Japan, Hikikomori and Karoshi
Japan, Hikikomori and Karoshi: What happens when a society is sacrificed to the market
Japan, Hikikomori and Karoshi: What happens when a society is sacrificed to the market
DESCRIPTION: Hikikomori, karoshi, the idol cult: Japan’s so-called peculiarities clearly reveal an economy that produces prosperity without creating conditions in which people can live.
Japan shows what an unbridled market does to a society
Japan’s so-called cultural peculiarities (social withdrawal, overwork, sexlessness, parasocial attachment) reveal what happens when an economy continues to generate wealth for the few, whilst the majority can no longer make a living.
The conventional view of Japan
There is an exoticising and techno-Orientalist view of Japan. It sees the hikikomori who has not left his childhood bedroom for years, the employee who lies unconscious on a train platform after yet another evening of compulsory drinking, the idol who apologises in tears for having breached a relationship norm, men who cultivate elaborate bonds with fictional characters, low birth rates, a lack of sex, robotic companions, capsule hotels and lonely deaths.
Then he looks away, reassured. Japan becomes a curiosity: a society that is at once hypermodern and exotic, technologically advanced and yet frozen in an archaic social code. Its emotionally alien pathologies are attributed to an enigmatic national psychology: a peculiar relationship with shame, a Far Eastern collectivism taken to extremes. Japan fascinates precisely because it is different.
This framing is comforting and allows Western observers to deny their own reflection: work is eroding social life in the West, too. Housing is becoming unaffordable for ever more people. Friendship and starting a family are being ground down by insecurity in the West. But: ‘The Japanese are simply different.’
The thesis and the arguments against it
The claim is that much of what is regarded as Japanese social pathology arises when the material conditions for an ordinary adult life break down, whilst the moral imperative to achieve this life remains in full force. It is a mechanism by which economic pressure becomes psychological suffering, with the city, in particular, being the place where the two converge.
If this claim is true, it must be open to refutation. It would have to predict that where the material conditions are restored (secure employment, affordable housing, a genuine care infrastructure), the specifically economic component of the harm would diminish. The best test case is the Scandinavian countries, for it is there that the argument would have to hold up.
The end of the promised life
The post-war order in Japan offered security to a large section of the population: education, permanent employment, marriage, family, housing, social recognition. This promise was never universal, unintentional or even free from pressure to conform. But it gave structure to expectations. It gave effort a goal.
The collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s destroyed more than just book assets. It shook this sense of security to its core. The labour market split into protected regular employment and a growing peripheral sector comprising part-time, temporary, agency and contract work. This grey area now accounts for 36.8 per cent of all employees, around 21 million people (Labour Force Survey by the Japanese Statistics Bureau, annual average for 2024).
The distribution is uneven. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the proportion stands at 22.5 per cent – lower than in any other age group. Among women, it exceeds 50 per cent, as many do not return to regular employment after giving birth. It is highest among those aged over 65, a figure driven by the age limit. Most companies dismiss employees at age 60 and then re-employ them on fixed-term contracts with lower pay. Two-thirds of companies operate in this way.
Japanese companies fill their permanent posts almost exclusively by collectively recruiting an entire cohort of graduates within a few months after graduation. Those who are accepted are in. Those who miss out are left out, as there is virtually no opportunity for lateral entry. This chance comes around only once in a lifetime.
Every cohort that graduated between 1994 and 2003 was thus left out in the cold. The economy had collapsed, companies were hardly taking on any new staff, and in Japan these graduates are still referred to today as the ‘Employment Ice Age Generation’ (Japanese: Shūshoku Hyōgaki sedai). Of the men with university degrees who started in precarious jobs back then, a third still did not have a permanent position twenty years later. They are now in their forties and fifties. What began as a temporary setback became the reality for an entire generation.
What this looks like is as follows. A 34-year-old man with a university degree, who has been working for eleven years and is now on his fourth fixed-term contract. He lives in the room he grew up in because he cannot afford to keep his own flat in Tokyo on this income. Getting married would be possible if he had a permanent contract. He cannot get one because he is too old for the career entry route through which permanent positions are awarded in Japan. He has done nothing wrong and has no prospect of ever getting it right.
This is the fact that the culturalist narrative continually overlooks. The question is: what happens to a society that maintains a completely moralised image of successful adulthood whilst quietly withdrawing the means to achieve it?
How poverty shatters one’s horizons
The answer is: it generates shame – and does so structurally.
Material insecurity means having less money. And that shatters any sense of the future. Anyone without reliable working hours cannot commit themselves in the same way as someone with a predictable income. Anyone moving from one short-term contract to another cannot easily plan a household, take out a mortgage, have a child or expose themselves to vulnerability by becoming dependent on another person. Anyone who works 12 hours a day also loses the free time when relationships develop. Late marriage, falling birth rates, single-person households, ‘reduced participation’: this neutral administrative vocabulary conceals violence. It describes how human needs are trampled underfoot.
The Scandinavian counter-example
But if material insecurity is the cause of demographic and social collapse, why do Sweden, Finland and Norway (secure employment, strong tenant protection, generous universal childcare, comparatively humane working hours) also fall short of demographic sustainability, with rising levels of loneliness and falling marriage and birth rates? If the Scandinavian model has addressed the material conditions and the outcome nevertheless resembles the situation in Japan, then material insecurity is not the only factor at play.
The birth rate, in particular, is overrated. Once effective contraception, women’s education and the elimination of the economic necessity of having children are secured, birth rates fall in almost every affluent society, regardless of policy. As far as the birth rate is concerned, a mere figure does not explain everything. Material security goes hand in hand with higher birth rates. (This is why the Scandinavian countries are not at the same level as South Korea or Japan, where the demographic situation is on the verge of collapse.) But it is not the root cause.
One should therefore examine which outcomes coincide in both cases and which do not. The Scandinavian countries share Japan's falling birth rate. What they do not share are the mass phenomenon of hikikomori, karoshi, the scale of lonely deaths, or marital norms under which only 2.4 per cent of children are born outside marriage (OECD Family Database). In France the figure is over 60 per cent, and in Sweden over 50 per cent. In a society where marriage remains the almost exclusive route to parenthood, the erosion of secure employment directly results in demographic collapse, because young men in precarious employment cannot access the marriage market and there is no legitimate route to starting a family outside it. In the Scandinavian countries, cohabitation and births outside marriage are the norm, so the same economic pressures do not directly result in childlessness.
Material insecurity, coupled with rigid social norms of adulthood, thus causes the greatest harm. Japan is the prime example.
The neoliberal superego
Political economy can describe the destruction of stable employment relationships. However, it cannot explain why people whose lives have been structurally restricted so regularly experience their situation as a personal shortcoming. For that, social psychology is required.
Alain Ehrenberg has described the transformation in question. In the disciplinary society, prohibition was the guiding principle. People were torn between what was desired and what was forbidden, and neurosis was the illness that arose when no tolerable solution could be found to this conflict. Since the 1970s, the opposite has been the norm: be yourself, take the initiative, bring out what is within you. Now, people are torn between what is expected of them and what they cannot achieve. Depression is not the illness that accompanies this conflict when it remains unresolved. Those who fail have done nothing forbidden. They fall short. Ehrenberg calls the result the ‘exhausted self’: a person who suffers not from a prohibition, but from failing to meet a standard that no one has personally imposed on them and that no one ever declares to have been sufficiently fulfilled.
The subject produced by neoliberalism is not merely exploited; they are commanded to become an entrepreneurial project: to optimise themselves, to gain further qualifications, to demonstrate resilience, to monetise their own personality, to transform every setback into self-improvement. Success in consumption becomes the ‘’. The command is universal: be more, fulfil your potential, be successful. This is the neoliberal superego, and its particular cruelty lies in its tendency to magnify failure to immeasurable proportions. Poor, lonely, overworked, unattractive, incapable of building a stable adult life? The system has the answer ready: you haven’t adapted, haven’t made connections, haven’t built up resilience, haven’t taken on enough responsibility. Social injustice is forged into individual guilt.
What language loses
Psychological structure emerges as a form of interaction: a sedimented pattern of early relational practice in which physicality, affect, desire, perception, and social relations converge. Symbolisation succeeds when this sensory-bodily experience can be linked to linguistic or other cultural symbols. Then fear, dependence, shame or desire can not only be experienced, but also named, remembered, communicated and situated in relation to prevailing norms. The symbol is not merely a label. It unites lived experience and language.
Desymbolisation sets in where a desire, a state of affect or a form of interaction comes into irreconcilable conflict with normative demands, and this conflict cannot be resolved symbolically. The connection between experience and verbal representation is then severed. For Lorenzer, repression is, in this respect, a form of linguistic destruction. The experience does not disappear. It loses its reflexive and communicable expression, yet remains effective without being adequately expressible. The symbols become clichés that continue to exert an influence, emptied of any available biographical and affective meaning. What emerges from this, Lorenzer calls ‘pseudocommunicative private language’, a neurotic phenomenon in which repressed, unconscious conflicts undermine the normal order of language. The words sound as if they convey general understanding, but in truth they merely convey a detached, subjective and silent meaning. Outwardly, it takes the form of ordinary speech and does not reveal its subjective meaning. However, it is not only internal conflicts that bring about this exclusion from the shared linguistic space; institutions do so as well. Then, ideology emerges from the clichés – that familiar linguistic form which obscures real conditions by pretending to symbolise them.
In the case of Japan, it is possible to identify the specific form this takes, and Japanese psychoanalysis has long since done so. In 1971, Takeo Doi described this pattern precisely under the term ‘amae’: the permission to lean on others, which expects that the affection will be reciprocated, and which in Japan is not regarded as a vestige of childhood, but as a fundamental form of adult relationships, extending even into the workplace and public administration. Anyone who speaks here of ‘desymbolised dependence’ is talking about ‘amae’. The post-war order had institutionally enshrined this form: to commit oneself and be supported, to exhaust oneself and receive security in return. The material aspect was withdrawn, whilst the moral demand remained. Ever since, the form has been running into a void without its answer, and in public discourse, the loss does not even feature. An entire range of needs is thus dismissed: to receive without having earned it, to rest without having performed, to be wanted without having put oneself on display. Neoliberalism does not forbid this. It renders it unspeakable, and that has a more devastating effect.
This is where the ideology comes in: neither false knowledge nor deliberate lies. It takes psychological effect because it ties in precisely with these excluded needs and conflicts. What cannot be symbolised and negotiated individually as one’s own desire, fear or ambivalence finds an apparent solution in collectively available patterns of interpretation. The ideological formula provides a socially acceptable language for something that, subjectively, must not be said. It organises the emotion by concealing it. That is why prejudice is more than a mere error. It is a collectively accessible, desymbolised pseudo-solution to conflict that makes change impossible and thereby invisibly cements existing conditions by falsely imposing an admission of guilt on the individual.
Everyone is familiar with the words used for this: flexibility, personal responsibility, resilience, employability, self-fulfilment, ‘reduced participation’. They were once tied to lived interaction and have lost that meaning. It is precisely in this that their usefulness lies. The signs remain available and continue to circulate, and they become susceptible to manipulation because they lack sensory and bodily meaning. The further societal symbolisations drift from bodily experience and lived practice, the more vulnerable a society becomes to ideological delusion. The subject suffers from conditions for which it has no words, and the symptom obscures its view of an encrypted knowledge of these conditions. In this sense, the symptom is a testimony.
Withdrawal is not a Japanese phenomenon.
The research contradicts any form of cultural essentialism. Severe social withdrawal, long treated as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, has now been documented in many countries, which undermines the thesis of a ‘culture-bound phenomenon’. Furlong has argued sociologically that it was a mistake to view hikikomori as a homogeneous group of mentally distressed young people, and has classified a large proportion of them as an anomic reaction to a world in which the prescribed paths to adulthood have lost their reliability.
The authoritative Japanese interpretation, however, interprets this withdrawal differently. Tamaki Saitō, who coined the term ‘hikikomori’ in 1998, sees the cause less in precariousness than in the family system: in a constellation that provides for the adult son and thereby keeps him at home, and in a vulnerability that arises when ‘amae’ can only be experienced at home. This interpretation does not rule out the Furlongs’ views. It explains why ‘ ’ withdrawal in Japan leads to children’s bedrooms, whilst elsewhere it leads to homelessness, incapacity to work or addiction. However, without the family's support, there would be no room to retreat.
Yet this does not dispel the clinical reality. Depression, anxiety, trauma, family conflict and developmental differences all play a part, and the suffering of the withdrawn individual cannot be reduced to an economic formula. But suffering becomes more incomprehensible when its social conditions are treated as merely an exotic backdrop. A young person may withdraw because their anxiety is unbearable and because the world, which was offered to them as a source of recognition, has become a place where judgement is passed, but where no one can truly belong.
Karoshi and Hikikomori: two sides of the same coin
Karoshi and hikikomori are usually presented as curiosities: death from overwork or complete withdrawal from work. Instead, they should be seen as two sides of the same coin.
Karoshi is the endpoint of docility. The individual identifies completely with the demand to perform, to remain available, to wear the body down for the sake of the company, until the body breaks under the weight of what the individual could not refuse. Heart attack, stroke, suicide: the body becomes the final site of an act of obedience that the person has never refused.
Hikikomori is total refusal. The subject leaves the arena of demand (not freely, not triumphantly, at a terrible cost) through a withdrawal that preserves a minimum of psychological survival. The room becomes a sanctuary: suffocating, infantilising, steeped in shame, and at the same time the only place where the performance of competence may cease.
In Lorenzer’s terms, both are desymbolised forms. In karoshi, the cliché of self-sacrifice persists after it has been stripped of any reciprocity that once gave it meaning. Through refusal, the hikikomori speaks of a situation for which no other language is available.
And neoliberal discourses are adept at neutralising such a refusal, for the withdrawn individual is isolated rather than organised. This isolation is no accident. It protects the system from collective awareness. Shame divides. If unemployment is a personal failure, the unemployed do not come together. If loneliness is an individual shortcoming, the lonely do not demand public spaces for socialising. If an adult child remains in the parental home, the family silently bears the costs, and the state is spared the duty of care. The child’s bedroom becomes a private social institution.
The city as a machine of fear
One link is still missing. Poverty shatters the horizon; shame and withdrawal take their toll on the psyche. What connects the two – where macroeconomic pressure becomes a tangible physical condition – is the neoliberal metropolis. This is where Tiziana Villani’s *Psychogéographies urbaines* really helps, and her argument needs to be understood precisely, for it is more powerful than the simple assertion that ‘cities have become unaffordable and alienating’.
Villani regards the neoliberal city as an affective and technical apparatus of control, rather than a neutral framework in which social processes take place. The apparatus creates a state of chronic, smouldering anxiety: the fear of no longer belonging, of one’s own failure, and of the hostile Other. The body, in a state of constant circulation, remains at a subliminal state of alert. It oscillates, carries out tasks, is monitored and provoked; it is allowed to go anywhere yet arrives nowhere. In this interpretation, fear is not a by-product, but the shaped outcome of how a territory organises and accelerates movement, visibility, threat and rhythm. The city does not merely deprive people of any sense of stability. It keeps their nervous systems on edge. Its question is therefore not where people live, but in what state a territory keeps its inhabitants.
This fear serves a purpose. Where life moves faster, and every interval is filled, the pause disappears. Yet it is precisely in the pause that someone might desire something the market does not sell. A body in a constant state of alert reaches for the quickest relief, and that costs money. Virtualisation complements this: it channels attention, sociability, desire and concern via platforms where every need already meets a purchasable response, and where even the search for connection generates the data that is sold. Acceleration robs us of the time to step outside consumption; virtualisation ensures that everything within it is already a glittering, alluring commodity.
When the third place disappears
Seen in this light, the hikikomori’s room is one of the products of the neoliberal metropolis; more precisely, it is the withdrawal of a nervous system from an environment designed to keep it active and consuming. The room and the platform belong to the same geography of manufactured excitement: one is expulsion from circulation; the other, exhausted circulation without arrival. The employee sleeping in public and the person who cannot leave the house are two bodies, destroyed by an urban-economic regime that has severed movement from sociability and filled the gaps with fear.
When the ‘third place’ (neither home nor work, a convenient, permanent space of social presence) disappears or is displaced by rising prices, the screen fills the void, and the city migrates to the platforms: livestreams, subscriber communities, group chats, games, paid private messages. This is virtualisation reaching its culmination: not a complement to social life, but its replacement by an environment in which connection and consumption are the same act. These are not unreal relationships; people find care, solidarity, sexuality and genuine friendship there. But platforms shape these connections and turn them into money. The façade of participation is partly replacing the city of encounters, and this façade, like the accelerated city, is designed to keep the user engaged – and thus reachable and, consequently, willing to buy.
Intimacy, sold back to those who have been deprived of it
Capitalism does not merely sell objects for use; it sells appearances, atmospheres, and promises of status, belonging and desirability. The commodity always arrives imbued with a social fantasy.
In the idol industry, the commodity is managed availability. The performer is expected to embody a sense of closeness that is carefully manufactured and never mutually available: close enough to invite attachment, yet distant enough to remain a product. The ban on romantic relationships is not some enigmatic form of Japanese puritanism; it protects the commodity’s value. The fantasy of availability must not be shattered, for it is precisely this fantasy that has been purchased. The public humiliation of a performer who breaks the rule is therefore no mere act of cruelty. It lays bare the relationship of ownership hidden within parasocial desire: the fan does not literally own her, but the market has taught him to experience her life as a breach of a contract into which he has invested.
Western influencer culture follows a similar structure: the daily vlog, the livestream, the ‘close friends’ subscription, the creator speaking directly into the viewer’s bedroom – all sell varying degrees of micro-intimacy. None of this can be reduced to deception; the audience derives genuine pleasure and companionship. But it comes down to the economic form: a general scarcity of time, security and accessible social space is transformed into a market for simulated closeness. The system first undermines the conditions of ordinary closeness and then sells an aestheticised substitute back to those it has deprived.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, the appeal lies in the fact that parasocial bonding offers a counterpart whose desire is limited. The idol, the streamer, the fictional character can appear emotionally present without the full demands of reciprocity. They cannot reject you in the usual way; they cannot introduce the unpredictability and conflict through which a relationship truly becomes ‘’. It is attachment without exposure to the other’s otherness: closeness without risk and therefore closeness without reciprocity. This is not a Japanese pathology, but an increasingly widespread solution for a world in which interdependence has become precarious. Its Japanese manifestations are merely more visible because Japan has lived with the full extent of these conditions for the longest time: stagnation, a divided labour market, high housing costs, rigid family norms, and a technology-saturated city.
The Western gaze as a defence mechanism
The exoticisation of Japan is a defence mechanism, even if it involves ignorance. Western observers consume images of Japanese alienation because these images allow for recognition from a safe distance. The hikikomori becomes proof that Japan has taken a path the West has not, an anthropological object rather than a possible reflection of the home-office worker in a studio flat, the graduate in debt who moves back in with their parents, or the warehouse worker who is too tired after a long commute to keep a friendship alive.
This is a form of fetishistic denial, in which someone is simultaneously aware of an unpleasant reality yet effectively refuses to acknowledge it: ‘I know, but still …’. I know that loneliness has now become a public health issue; I know that wages have not kept pace with the cost of living; I know that birth rates are falling across the affluent world; I know that platforms have replaced public institutions. But even so, the Japanese are strange.
This is not about erasing real differences. Japan has its own history of imperialism, defeat, reconstruction, corporate organisation and social hierarchy. But it would be just as foolish to deny these particularities as it would be to explain everything by them. Cultural forms are activated under changing economic conditions, as the Scandinavian comparison has shown: the same economic pressure, a different normative structure, a different outcome.
From private pain to public demand
The temptation is to conclude with the following diagnosis: neoliberalism generates shame; shame isolates; isolation is profitable; the system survives by treating the harms it causes as individual problems. But this diagnosis must not degenerate into fatalism.
Yes, the working class needs material solutions, and these are well known: secure jobs, higher wages, shorter working hours, genuine tenant protection, affordable housing, universal childcare, accessible healthcare, public transport, and free, non-commercial spaces where people can be themselves. This is the infrastructure of psychological survival, and it raises that lower threshold for the birth rate (the Scandinavian one), below which the worst demographic trends tend to occur.
But the Scandinavian comparison has also shown that material remedies do not reach the second layer. Where the damage stems from social norms (the moralised image of adulthood, the rigidity of the marriage norm, the transformation of structural failure into private shame), childcare does not resolve it. This layer must be treated for what it is: a problem of recognition. The violence of this system lies in its suppression of a divided state of being within the collective consciousness. The remedy, therefore, lies in making this unjust shaming articulable and, in the act of articulating it, discovering that it was never justified.
This is where psychotherapy makes a special contribution. Therapy cannot tell people who are suffering that their pain is ‘structural’, nor must it turn the therapy room into a political seminar. Its work is more focused and more radical: to reject the lie that the individual is the sole cause of a condition whose causes are societal. The work of putting suffering into words can reconnect private misery with stories, relationships and institutions. In Lorenzer’s sense, this is precisely where resymbolisation begins: a form of interaction regains its language and thereby becomes contestable. And it can restore the very capacity that neoliberalism most severely undermines: the realisation that what feels like personal failure is, for the most part, a shared injury. This realisation is the point at which collective action becomes possible. It is the beginning of politics.
Japan’s significance lies in the fact that it reveals, in an unusually pure form, a contradiction that affluent societies strive to ignore: an economy can continue to produce prosperity without any interest in creating the conditions in which people can live. When people withdraw from society, stop getting married, stop having children, work themselves to the point of collapse, or replace mutual bonds with simulations that can be bought, the fundamental question is: what sort of society made these adaptations necessary, and what would it take to abolish them? a radical shift away from the compulsion for growth towards an economy of the good life, which prioritises social security, genuine community and human needs over profit.
The key points in brief
• The cause of Japan’s low birth rate: the erosion of the material conditions of adult life, whilst the moral expectation to achieve this life remains unchanged.
• Effects of poverty: the destruction of one’s sense of prospects and the loss of unstructured time for building relationships.
• The link between economic insecurity and the birth rate: precarious work leads to demographic collapse when it clashes with rigid norms.
• Neoliberal superego: Demands self-realisation, leading to inexhaustible failure and the shifting of societal contradictions onto individual guilt.
• Karoshi and hikikomori: Represent two extreme reactions to social pressure: excessive conformity to the point of physical collapse, or total refusal through withdrawal.
• Shame and isolation: Shame prevents collective action by dividing people and encouraging the internalisation of social conditions.
Sources
• Alfred Lorenzer, *The Destruction and Reconstruction of Language* (1970) and *The Council of Accountants* (1981): symptoms as damaged forms of interaction
• Tiziana Villani, *Psychogéographies urbaines. Corps, territoires et technologies* (2014)
• Wolfgang Fritz Haug, A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971)
• Alain Ehrenberg, *The Exhausted Self: Depression and Society in the Present* (1998, German edition 2004)
• Tamaki Saitō, *Hikikomori: Adolescence without End* (1998, English edition 2013)
• Takeo Doi, Amae. Freedom within Security. On the Structure of the Japanese Psyche (1971, German edition 1982)
• Statistics Japan, Labour Force Survey, annual average for 2024: 36.8 per cent in non-regular employment
• Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), ‘Employment Ice-age Generation’ Today (2020): Status of graduates from 1994–2003 in non-regular employment
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), Survey on the Employment of Older Workers 2024: Continued employment beyond the retirement age in around two-thirds of workplaces
• OECD Family Database SF2.4: Proportion of births outside marriage
• Andy Furlong, ‘The Japanese hikikomori phenomenon: acute social withdrawal among young people’, The Sociological Review 56 (2008)
• Sigmund Freud, Fetishism (1927): on denial (“I know full well, but nevertheless”)
Related
DESCRIPTION: Hikikomori, karoshi, the idol cult: Japan’s so-called peculiarities clearly reveal an economy that produces prosperity without creating conditions in which people can live.
Japan shows what an unbridled market does to a society
Japan’s so-called cultural peculiarities (social withdrawal, overwork, sexlessness, parasocial attachment) reveal what happens when an economy continues to generate wealth for the few, whilst the majority can no longer make a living.
The conventional view of Japan
There is an exoticising and techno-Orientalist view of Japan. It sees the hikikomori who has not left his childhood bedroom for years, the employee who lies unconscious on a train platform after yet another evening of compulsory drinking, the idol who apologises in tears for having breached a relationship norm, men who cultivate elaborate bonds with fictional characters, low birth rates, a lack of sex, robotic companions, capsule hotels and lonely deaths.
Then he looks away, reassured. Japan becomes a curiosity: a society that is at once hypermodern and exotic, technologically advanced and yet frozen in an archaic social code. Its emotionally alien pathologies are attributed to an enigmatic national psychology: a peculiar relationship with shame, a Far Eastern collectivism taken to extremes. Japan fascinates precisely because it is different.
This framing is comforting and allows Western observers to deny their own reflection: work is eroding social life in the West, too. Housing is becoming unaffordable for ever more people. Friendship and starting a family are being ground down by insecurity in the West. But: ‘The Japanese are simply different.’
The thesis and the arguments against it
The claim is that much of what is regarded as Japanese social pathology arises when the material conditions for an ordinary adult life break down, whilst the moral imperative to achieve this life remains in full force. It is a mechanism by which economic pressure becomes psychological suffering, with the city, in particular, being the place where the two converge.
If this claim is true, it must be open to refutation. It would have to predict that where the material conditions are restored (secure employment, affordable housing, a genuine care infrastructure), the specifically economic component of the harm would diminish. The best test case is the Scandinavian countries, for it is there that the argument would have to hold up.
The end of the promised life
The post-war order in Japan offered security to a large section of the population: education, permanent employment, marriage, family, housing, social recognition. This promise was never universal, unintentional or even free from pressure to conform. But it gave structure to expectations. It gave effort a goal.
The collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s destroyed more than just book assets. It shook this sense of security to its core. The labour market split into protected regular employment and a growing peripheral sector comprising part-time, temporary, agency and contract work. This grey area now accounts for 36.8 per cent of all employees, around 21 million people (Labour Force Survey by the Japanese Statistics Bureau, annual average for 2024).
The distribution is uneven. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the proportion stands at 22.5 per cent – lower than in any other age group. Among women, it exceeds 50 per cent, as many do not return to regular employment after giving birth. It is highest among those aged over 65, a figure driven by the age limit. Most companies dismiss employees at age 60 and then re-employ them on fixed-term contracts with lower pay. Two-thirds of companies operate in this way.
Japanese companies fill their permanent posts almost exclusively by collectively recruiting an entire cohort of graduates within a few months after graduation. Those who are accepted are in. Those who miss out are left out, as there is virtually no opportunity for lateral entry. This chance comes around only once in a lifetime.
Every cohort that graduated between 1994 and 2003 was thus left out in the cold. The economy had collapsed, companies were hardly taking on any new staff, and in Japan these graduates are still referred to today as the ‘Employment Ice Age Generation’ (Japanese: Shūshoku Hyōgaki sedai). Of the men with university degrees who started in precarious jobs back then, a third still did not have a permanent position twenty years later. They are now in their forties and fifties. What began as a temporary setback became the reality for an entire generation.
What this looks like is as follows. A 34-year-old man with a university degree, who has been working for eleven years and is now on his fourth fixed-term contract. He lives in the room he grew up in because he cannot afford to keep his own flat in Tokyo on this income. Getting married would be possible if he had a permanent contract. He cannot get one because he is too old for the career entry route through which permanent positions are awarded in Japan. He has done nothing wrong and has no prospect of ever getting it right.
This is the fact that the culturalist narrative continually overlooks. The question is: what happens to a society that maintains a completely moralised image of successful adulthood whilst quietly withdrawing the means to achieve it?
How poverty shatters one’s horizons
The answer is: it generates shame – and does so structurally.
Material insecurity means having less money. And that shatters any sense of the future. Anyone without reliable working hours cannot commit themselves in the same way as someone with a predictable income. Anyone moving from one short-term contract to another cannot easily plan a household, take out a mortgage, have a child or expose themselves to vulnerability by becoming dependent on another person. Anyone who works 12 hours a day also loses the free time when relationships develop. Late marriage, falling birth rates, single-person households, ‘reduced participation’: this neutral administrative vocabulary conceals violence. It describes how human needs are trampled underfoot.
The Scandinavian counter-example
But if material insecurity is the cause of demographic and social collapse, why do Sweden, Finland and Norway (secure employment, strong tenant protection, generous universal childcare, comparatively humane working hours) also fall short of demographic sustainability, with rising levels of loneliness and falling marriage and birth rates? If the Scandinavian model has addressed the material conditions and the outcome nevertheless resembles the situation in Japan, then material insecurity is not the only factor at play.
The birth rate, in particular, is overrated. Once effective contraception, women’s education and the elimination of the economic necessity of having children are secured, birth rates fall in almost every affluent society, regardless of policy. As far as the birth rate is concerned, a mere figure does not explain everything. Material security goes hand in hand with higher birth rates. (This is why the Scandinavian countries are not at the same level as South Korea or Japan, where the demographic situation is on the verge of collapse.) But it is not the root cause.
One should therefore examine which outcomes coincide in both cases and which do not. The Scandinavian countries share Japan's falling birth rate. What they do not share are the mass phenomenon of hikikomori, karoshi, the scale of lonely deaths, or marital norms under which only 2.4 per cent of children are born outside marriage (OECD Family Database). In France the figure is over 60 per cent, and in Sweden over 50 per cent. In a society where marriage remains the almost exclusive route to parenthood, the erosion of secure employment directly results in demographic collapse, because young men in precarious employment cannot access the marriage market and there is no legitimate route to starting a family outside it. In the Scandinavian countries, cohabitation and births outside marriage are the norm, so the same economic pressures do not directly result in childlessness.
Material insecurity, coupled with rigid social norms of adulthood, thus causes the greatest harm. Japan is the prime example.
The neoliberal superego
Political economy can describe the destruction of stable employment relationships. However, it cannot explain why people whose lives have been structurally restricted so regularly experience their situation as a personal shortcoming. For that, social psychology is required.
Alain Ehrenberg has described the transformation in question. In the disciplinary society, prohibition was the guiding principle. People were torn between what was desired and what was forbidden, and neurosis was the illness that arose when no tolerable solution could be found to this conflict. Since the 1970s, the opposite has been the norm: be yourself, take the initiative, bring out what is within you. Now, people are torn between what is expected of them and what they cannot achieve. Depression is not the illness that accompanies this conflict when it remains unresolved. Those who fail have done nothing forbidden. They fall short. Ehrenberg calls the result the ‘exhausted self’: a person who suffers not from a prohibition, but from failing to meet a standard that no one has personally imposed on them and that no one ever declares to have been sufficiently fulfilled.
The subject produced by neoliberalism is not merely exploited; they are commanded to become an entrepreneurial project: to optimise themselves, to gain further qualifications, to demonstrate resilience, to monetise their own personality, to transform every setback into self-improvement. Success in consumption becomes the ‘’. The command is universal: be more, fulfil your potential, be successful. This is the neoliberal superego, and its particular cruelty lies in its tendency to magnify failure to immeasurable proportions. Poor, lonely, overworked, unattractive, incapable of building a stable adult life? The system has the answer ready: you haven’t adapted, haven’t made connections, haven’t built up resilience, haven’t taken on enough responsibility. Social injustice is forged into individual guilt.
What language loses
Psychological structure emerges as a form of interaction: a sedimented pattern of early relational practice in which physicality, affect, desire, perception, and social relations converge. Symbolisation succeeds when this sensory-bodily experience can be linked to linguistic or other cultural symbols. Then fear, dependence, shame or desire can not only be experienced, but also named, remembered, communicated and situated in relation to prevailing norms. The symbol is not merely a label. It unites lived experience and language.
Desymbolisation sets in where a desire, a state of affect or a form of interaction comes into irreconcilable conflict with normative demands, and this conflict cannot be resolved symbolically. The connection between experience and verbal representation is then severed. For Lorenzer, repression is, in this respect, a form of linguistic destruction. The experience does not disappear. It loses its reflexive and communicable expression, yet remains effective without being adequately expressible. The symbols become clichés that continue to exert an influence, emptied of any available biographical and affective meaning. What emerges from this, Lorenzer calls ‘pseudocommunicative private language’, a neurotic phenomenon in which repressed, unconscious conflicts undermine the normal order of language. The words sound as if they convey general understanding, but in truth they merely convey a detached, subjective and silent meaning. Outwardly, it takes the form of ordinary speech and does not reveal its subjective meaning. However, it is not only internal conflicts that bring about this exclusion from the shared linguistic space; institutions do so as well. Then, ideology emerges from the clichés – that familiar linguistic form which obscures real conditions by pretending to symbolise them.
In the case of Japan, it is possible to identify the specific form this takes, and Japanese psychoanalysis has long since done so. In 1971, Takeo Doi described this pattern precisely under the term ‘amae’: the permission to lean on others, which expects that the affection will be reciprocated, and which in Japan is not regarded as a vestige of childhood, but as a fundamental form of adult relationships, extending even into the workplace and public administration. Anyone who speaks here of ‘desymbolised dependence’ is talking about ‘amae’. The post-war order had institutionally enshrined this form: to commit oneself and be supported, to exhaust oneself and receive security in return. The material aspect was withdrawn, whilst the moral demand remained. Ever since, the form has been running into a void without its answer, and in public discourse, the loss does not even feature. An entire range of needs is thus dismissed: to receive without having earned it, to rest without having performed, to be wanted without having put oneself on display. Neoliberalism does not forbid this. It renders it unspeakable, and that has a more devastating effect.
This is where the ideology comes in: neither false knowledge nor deliberate lies. It takes psychological effect because it ties in precisely with these excluded needs and conflicts. What cannot be symbolised and negotiated individually as one’s own desire, fear or ambivalence finds an apparent solution in collectively available patterns of interpretation. The ideological formula provides a socially acceptable language for something that, subjectively, must not be said. It organises the emotion by concealing it. That is why prejudice is more than a mere error. It is a collectively accessible, desymbolised pseudo-solution to conflict that makes change impossible and thereby invisibly cements existing conditions by falsely imposing an admission of guilt on the individual.
Everyone is familiar with the words used for this: flexibility, personal responsibility, resilience, employability, self-fulfilment, ‘reduced participation’. They were once tied to lived interaction and have lost that meaning. It is precisely in this that their usefulness lies. The signs remain available and continue to circulate, and they become susceptible to manipulation because they lack sensory and bodily meaning. The further societal symbolisations drift from bodily experience and lived practice, the more vulnerable a society becomes to ideological delusion. The subject suffers from conditions for which it has no words, and the symptom obscures its view of an encrypted knowledge of these conditions. In this sense, the symptom is a testimony.
Withdrawal is not a Japanese phenomenon.
The research contradicts any form of cultural essentialism. Severe social withdrawal, long treated as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, has now been documented in many countries, which undermines the thesis of a ‘culture-bound phenomenon’. Furlong has argued sociologically that it was a mistake to view hikikomori as a homogeneous group of mentally distressed young people, and has classified a large proportion of them as an anomic reaction to a world in which the prescribed paths to adulthood have lost their reliability.
The authoritative Japanese interpretation, however, interprets this withdrawal differently. Tamaki Saitō, who coined the term ‘hikikomori’ in 1998, sees the cause less in precariousness than in the family system: in a constellation that provides for the adult son and thereby keeps him at home, and in a vulnerability that arises when ‘amae’ can only be experienced at home. This interpretation does not rule out the Furlongs’ views. It explains why ‘ ’ withdrawal in Japan leads to children’s bedrooms, whilst elsewhere it leads to homelessness, incapacity to work or addiction. However, without the family's support, there would be no room to retreat.
Yet this does not dispel the clinical reality. Depression, anxiety, trauma, family conflict and developmental differences all play a part, and the suffering of the withdrawn individual cannot be reduced to an economic formula. But suffering becomes more incomprehensible when its social conditions are treated as merely an exotic backdrop. A young person may withdraw because their anxiety is unbearable and because the world, which was offered to them as a source of recognition, has become a place where judgement is passed, but where no one can truly belong.
Karoshi and Hikikomori: two sides of the same coin
Karoshi and hikikomori are usually presented as curiosities: death from overwork or complete withdrawal from work. Instead, they should be seen as two sides of the same coin.
Karoshi is the endpoint of docility. The individual identifies completely with the demand to perform, to remain available, to wear the body down for the sake of the company, until the body breaks under the weight of what the individual could not refuse. Heart attack, stroke, suicide: the body becomes the final site of an act of obedience that the person has never refused.
Hikikomori is total refusal. The subject leaves the arena of demand (not freely, not triumphantly, at a terrible cost) through a withdrawal that preserves a minimum of psychological survival. The room becomes a sanctuary: suffocating, infantilising, steeped in shame, and at the same time the only place where the performance of competence may cease.
In Lorenzer’s terms, both are desymbolised forms. In karoshi, the cliché of self-sacrifice persists after it has been stripped of any reciprocity that once gave it meaning. Through refusal, the hikikomori speaks of a situation for which no other language is available.
And neoliberal discourses are adept at neutralising such a refusal, for the withdrawn individual is isolated rather than organised. This isolation is no accident. It protects the system from collective awareness. Shame divides. If unemployment is a personal failure, the unemployed do not come together. If loneliness is an individual shortcoming, the lonely do not demand public spaces for socialising. If an adult child remains in the parental home, the family silently bears the costs, and the state is spared the duty of care. The child’s bedroom becomes a private social institution.
The city as a machine of fear
One link is still missing. Poverty shatters the horizon; shame and withdrawal take their toll on the psyche. What connects the two – where macroeconomic pressure becomes a tangible physical condition – is the neoliberal metropolis. This is where Tiziana Villani’s *Psychogéographies urbaines* really helps, and her argument needs to be understood precisely, for it is more powerful than the simple assertion that ‘cities have become unaffordable and alienating’.
Villani regards the neoliberal city as an affective and technical apparatus of control, rather than a neutral framework in which social processes take place. The apparatus creates a state of chronic, smouldering anxiety: the fear of no longer belonging, of one’s own failure, and of the hostile Other. The body, in a state of constant circulation, remains at a subliminal state of alert. It oscillates, carries out tasks, is monitored and provoked; it is allowed to go anywhere yet arrives nowhere. In this interpretation, fear is not a by-product, but the shaped outcome of how a territory organises and accelerates movement, visibility, threat and rhythm. The city does not merely deprive people of any sense of stability. It keeps their nervous systems on edge. Its question is therefore not where people live, but in what state a territory keeps its inhabitants.
This fear serves a purpose. Where life moves faster, and every interval is filled, the pause disappears. Yet it is precisely in the pause that someone might desire something the market does not sell. A body in a constant state of alert reaches for the quickest relief, and that costs money. Virtualisation complements this: it channels attention, sociability, desire and concern via platforms where every need already meets a purchasable response, and where even the search for connection generates the data that is sold. Acceleration robs us of the time to step outside consumption; virtualisation ensures that everything within it is already a glittering, alluring commodity.
When the third place disappears
Seen in this light, the hikikomori’s room is one of the products of the neoliberal metropolis; more precisely, it is the withdrawal of a nervous system from an environment designed to keep it active and consuming. The room and the platform belong to the same geography of manufactured excitement: one is expulsion from circulation; the other, exhausted circulation without arrival. The employee sleeping in public and the person who cannot leave the house are two bodies, destroyed by an urban-economic regime that has severed movement from sociability and filled the gaps with fear.
When the ‘third place’ (neither home nor work, a convenient, permanent space of social presence) disappears or is displaced by rising prices, the screen fills the void, and the city migrates to the platforms: livestreams, subscriber communities, group chats, games, paid private messages. This is virtualisation reaching its culmination: not a complement to social life, but its replacement by an environment in which connection and consumption are the same act. These are not unreal relationships; people find care, solidarity, sexuality and genuine friendship there. But platforms shape these connections and turn them into money. The façade of participation is partly replacing the city of encounters, and this façade, like the accelerated city, is designed to keep the user engaged – and thus reachable and, consequently, willing to buy.
Intimacy, sold back to those who have been deprived of it
Capitalism does not merely sell objects for use; it sells appearances, atmospheres, and promises of status, belonging and desirability. The commodity always arrives imbued with a social fantasy.
In the idol industry, the commodity is managed availability. The performer is expected to embody a sense of closeness that is carefully manufactured and never mutually available: close enough to invite attachment, yet distant enough to remain a product. The ban on romantic relationships is not some enigmatic form of Japanese puritanism; it protects the commodity’s value. The fantasy of availability must not be shattered, for it is precisely this fantasy that has been purchased. The public humiliation of a performer who breaks the rule is therefore no mere act of cruelty. It lays bare the relationship of ownership hidden within parasocial desire: the fan does not literally own her, but the market has taught him to experience her life as a breach of a contract into which he has invested.
Western influencer culture follows a similar structure: the daily vlog, the livestream, the ‘close friends’ subscription, the creator speaking directly into the viewer’s bedroom – all sell varying degrees of micro-intimacy. None of this can be reduced to deception; the audience derives genuine pleasure and companionship. But it comes down to the economic form: a general scarcity of time, security and accessible social space is transformed into a market for simulated closeness. The system first undermines the conditions of ordinary closeness and then sells an aestheticised substitute back to those it has deprived.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, the appeal lies in the fact that parasocial bonding offers a counterpart whose desire is limited. The idol, the streamer, the fictional character can appear emotionally present without the full demands of reciprocity. They cannot reject you in the usual way; they cannot introduce the unpredictability and conflict through which a relationship truly becomes ‘’. It is attachment without exposure to the other’s otherness: closeness without risk and therefore closeness without reciprocity. This is not a Japanese pathology, but an increasingly widespread solution for a world in which interdependence has become precarious. Its Japanese manifestations are merely more visible because Japan has lived with the full extent of these conditions for the longest time: stagnation, a divided labour market, high housing costs, rigid family norms, and a technology-saturated city.
The Western gaze as a defence mechanism
The exoticisation of Japan is a defence mechanism, even if it involves ignorance. Western observers consume images of Japanese alienation because these images allow for recognition from a safe distance. The hikikomori becomes proof that Japan has taken a path the West has not, an anthropological object rather than a possible reflection of the home-office worker in a studio flat, the graduate in debt who moves back in with their parents, or the warehouse worker who is too tired after a long commute to keep a friendship alive.
This is a form of fetishistic denial, in which someone is simultaneously aware of an unpleasant reality yet effectively refuses to acknowledge it: ‘I know, but still …’. I know that loneliness has now become a public health issue; I know that wages have not kept pace with the cost of living; I know that birth rates are falling across the affluent world; I know that platforms have replaced public institutions. But even so, the Japanese are strange.
This is not about erasing real differences. Japan has its own history of imperialism, defeat, reconstruction, corporate organisation and social hierarchy. But it would be just as foolish to deny these particularities as it would be to explain everything by them. Cultural forms are activated under changing economic conditions, as the Scandinavian comparison has shown: the same economic pressure, a different normative structure, a different outcome.
From private pain to public demand
The temptation is to conclude with the following diagnosis: neoliberalism generates shame; shame isolates; isolation is profitable; the system survives by treating the harms it causes as individual problems. But this diagnosis must not degenerate into fatalism.
Yes, the working class needs material solutions, and these are well known: secure jobs, higher wages, shorter working hours, genuine tenant protection, affordable housing, universal childcare, accessible healthcare, public transport, and free, non-commercial spaces where people can be themselves. This is the infrastructure of psychological survival, and it raises that lower threshold for the birth rate (the Scandinavian one), below which the worst demographic trends tend to occur.
But the Scandinavian comparison has also shown that material remedies do not reach the second layer. Where the damage stems from social norms (the moralised image of adulthood, the rigidity of the marriage norm, the transformation of structural failure into private shame), childcare does not resolve it. This layer must be treated for what it is: a problem of recognition. The violence of this system lies in its suppression of a divided state of being within the collective consciousness. The remedy, therefore, lies in making this unjust shaming articulable and, in the act of articulating it, discovering that it was never justified.
This is where psychotherapy makes a special contribution. Therapy cannot tell people who are suffering that their pain is ‘structural’, nor must it turn the therapy room into a political seminar. Its work is more focused and more radical: to reject the lie that the individual is the sole cause of a condition whose causes are societal. The work of putting suffering into words can reconnect private misery with stories, relationships and institutions. In Lorenzer’s sense, this is precisely where resymbolisation begins: a form of interaction regains its language and thereby becomes contestable. And it can restore the very capacity that neoliberalism most severely undermines: the realisation that what feels like personal failure is, for the most part, a shared injury. This realisation is the point at which collective action becomes possible. It is the beginning of politics.
Japan’s significance lies in the fact that it reveals, in an unusually pure form, a contradiction that affluent societies strive to ignore: an economy can continue to produce prosperity without any interest in creating the conditions in which people can live. When people withdraw from society, stop getting married, stop having children, work themselves to the point of collapse, or replace mutual bonds with simulations that can be bought, the fundamental question is: what sort of society made these adaptations necessary, and what would it take to abolish them? a radical shift away from the compulsion for growth towards an economy of the good life, which prioritises social security, genuine community and human needs over profit.
The key points in brief
• The cause of Japan’s low birth rate: the erosion of the material conditions of adult life, whilst the moral expectation to achieve this life remains unchanged.
• Effects of poverty: the destruction of one’s sense of prospects and the loss of unstructured time for building relationships.
• The link between economic insecurity and the birth rate: precarious work leads to demographic collapse when it clashes with rigid norms.
• Neoliberal superego: Demands self-realisation, leading to inexhaustible failure and the shifting of societal contradictions onto individual guilt.
• Karoshi and hikikomori: Represent two extreme reactions to social pressure: excessive conformity to the point of physical collapse, or total refusal through withdrawal.
• Shame and isolation: Shame prevents collective action by dividing people and encouraging the internalisation of social conditions.
Sources
• Alfred Lorenzer, *The Destruction and Reconstruction of Language* (1970) and *The Council of Accountants* (1981): symptoms as damaged forms of interaction
• Tiziana Villani, *Psychogéographies urbaines. Corps, territoires et technologies* (2014)
• Wolfgang Fritz Haug, A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971)
• Alain Ehrenberg, *The Exhausted Self: Depression and Society in the Present* (1998, German edition 2004)
• Tamaki Saitō, *Hikikomori: Adolescence without End* (1998, English edition 2013)
• Takeo Doi, Amae. Freedom within Security. On the Structure of the Japanese Psyche (1971, German edition 1982)
• Statistics Japan, Labour Force Survey, annual average for 2024: 36.8 per cent in non-regular employment
• Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), ‘Employment Ice-age Generation’ Today (2020): Status of graduates from 1994–2003 in non-regular employment
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), Survey on the Employment of Older Workers 2024: Continued employment beyond the retirement age in around two-thirds of workplaces
• OECD Family Database SF2.4: Proportion of births outside marriage
• Andy Furlong, ‘The Japanese hikikomori phenomenon: acute social withdrawal among young people’, The Sociological Review 56 (2008)
• Sigmund Freud, Fetishism (1927): on denial (“I know full well, but nevertheless”)
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