Notes

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the alleged isolation of a stratum of young people who were said to have trouble making friends, working or attending school surfaced as a prominent social problem in Japan. One of the most curious of the country’s many youth issues, the phenomenon came to be known as ‘hikikomori’ and it quickly entered the vocabulary of citizens and policy-makers alike. Fascination with the idea that hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Japanese youth might be ‘socially withdrawn’, disengaged or even mentally unwell was so strong that the issue soon splashed beyond the borders of Japan.1 In 2006 the American journalist Michael Zielenziger published one of the earliest accounts of hikikomori in the English-speaking world, which raised the visibility of this phenomenon in the west (Zielenziger 2006). Intriguingly, Zielenziger (2006) argues that hikikomori has now come to stand for the entire Japanese nation.
How did hikikomori emerge as a universally recognized concept within Japan denoting both the ‘pathology’ of withdrawal as well as those who engage in it? What forces were responsible for turning a particular form of isolation – a seemingly private experience – into a public problem of such prominence that, crossing linguis- tic and cultural boundaries, it was listed in 2010 in the Oxford English Dictionary?