Queer will: hikikomori as willful subjects

ABSTRACT

This article considers hikikomori as willful subjects. The hikikomori are a portion of the Japanese population who withdraw into their homes. These are mostly young people (between the ages of 15 and 35) and mostly young men. The focus of this article is how hikikomori constitute a challenge to dominant national imaginaries of Japan as a “corporate-family system.” This article analyses popular media and psychiatric representations of hikikomori, particularly from Saitô’s work as exemplifying Ahmed’s notion of “willful subjects.” It is argued that the hikikomori’s apparent willfulness produces them as Queer subjects who are out of place and pace with the dominant heteronormative, masculinist culture of contemporary Japan.

KEYWORDS:

• Hikikomori
• Japan
• media
• “willfulness”
• Queer

Notes on contributor

Rosemary Overell works at the University of Otago. Her most recent work considers how gendered subjectivities are co-constituted by and through mediation. She draws particularly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore a variety of mediated sites. In particular, she considers the intersections between affect and signification and how these produce gender. Rosemary has looked at media as varied as anime, extreme metal and reality television.

ORCID

Rosemary Overell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8808-7638

Special terms
hiku	=	引
komoru	=	篭る
shakaiteki	=	社会的
kaisha	=	会社
amae	=	甘え
kanji	=	甘
utsu byô	=	鬱病
furitaa	=	フリーター

Notes

1 Figures vary wildly – between 5000 and 1.2 million – depending on sources (cf. Hairston 2010, 312). For some perspective, the Japanese population is 127 million. In Saitô’s (2013, x) work, however, he notes that due to shame many hikikomori remain unreported. Furlong (2008) offers a detailed survey of quantitative data on hikikomori in his work.

2 See Saitô (2013, 31), which is based on a survey he conducted in 1989.

3 Ahmed deliberately spells “willful” with a double “l” to draw attention to the presence of “will” in the standard notion of “willful.”

4 See Beran’s (2017) article “How the ‘isolated man-boys’ of 4chan turned a meme into the president of the United States.”

5 Though Norihiko Kitao is credited with coining the term in the mid-1980s (Furlong 2008; Saitô 2013). I have not been able to read Kitao's article as it has not been translated into English.

6 Though in Saitô's more recent work he notes that recent government led surveys indicate hikikomori are ageing. The average age in a 2009 survey was 32 years old.

7 Again, there are exceptions to this. In fact, Saitô's opening case-study is of a woman.

8 Though social withdrawal was listed as a symptom of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

9 Saitô has also written subsequent works on hikikomori, which have not yet been translated in to English.

10 “We can think of it as a system – a vicious circle, in which various psychological factors work together and one external trauma gives rise to another” (Saitô 2013, 53).

11 As he writes: “what I am really talking about are the parents” not the individual child (Saitô 2013, 123).

12 He has been interviewed in English media, such as The Independent and Correspondent as well as in Japanese press, a few recent examples from daily newspapers are Yomiuri Shimbun's coverage and Kenko100's coverage of recent TV programmes about hikikomori.

13 Two key flashpoints for moral panic were the murder of a primary school student in Kyoto and the kidnapping or a woman in Niigata. Furlong (2008, 313) discusses these incidents in terms of media amplification in his article.

14 He muses throughout the book on whether hikikomori is peculiar to Japan, comparing it to the Western diagnosis of “avoidant personality” early on. However, Saitô (2013, 80) does appear to suggest that the “peculiarities  … the cultural and social situation in our nation” do contribute significantly to the constitution of the hikikomori subject.

15 See Mathews and White's edited collection for a discussion of this same pressure to integrate, in particular Mathews' (2004) article on Japanese young people and the workforce.

16 This is most evident in Japan in the mediated panic around sôshoku danshi or the “herbivore man,” originally coined by Maki Fukusawa, a Japanese journalist, in 2006. These were men regarded as soft, sensitive, “non-meat eaters” who were coddled by their mothers. The herbivores were pilloried in the media as weak and less masculine than the salaryman norm. Allison (2013, 77–121) discusses this in her chapter “Home and Hope” in Precarious Japan. See Harney (2009) for a popular account in English. There is little written from an academic perspective, save Morioka’s (2013) “A Phenomenological Study of ‘Herbivore Men’” and his ([2005] 2013) associated book Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher's Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men's Sexuality.

17 Saitô (2013) also notes the importance of relationship with the mother throughout his book. See page 41 for a description of a hikikomori man with obsessive compulsive disorder whose symptom included a need for approval of his habits by his mother. For a further discussion and analysis of Doi's account of the mother and amae, see Taniguchi (2012).

18 See particularly Doi’s ([1971] 1973, 63–65) section on “The century of the child.”

19 A key reason Doi's work is treated with relative suspicion is, in fact, his Japanese particularism. The notion of a peculiar and vaunted Japanese-ness or Nihonjinron was, of course, a key tenet of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. Since their defeat and following the emergence of a reflexive and critical understanding of the racism (particularly under the auspices of the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere) of Nihonjinron, concepts which depend on an understanding of Japanese particularism have been critiqued. For a critical discussion of Japanese engagements with (strategically in the 1970s and 80s in terms of courting foreign trade and more recent distancing from the concept), see Morris-Suzuki (1998); Iwabuchi (2002) and Yoshino (1992).

20 This sometimes manifests literally – such as the brutal beating of a father (a salaryman/representative of kaisha) by his hikikomori son. See Saitô (2013, 17).

21 Though Saitô does acknowledge that as hikikomori is “having to do with the mind” (rather than the body like TB), a type of “sure fire cure” like antibiotics is unlikely (Saitô 2013, 35).

22 Compare with translators’ intro where he discusses in terms of Foucault's Will to Knowledge (1991, xii). See also Saitô (2013, xiii).

23 See Saitô (2013, 31). Also, “it is clearly a mistake to see young people who have withdrawn from society as living peaceful lives of indolence” (Saitô 2013, 48).

24 This echoes Payot (as quoted in Ahmed 2014, 62) who wrote The Education of the Will in 1909. This text focused on the young men “suffering from malaise” as the apex of a “weak will.” The solution at this time was much like to day – education – a training of the will.

25 See particularly Chapter 5 “Hikikomori Systems” (Saitô 2013, 77–89). Though it is beyond the scope of this, Japan-focused, article, it is worth noting that the 4chan, reddit subjects who Beran (2017) discusses are also often framed as “addicted” – to online gaming, social media and pornography.

26 Saitô (2013, 104) goes on to write: “The family should not vacillate between joy and sadness at every little word or deed […] they should […] behave in a level-headed manner.”

27 Compare with Stewart’s (2007, 97–98) discussion of the United States’ national imaginary in Ordinary Affects: “FREE FALLING: There are bodies out of place. There are plenty of people in free fall. There are people whose American dreaming is literally a dreaming cut off from any actual potential. But that doesn't stop it – far from it.”

28 Ahmed (2014, 77) puts it simply, willful subjects are “‘in the way’ or what is ‘on the way.’”

29 Both Ahmed (2014) and Allison (2013) draw on Berlant’s (2011) work on the good life in Cruel Optimism.

30 In Japan it is customary to wear a small badge with your employer's logo on your lapel.

31 Ahmed (2014) draws particularly on French scholars Ribot and Payot here as well as Locke. I would also venture that Arnold’s ([1869] 2009) work on culture fits this genealogy.

32 See also Saitô (2013, 59–61): “Student Apathy and Retreat Neurosis.” This is repeated again and again in popular media stories about hikikomori in the West (BBC; ABC; WSJ).

33 Stewart (2007, 74) writes: “the kids, or the records they leave behind, tell stories that have their own complex trajectories: they’re caught in an obsessive focus on the details of a BIG scenario; they’re surging to escape a trapped life; they’re dangerously depressed; they’re alone with their cadre and their plan. These stories don't end in a moral but are left to resonate with all the other ways that intensities rise out of the ordinary and then linger, unresolved, until memory dims, or some new eruption catches our attention.”

34 The “herbivore man” is similarly regarded as sexually incompetent and impotent (Morioka [2005] 2013; Tomikawa 2011).

35 This is described in the co-morbidity of Student Apathy section.

36 Saitô (2013, 37) writes: “after one person has achieved a high level of social maturation, then it is rare for a person to slip into a state of social withdrawal. At least, I do not know of any such cases.”

37 Hikikomori, according to Saitô (2013, 44), “become increasingly childlike […] they might do things like cling to their mothers, speak in a wheedling, infantile voices, or express the desire to touch their mother's bodies.” The Carpe Fidem piece (2013) echoes this: “if the parent ignores the problem [of the child becoming/being hikikomori] the child becomes stuck in their situation […] good or bad families clearly exist. Phrases like ‘everyone is different’ and ‘you can't compare [families]’ are nice to hear, but they don't help to solve real problems. If the family is too slow to act then they are indulging them like a child.”

38 Hikikomori temporality is also discussed in other Japanese representations. In Carpe Fidem, the anonymous psychiatrist warns parents of running out of time if their hikikomori child reaches their 30s. In Welcome to the N. H. K.! Satô is regularly shown “losing track” of time due to his absorption in video games.

39 Ahmed (2014, 113–114) continues: “Even when a child is still a child, the parents can speak to the child about their anticipation of becoming grandparents, as if it was a fait accompli […] Becoming part can mean to become another point on a line […] The family line can become a rod: a technique for straightening out.”

40 Another example of Saitô's use of the Western language of addiction.

41 Writes Saitô (2013), on page 121, it is important that parents are mindful and steadfast in setting boundaries so as not to be “swallowed up” by over loving.

42 The full quote is as follows: “the intoxicating effect of the poison [of amae] is strong enough that both people begin to feel they cannot live without one another […] when one is trying to help a child get better, one should restrain oneself from practicing this kind of ‘love.’”

43 This also parallels Satô's self-loathing vision of himself in an episode where he becomes addicted to online role-playing games.