Hikikomori

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
In particular, detailed information on the causes urgently needs a source

As a hikikomori ( jap. ひきこもり , 引き籠もり or 引き篭り , "including himself; social withdrawal") are in Japan referred to people who voluntarily lock themselves in their home or their room and reduce contact with the company to a minimum. The term refers both to the sociological phenomenon and to the people concerned, for whom the characteristics can be very different.

Definition and scale

The Japanese Ministry of Health defines a hikikomori as a person who refuses to leave their parents' home and withdraws from family and society for at least six months. However, there are also cases in which Hikikomori remain in this self-chosen isolation for years or even decades. Most of the hikikomori are male.

The phenomenon was first described in 1998 by the Japanese psychologist Tamaki Saitō , who also coined the term. He claimed that there are more than one million hikikomori in Japan, which has a population of about 127 million. In a more cautious estimate, the Ministry of Health gives only 50,000 Hikikomori, a third of them over 30 years old. An Internet survey by the television station NHK leads to an estimate of 1.6 million people affected in 2013. Recent estimates by the Japanese authorities speak of over one million inhabitants who can be assigned to the group of the Hikikomori. 613,000 of them are between 40 and 64 years old.

causes

A hikikomori usually begins as truants ( 登校拒否 , tōkōkyohi ). Young Japanese adults often feel overwhelmed by the high expectations society has of them. Fear of failure and the lack of pronounced honne and tatemae (roughly translated, the ability to differentiate between “public face” and “real self” and to deal with the daily paradoxes of adult life) push them into isolation. The commonality of the Hikikomori to fail at the transition from youth and childhood to the adult world is justified by many psychologists with the lack of transformation and initiation rituals in modern Japan.

Influencing factors

The development to Hikikomori is essentially influenced by three factors:

  1. Financial situation: The affluent middle class in Japan has the financial means to provide adequate care for an adult child. In the case of financially disadvantaged families, however, the children enter work earlier.
  2. Family relationships: Parents often do not recognize the beginning isolation of their child or do not react appropriately to it. Pampering the child or even mutual dependency, as occurs above all in the mother-son relationship (referred to as amae in Japan ), also impairs the young people's independence.
  3. Situation on the labor market: The long-term economic stagnation has fundamentally changed the Japanese labor market. While earlier generations of workers and employees could still rely on a lifelong position in their company, today's young professionals are often unsuccessful in their job search. The dissolution and realignment of the Japanese labor market is forcing a reorientation of traditional goals in life.

Pressure in school

The modern Japanese school system requires a lot of work from its students and is very much geared towards memorization . As early as the 1960s, entrance exams began to be introduced at every level of the school system, including preschool . Some examinees take a whole year to prepare for the university entrance examination . It was not until 1996 that the Ministry of Education initiated countermeasures to give the students more creative freedom and to cut the school week from six to five days and the daily schedule by two subjects. The new curricula are more oriented towards Western school systems . These changes came very late, however: ambitious parents have increasingly been sending their children to private schools in order to escape the “lax” system of public schools.

Classmates also exert pressure on individual students. Reasons for this Ijime (special form of bullying in Japan) can be appearance, school and sporting achievements as well as ethnicity , social origin or even longer stays abroad.

Symptoms

The symptoms of Hikikomori begin insidiously and lead to complete withdrawal when fully developed. The most important steps are loss of joie de vivre, loss of friends, increasing insecurity, shyness and decreasing willingness to communicate .

Hikikomori usually withdraw into a single room and isolate themselves from the environment. They spend the day sleeping and are more active at night . Some manage to leave their room at night, others spend the whole night in front of the computer or television.

Behavior of parents

Having a hikikomori in the family is highly stigmatized in Japan and the fear of public humiliation can become exaggerated. Most parents simply wait to see whether their child approaches society again on its own. If they even take steps of their own accord, long periods of time can pass beforehand. The traditionally close mother-child relationship also contributes to delaying treatment.

treatment

There are different views on the treatment of Hikikomori: Japanese-oriented methods tend to rely on waiting, while Western-oriented methods actively want to bring Hikikomori back into society - sometimes with unusual procedures that can mean a separation of children and parents for several years.

More and more therapeutic facilities in Japan are specializing in Hikikomori. There are two main directions:

  • The psychiatric route usually provides for a longer inpatient stay to treat the behavioral or mental disorder. Medicines are also used here.
  • The socio-educational path consists of a detachment from the familiar environment and integration in shared apartments with other Hikikomori, where those who have been present for a longer period of time should help the newcomers to get closer to society again and to live independently.

International comparison and diagnostic classification

The so-called NEETs ( Not in Education, Employment or Training ) represent a similar form of social retreat . This abbreviation, which originated in Great Britain but is now also used throughout Asia, is used to describe people who neither work, study nor want to receive further training and who allow themselves to be endured by their parents.

Hikikomori symptoms can arise against the background of the diagnosis social phobia (F40.1) and / or anxious- avoidant personality disorder (F60.6); these diagnoses are defined in ICD-11 , the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases , which is also used in Japan.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ines Hielscher: Hikikomori: How young Japanese lock out life . In: Spiegel Online . April 24, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed April 24, 2018]).
  2. ↑ Tamaki Saitō: Shakaiteki hikikomori - Owaranai Shishunki ( 社会 的 ひ き こ も り ―― 終 わ ら な い 思春期 ), Social withdrawal-Adolescence without End (1998)
  3. ↑ Maggie Jones: Shutting Themselves In. New York Times , January 15, 2006, accessed January 24, 2014 .
  4. ^ H. Konishi: What is Hikikomori? Unpublished manuscript. Temple University Japan, no year, p. 5, quoted by Heiko Höttermann, Klaus Hinze: Cell phones off!?! Educational youth media protection in Japan. In: Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Fernsehen (FSF) (ed.): Tv diskurs - Responsibility in audiovisual media , Volume 17, No. 65, 3/2013, ISSN  1433-9439 , pp. 4–7, here p. 5 ( PDF File; 1.0 MB ).
  5. ↑ 613,000 in Japan aged 40 to 64 are recluses, says first government survey of hikikomori . In: The Japan Times Online . March 29, 2019, ISSN  0447-5763 ( japantimes.co.jp [accessed March 31, 2019]).