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Emplotting Hikikomori: Japanese Parents’ Narratives of Social Withdrawal

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Abstract

Hikikomori, often glossed as “social withdrawal,” emerged as a sociomedical condition among Japanese youth at the end of the twentieth century, and it continues to fascinate and concern the public. Explanatory frameworks for hikikomori abound, with different stakeholders attributing it to individual psychopathology, poor parenting, and/or a lack of social support structures. This article takes an interpretive approach to hikikomori by exploring parents’ narrative constructions of hikikomori children in support group meetings and in-depth interviews. I argue that some parents were able to find hope in hikikomori by ‘emplotting’ their children’s experiences into a larger narrative about onset, withdrawal, and recovery, which helped them remain invested in the present by maintaining a sense of possibility about the future. Contrary to literature that examines hikikomori as an epidemic of isolated individuals, I demonstrate how parents play a key role in hikikomori through meaning-making activities that have the potential to shape their children’s experiences of withdrawal.

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Notes

  1. Translation by author. Japanese names are written in the order of family name followed by given name.

  2. Hikikomori (“withdrawal”) can be used as either a noun or an adjective.

  3. For an extended discussion on the difference between hope and desire, see Crapanzano (2003). Miyazaki’s (2006) response to Crapanzano explores hope within the context of neoliberalism and the Japanese economy.

  4. Although I digitally recorded formal interviews, I did not record discussion group meetings or social outings. I therefore use different textual formats to represent different types of speech and interpretation (see Davis 2012). Dialogue quoted verbatim and translated from the Japanese is presented in quotation marks and block quotes. Non-verbatim dialogue captured in extensive fieldnotes is presented in italics.

  5. All names are pseudonyms. -san is a respectful title that is equivalent to the English “Mr./Miss/Ms./Mrs.”

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alessandro Angelini, Elif Babul, Nicholas J. K. Breitborde, Benjamin F. Crabtree, Jenna Howard, William W. Kelly, Nicole Labruto, Aubrey Moe, Karen Nakamura, and especially Joshua H. Roth, in addition to the anonymous reviewers, for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Erika Kido-Kumah and Toko Shiiki for transcription and translation assistance. This study was funded by the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission (Fulbright IIE) Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale University’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies Dissertation Grant, and Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies Dissertation Research Grant.

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  1. Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 112 Paterson Street, #413, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Ellen Rubinstein

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Correspondence to Ellen Rubinstein.

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Ellen Rubinstein declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of Yale University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB Protocol #: 0909005658).

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Rubinstein, E. Emplotting Hikikomori: Japanese Parents’ Narratives of Social Withdrawal. Cult Med Psychiatry 40, 641–663 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-016-9495-6

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