Mental Health and Social Withdrawal in Contemporary Japan. Beyond the Hikikomori Spectrum

273 Pages·2021·11.907 MB·English

by  Nicolas Tajan

(タイトル・クレジット表記　日/英)
«修復のモニュメント「ドア」»
渡辺 篤
2016–2020年
写真：井上圭佑
© Atsushi Watanabe 2020
MONUMENT OF RECOVERY “The Door”
Atsushi Watanabe
Photo by Keisuke Inoue
© Atsushi Watanabe 2020

Mental Health and Social
Withdrawal in Contemporary Japan
This book examines the phenomenon of social withdrawal in Japan, which
ranges from school nonattendance to extreme forms of isolation and confine-
ment, known as hikikomori. Based on extensive original research, including
interview research with a range of practitioners involved in dealing with the
phenomenon, the book outlines how hikikomori expresses itself, how it is
treated and dealt with, and how it has been perceived and regarded in Japan
over time. The author, a clinical psychologist with extensive experience of prac-
tice, argues that the phenomenon although socially unacceptable is not homog-
enous and can be viewed not as a mental disorder, but as an idiom of distress,
a passive and effective way of resisting the many great pressures of Japanese
schooling and society more widely.
Nicolas Tajan is a program-specific associate professor in the Graduate School
of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan.
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Japan Anthropology Workshop Series
Series editor:
Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University
Editorial Board:
Pamela Asquith, University of Alberta
Eyal Ben Ari, Kinneret Academic College, Sea of Galilee
Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Munich
Henry Johnson, Otago University
Hirochika Nakamaki, the Suita City Museum
Founder Member of the Editorial Board:
Jan van Bremen, University of Leiden
The Japanese Family
Touch, Intimacy and Feeling
Diana Tahhan
Happiness and the Good Life in Japan
Edited by Wolfram Manzenreiter and Barbara Holthus
Religion in Japanese Daily Life
David C. Lewis
Escaping Japan
Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Blai Guarné and Paul Hansen
Women Managers in Neoliberal Japan
Gender, Precarious Labour and Everyday Lives
Swee-Lin Ho
Global Coffee and Cultural Change in Modern Japan
Helena Grinshpun
Inside a Japanese Sharehouse
Caitlin Meagher
Mental Health and Social Withdrawal in Contemporary Japan
Nicolas Tajan
For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Japan-
Anthropology-Workshop-Series/book-series/SE0627
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Mental Health and Social
Withdrawal in Contemporary
Japan
Beyond the Hikikomori Spectrum
Nicolas Tajan
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First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 Nicolas Tajan
The right of Nicolas Tajan to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com,
has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6574-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-26080-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
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Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Step aside, intersections, minor roads xi
1 School nonattendance created the need for clinical
psychologists 1
2 The resistance to students’ psychological care 32
3 Is social withdrawal a mental disorder? 59
4 Mental health surveys on hikikomori 88
5 NPO support toward hikikomori youths 117
6 Hikikomori subjects’ narratives 151
7 Beyond the hikikomori spectrum 186
8 Conclusions: Social isolation, biopower, and the
end of the clinic 219
Index 243
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Preface
“Hikikomori phenomenon, far from being homogeneous, begins to appear
as it really is: the history of a myriad of singular subjects who, despite them-
selves, draw attention to their absence while making social renunciation an
idiom that is deeply subjective and eminently social.” This quotation encap-
sulates some of the central issues of this fascinating and important work.
Nicolas Tajan is not an anthropologist but a clinical psychologist who was
brought by his topic of inquiry to act and proceed in his research more
and more like an anthropologist. As the above mentioned sentence indi-
cates hikikomori is not a psychiatric category – showing this is one of the
central aims of the book – the term refers to “the history of myriad singu-
lar subjects” rather than to an ailment with clear characteristic traits. The
point is not merely that this failure at being a homogeneous set of indi-
viduals or psychological characteristics reflects the difference between the
method of the psychiatrist, who sees instances of particular diseases and
categorizes them as depression or bipolar disorder, and that of the anthro-
pologist, who seeks to encounter others as they are in their diversity, rather
than to categorize them. The point rather is that the reason why hikikomori
escapes psychiatric categorization is neither because these categories do not
constitute knowledge nor because it is true that all medical categories sub-
sume under a single term myriad singular subjects, but because hikikomori
fails to become an object of psychiatric knowledge. It is not a mental disease
but a psychosocial phenomenon.
The hikikomori does not ask anything from the psychiatrist, or the
medical profession in general, or from any others in particular actually:
hiding, shut in a room in a house that he or she rarely leaves. There is a
paradox here in viewing these persons as “patients”. How do you meet
someone who does not want to meet anyone? What if you succeed, is the
person you met a hikikomori or not hikikomori anymore? This desire for
isolation and loneliness, which Tajan describes as an “idiom of distress,”
is eminently social and challenges the health professions. Here are persons
who do not ask for help, do not come forward with their complaints, and
therefore are only made into “patients” by others. Which happens only some-
times, when they are not hidden from view by the family from (and within)
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Preface vii
which they are hiding. In either case, they do not seek help, for whatever
reason they have renounced asking.
The clinic has always been about responding to the patient’s demand, even
if in many cases, this meant reinterpreting it in a different way. Medical and
psychiatric categories are tools that help the specialist endowed with knowl-
edge, called upon because of that knowledge, to respond to the patient’s
demands. Hence the need for a different method and approach when the
person’s way to ‘address’ others is silence, isolation, social renunciation; one
that is not, or at least that is less, predicated on a hierarchical relation of
knowledge and thus closer to that of anthropologists. Clinical psycholo-
gists interested in hikikomori have to do fieldwork. They cannot remain in
their office waiting for the patients to come. They must go to them. This
profoundly changes the relationship and indicates that these individuals in
distress are not like those who can be analyzed, and disciplined through the
use of psychiatric categories. In what ways are they different? This is what
this book describes with finesse and attention and tries to interpret in a
larger social and historical context.
The hikikomori phenomenon, according to Tajan, makes visible an ongo-
ing process of social transformations of which it is part. One that is par-
ticularly visible in Japan, but that is also present in many places across the
world. It concerns the place of medical professions in contemporary post-
modern societies, the way individuals attempt to make themselves into sub-
jects, their refusal of current mental health practices, and it questions the
place and role of anthropological knowledge in this changing world.
Paul Dumouchel
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