Sometimes referred to as a kind of social problem in Japanese discourse, the hikikomori phenomenon has a number of possible contributing factors. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. This section does not cite any references or sources. Even the most casual search of anglophonic materials will show similar phenomenon may be found in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, etc. When a BBC program claiming that hikikomori was a Japanese phenomenon was aired in Britain, the BBC home page received numerous messages from viewers in the United Kingdom saying that they had personal experience with hikikomori and that it was hardly a phenomenon particular to Japan. While total social withdrawal has been claimed to be mainly a Japanese phenomenon, there are reports of similar phenomena developing in South Korea, Taiwan and China. Though acute social withdrawal in Japan appears to affect both genders equally, due to differing social expectations for maturing boys and girls, the most widely reported cases of hikikomori are from Japanese families with male children who seek outside intervention when a son, usually the eldest, refuses to leave the family home. After the syndrome was officially recognized, the number of reported cases turned out to be in the low thousands. His clinical work had convinced him that there were at least that many hikikomori. He had based the figure on the number of schizophrenics found in Japanese society. Saito later admitted in his autobiography ( Hakushi no kimyo na shishunki) that he made up this number to draw attention to the problem and that it had no factual basis.
Often hikikomori start out as school refusals, or tōkōkyohi (登校拒否) in Japanese.Īccording to psychologist Tamaki Saitō, who first coined the phrase, there may be one million hikikomori in Japan, twenty percent of all male adolescents in Japan, or one percent of the total Japanese population. While the severity of the phenomenon varies depending on the individual, some youths remain in isolation for years, or in rare cases, decades. 9.2 Medical diagnoses for hikikomori behaviorsĪlthough there are versions where the hikikomori may venture outdoors, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as individuals who refuse to leave their parents' house, and isolate themselves away from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.
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