that has one of the oldest populations, and they're really, their population is declining because also they have a lack of immigration there, people aren't having children, and people are fucking working themselves to death, and they have super low productivity. It's kind of like a recipe for disaster. So that is why the Japanese government, when they're doing things like Premium Fridays turning the lights off, it's not because they are like, oh, we should just be really nice. They're like, it's actually, we need to change something fundamental. I'm almost sure they have a national shagging day as well where everyone's given the day off work and they're like, please go and fuck your wife.

Please have a baby. For the good of the empire. Please have a child. So yeah, I don't know. And the government on top of turning all the lights off, premium Fridays, etc., is also trying to help by adding in more national holidays. In 2016, they added a new one in. Hannah, would you like to guess what the new one that was added in 2016 was called? It's something day.

Penis day. Mountain Day. Okay. I think shagging day would be better. Maybe another one, premium shagging day. Now again, this was a desperate attempt, not just to get people to stop fucking literally dying at their desks, but it was also an attempt to boost consumer spending

because everyone's at work all the time. They're not spending enough money. So yeah, it's a problem that the government is trying to tackle. The issue is that people aren't really taking it up because it's so ingrained in the car. ultra. So with all of that being said, let's get back to our 14-year-old boy. It's commonly said of the hickikamori that there is no trigger that suddenly, completely out of the blue, these people recede into their rooms and refuse to leave. This is, however, quite rarely the case. In reality, the cause of

people entering a state of social isolation comes from some kind of trauma. And this trauma ranges from losing loved ones to losing jobs or even just missing out on the grades you wanted at school. And this includes the 14-year-old boy in Tio and Gore's proposal. As they say in their paper, from the surface, the boys jump into social isolation seemed sudden, but on closer inspection, it was far from it, as it literally always is.

Nobody does anything this extreme for no reason. And that idea that it does happen without a trigger does feel a little bit like people wanting to ignore what is forcing that to happen. Yeah, ignoring that it's a cultural problem. So let's talk about this 14-year-old boy. As an infant, the boy had been delayed in his speech, and when he could talk, he struggled with more complex sentence structures.

He wasn't mentally underdeveloped, and it doesn't seem that he even really had any learning difficulties. He was just a bit slower to progress than his peers. This became more and more pronounced as he entered education. Then, during his second year of middle school, he decided he no longer wanted to attend. For him, the embarrassment of failure had become too much, and he'd rather stop engaging altogether.

This idea of shame and embarrassment is something that runs through all of the stories that we have read about Hikikimori. Known as haji, in Japanese, intense shame around failure, and the idea that failure reflects not just on you, but also on your Sikente or your reputation in society, is a key factor in creating Hikikamori. And I think I'm obviously not Japanese,

but being of the Asian persuasion, I can definitely vouch for the fact that Asian cultures are very based in shame and social embarrassment and people will literally kill themselves over something that just feels like a minor social slight, in my experience. And it is hardly a secret that there is intense pressure to succeed, put on both children and adults in Japanese culture.

It has been described as sink or swim. In order to keep up with the pack, you have to give everything you have and more. If you don't, you get left behind. And sometimes even if you do, because they have an extremely stratified education system, so only 2% ever get the top grade. It doesn't matter how many people in the population get that grade. So there is also this sense of disenfranchisement and what's the pointism in high school. and university exams because they're like, I could literally kill myself over this, and it would

make no difference. We did see an interview with a young woman, again, a recovering Hickokomori who had become isolated as an adult. She said that the culture in Japan had left her feeling as though she didn't have anyone who felt like a friend or a family member. Both her and her parents spent all of their time apart when she was growing up. She was at school for almost every waking hour, and her parents were at work. She was schooled on the weekend. and the only time that her and her parents were at home together was when they were asleep. And as a result, when it came time to leave home and find a job, she was left feeling completely lost.

Ultimately, she decided not to do either of those things and stay home indefinitely. And I know this isn't maybe the conscious thought that people who are Hikikamori are making. But again, you know, we only watched interviews and read these things. and yes, I had that conversation with that Japanese couple for all of 20 minutes. But it almost feels like the whole system is against me. It's almost like a strike. I'm just not going to engage with this. That's absolutely what it is.

I'm just going to take myself completely out of the equation. And it's also why so much Japanese street fashion is dressing like children. Because if you stay a child forever, this can't happen to you. Yeah, yeah. And it does feel a bit like if you, I don't know, if there is a culture where there isn't that time to just be a child and to spend time with your family and to just, the family are under so much pressure to work all the time,

so they can't spend time with the kids. The kids are under so much pressure to perform at school that they can't just be children and spend time with their parents and whatever. And again, I can only speak from, like, my culture. When I came here and I, like, worked in education conferences at first, and you see how much, like, importance of play is placed in the West, because it is important.

It is really important. Play to learn is a very important learning process for children. When I went to school in India and I did my first preschooling in India, there is none of that. There is no time to play. You have to focus. You have to beat everybody else. They grade you, they rank you as soon as you're going into like first standard as they call it. So maybe a loss of all of that leads to you wanting to regress later to hold on to it.

It's really interesting and really sad. Coming back to this, of course not everyone can stay. at home indefinitely. And at this point, it is worth noting that Heikamori are found almost entirely in middle and upper class families in Japan. There are almost no cases of Heikimori who are living in poor families or via their own means. So this leads us to our next key factor in what creates Heikomori. Amé, the Japanese term for the expectation of indulgence in Japanese parenting. Now this is a contentious topic and again one I think. think is going to be probably unfamiliar for people living in the West for us to really wrap our heads

around. But essentially what it is is a lot of Hicikamori feel incredibly let down by their parents and often blame them for the enormous pressure they were under before they withdrew. However, on the flip side of the coin, there is a cultural expectation that parents will do anything to help their children. They work long hours, sacrifice all of their spare time and often give up every aspect of their pre-parental lives to put towards their children. This means that Japanese parents will, if begrudgingly, support their children financially and physically if they refuse to be a part of society. So it's not sort of culturally acceptable to just be like, right, I'm going to try and do what

I think is best for you and kick you out and hope that that gives you the jolt you need to saw your life out. In other words, the culture of unconditional support, rightly or wrongly, does seem to add to this creation of hikikamori. And I think, again, that is quite typical in Asian cultures where the parents will do anything to help the children. But the expectation is, when I'm old, you look after me. So as you can already see, there is a lot about Japanese culture

that lends itself to creating hikikamori, and it doesn't end there. There's also an enormous stigma around mental health. And to be honest, any kind of health, like any kind of like degenerative or genetically passed on or anything like that is quite shameful. Parents are often a lot more comfortable supporting their reclusive children than they are seeking outside help. According to Professor Graham Yawston, around 80% of Hickokomori have had some kind of underlying mental health issue.

I would feel like it's 100%. Yeah, yes. Ranging from depression to anxiety to PCSD, borderline personality disorder and even schizophrenia, all of which are not the kind of thing a Japanese parent would admit that their child might have. Or heaven forbid to speak it. outside their family.

And this makes a vicious cycle. Being a hikikamori or having a child that is one is deeply shameful. But so is admitting that there is a problem. And this makes parents far less likely to seek help and making it far more preferable for them to just keep their kids indoors out of sight forever. As you can imagine, this concept of hikikamori isn't that popular in Japan.

And so a lot of other explanations for the phenomenon have also been suggested. One of the more popular explanations in Japan is the conflict between its deep-rooted cultural values and the modern values promoted in the media. Japan's cultural values are based on Confucian teachings. They promote conformity for the sake of social harmony. A common phrase to explain this is,

quote, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. This directly clashes, with Western values promoted on TV, films and social media, where being original and unique is the key to having self-worth. According to some, these entirely conflicting pressures being applied to the Japanese youth creates a kind of stalemate, where young men and young women feel that their only option is to step back entirely and not choose either path. While this explanation might seem a bit far-fetched, it isn't entirely unreasonable. Pressure and expectation have come up time and again in our research.

For instance, the 14-year-old boy that we spoke about earlier, according to his parents and their family therapist, he spent a lot of his time at home contemplating his future. He didn't spend his two years in isolation wallowing and self-pity, but rather trying to find his identity. He was also more than aware of the unsustainability of his current situation. He didn't think that he could stay at home forever, but somehow just knowing made the whole problem worse.

Yeah, I mean it would. just like I am already behind and now I'm stuck. My peers are all advancing. I'm well not in that top 2%. And the longer I stay at home, the worse this is going to get, but I also don't know how to get out of this. I don't think this is a uniquely Japanese thing, but I do think, like you said, there's a lot more of them there than anywhere else. But this just, it does feel like 80% of mental health problem? Yeah, no. This is, this feels like severe anxiety. at the thought of the world passing you by. And in Japan, it's so much more compounded

because here at least it feels like there are multiple routes to which you could have success. And if academics doesn't work for you, there are so many other options. But there it feels like a society in which if academics doesn't work for you, you're fucked. In the end, the solution appeared to be fairly simple.

Rather than his parents taking him to school, they took school to him, employing a home teacher to give him lessons. Interestingly, this teacher refused to engage with the boy unless he engaged first, giving him the opportunity to participate rather than forcing it onto him. And over time, the boy began to engage with his learning again, and then with his future. Eventually, after two years, he enrolled in a vocational school where he could follow a creative subject that he was passionate about. And for him, his time as a hikikamori was over.

However, not all Hickikamori have the same opportunities. While the paper we cited used a 14-year-old for its case study, the reality is that the majority of Hikikamori are over 20 years old and around 50% are actually over 40 years old, still living at home with their parents. Again, that pressure must just continue to build because you're also looking at your parents in your 40s, like you're getting older and older and pretty soon you're not going to be here.

What will become of me? This has led to a lot of people seeing being a hikikamori as a long-term condition rather than as some sort of cultural phenomenon. And interestingly, the data on this is mixed. As we've already said, the majority of hikikamori do have an underlying mental health problem. According to Toh and Gore, around 26% suffered from anxiety, 23% had a diagnosed personality disorder and 28% had been diagnosed with a form of neurodivergence as a child. I'd have to say that the dark figure there is going to be absolutely massive, because getting diagnosed with something like that in Japan as a child is very rare.

Yeah. Now, this might seem like concrete evidence that Hikikamori is not its own condition. Surely it's just Japan's response to a pre-existing phenomenon. Well, actually, Toh and Gore argue against this. They call Hikikamori a culture-bound syndrome, saying that while none of the mental health factors that we've just talked about are unique to Japan, the cultural pressure to achieve success is. They say that Hikikamori

is more than just Japanese culture dealing with mental health and neurodivergence, but also mental health and neurodivergence dealing with Japanese culture. For instance, someone with generalised anxiety in the UK is a lot less likely to be put under the same intense pressure that they would be in Japan, and therefore their reaction would be a lot less extreme.

On top of this, a parent in the UK is much more likely to seek help if their son or daughter did have such an extreme reaction to pressure. So Toangor argue that this makes Hikikamori its own unique culture-bound syndrome. With all of that in mind, what's the solution to Japan's Hikikomori problem? Well, as usual, it's far from simple. Naturally, a lot of current Hikikimori see Japanese culture

as the problem that needs to be solved. They argue that as a nation, they need to move away from the intense pressure put on children and adults to succeed, saying that a culture of cram schools and salary men is unsustainable. And to be honest, like we said, especially if you look at the productivity that Japan has, the data backs this up.

According to one paper we found, the average full-time employee in Japan works well over a 50-hour week, with many companies enforcing an unwritten rule that employees are unable to go home until their supervisor has left the building. This leads to many staying at their desks well into the early hours of the morning, doing busy work in order to keep their job. The same goes for children in education, with many children spending up to 18 hours a day

in some form of learning, attending school from 845 in the morning to 315, and then attending after-school cram sessions until late in the evening. I think it's clear to say that that is probably overdoing it. And again, it's not just the lack of work-life balance. Again, it is that lack of time for a family to just spend together, which is obviously proving to be so detrimental. From a more short-term perspective, we've seen several papers, including the one written by Toheng Gore, which pointed to the use of traditional mental health techniques, like talking therapy. The idea being that if you can help someone to overcome what's making them feel the need to be so isolated, they can reintegrate themselves into society a lot easier.

We've also seen schemes aimed at tackling the intense loneliness that leads some into becoming withdrawn. There's even a Hikikamori newspaper run by recovering Hikikamori aimed at creating a sense of community and friendship. And the growing voice of Hikikamori in Japan does seem to be helping as well, with a lot of recovered members of the withdrawn community saying that if Japan can change the stigma around becoming part of the hidden population, then people will feel more able to admit to having an issue. Truthfully, the problem seems far from solved. And if any, seems to be growing. Every bit of data we saw showed that Hickikimori population in Japan was only getting bigger, and that there were more and more cases of being reported around the world.

So it seems, at least anecdotally, that with social media creating higher expectations around what it means to succeed, the culture that creates Hikikikimori in Japan is spreading. So sad. It's sad. It's sad. It's very sad. So yeah, that's it, guys. That is a shorthand on Hickikamori. Fascinating topic. And, yeah, sad all round. But there you go.

Hopefully you learn something. And you can continue to shock and amaze Japanese tourists at cooking classes, the world over, with all of your information on Premium Fridays. So go forth and shock. And we'll see you next time. Go outside today. And go outside today.

Bye. Bye.