Hikikomori

Hikikomori are a Japanese social phenomenon. The term refers to both the 'disorder', and the people who suffer from it. They are usually adolescents, or young adults, who withdraw from society and family in an extreme fashion, locking themselves in their rooms for periods of over 6 months, many known to carry on for 20 to 30 years. Obviously, by this time they wouldn't still be young adults. Doctors don't believe it to be a disease, but rather a social phenomenon, triggered by events in the lives of the affected. Pressures from schools and inability to express thoughts to family are thought to be primary factors, as well as broken romance.

One boy in Tokyo at 17 sits in his kitchen, silent and refusing to let anyone in. This has been the case for the past three years, when he was unhappy at school and begin to play truant. One day he walked into the kitchen, shut the door, and has been in there since. The family has since built a new kitchen, at first having to eat takeaways or cook off a makeshift stove. His mother Yoshiko takes meals to his door 3 times a day. The bathroom is adjacent to the kitchen, though he only bathes once in 6 months. Photos of the boy prior to his withdrawal show him as plump and cheerful. He was then taunted by a classmate who wrote hate letters and scrawled abusive graffiti about him in the schoolyard.

Western doctors are puzzled, for this seems to be a distinctly Japanese or Eastern condition, dissimilar to agoraphobia, which does occur in the West. Where the typical western father might kick down the bedroom/kitchen door and sort out the child, in Japan this is treated as a 'phase'. Social workers and courts rarely get involved, and it is considered as a problem within the family, not a psychological illness.

Japanese history, folklore and poetry celebrate the nobility of solitude, and until the mid 19th century, Japan had cut itself off from the world for 200 years.

Mothers and sons have an incredibly symbiotic relationship, often looking after their children until they are 30 or 40 years old.

Sufferers are most often male, specifically the eldest son.

There are over a million who suffer from the phenomenon in Japan...