Turning Japanese

What the hikikomori phenomenon tells us about today's crisis of masculinity

If you’ve been hanging around some of the wrong places on the internet, you may already know what a hikikomori is. If you’re guessing and you say “something weird or unpleasant from Japan,” you’re on the right track—well done.

A hikikomori is an extreme social recluse, someone—usually a man—who withdraws from normal life, stays at home all day, and wastes his life playing video games, eating junk food, watching Anime cartoons and pornography too, if he can summon the libido. And that’s a big if, be the hormone that drives libido is—testosterone—is in short supply among the hikikomori. More on that in a moment.

Note: Hikikomori is also used to describe the phenomenon itself.

Recluses of one sort or another have existed for a very long time. In medieval Europe, for example, there were monks, nuns, hermits and anchorites, all of whom were accorded a special kind of sanctity for hiding themselves away from the snares and lures of the world. There were tens of thousands of these men and women in existence at any one time across Christendom, from Ireland and England in the west to Byzantium in the east.

Today, in Japan alone, there may be as many as ten million hikikomori, according to leading psychiatrist Saito Tamaki.

Now, ten million may be at the very upper limit of credible estimates, but the generally accepted low estimate is still a million: at least half a million people under 40, and half a million over 40. The Japanese government reckons a further 1.5 million are also on the way to becoming hikikomori. Even if the actual figure is “just” 2.5 million, that’s still a significant number in a nation of about 120 million people: let’s say 1 in 50, for argument’s sake, or 2%.

The progression of hikikomori-ism is worth noting. Many begin their isolation early, while they’re still in school. They become “school-refusers”—futoko is the term—and simply won’t go. Things only get worse from there.

With the growth of the condition, specific diagnostic criteria have been developed. To qualify as a hikikomori, one must spend most of the day and nearly every day at home; persistently avoid social situations and relationships; display significant impairment in one’s social skills; and have been displaying the symptoms for longer than six months. In addition, there should be no obvious physical or mental etiology to account for the withdrawal. Why the last point should be insisted upon, I’m not sure, since it’s obvious there must be some kind of physical or mental change underlying the condition.

Japan being Japan and not America or Europe, distinct social and cultural factors have been put forward to explain the hikikomori. The standard explanations focus on the lack of jobs for young people, the aging population, and, importantly, the cultural belief that shameful things—like a young man stuck in perpetual adolescence—should be hidden from sight.

Social and cultural factors unique to Japan clearly aren’t sufficient to explain what’s going on here. There are also at least half a million social recluses in nearby South Korea. And maybe six million men of working-age in the US are now displaying exactly the same symptoms of social withdrawal as the hikikomori and their cousins in Korea.

At least one study has linked becoming an extreme social recluse, in a specifically Japanese context, to having low testosterone. This doesn’t surprise me at all. The study focused on boys in their early teenage years, at precisely the time futoko—“school-refusers”—start to appear.

Here’s the study’s abstract, which explains what the researchers did.

“Salivary samples were collected from 159 healthy early adolescent boys (mean age [standard deviation]: 11.5 [0.73]) selected from participants of the ‘population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo Teen Cohort’... Social withdrawal and confounding factors, such as the secondary sexual characteristics and their age in months, were evaluated by self-ad-ministered questionnaires completed by the primary parents. The degree of social withdrawal was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist... Levels of salivary testosterone, and cortisol as a control, were measured by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry... A higher risk of social withdrawal was associated with a lower salivary testosterone level after adjustment for age in months (odds ratio 0.55, 95 percent confidence interval 0.33-0.94), and the association remained significant after adjusting for body mass index, the degree of anxiety/depression and pubertal stage.”

So, in basic terms, if you have lower testosterone levels as a teenage boy, you’re more likely to end up becoming a social recluse. First a futoko, then a hikikomori.

Like I said, I’m not surprised. The symptoms associated with being a hikikomori are classic symptoms of low testosterone, the kind of symptoms you’ll find described in testimonial after testimonial on Reddit’s low-T forums, as well as in the copious clinical literature on testosterone. Loss of motivation, anxiety, timidity, depression, no libido, weight gain…

And, of course, we’d expect the hikikomori lifestyle to drive further testosterone decline: the isolation and lack of meaningful fulfilment, the poor diet, no exercise, no sunlight… One of the points I try to hammer home is how testosterone increase is a virtuous cycle, and testosterone decline a vicious one. The lifestyle and attitudes associated with having high testosterone drive the hormone up, reinforcing those behaviours and beliefs; and the opposite happens with low testosterone, pushing the hormone down and down.

What does surprise me, though, is how slowly we’ve woken up to the idea that biological changes—especially hormonal changes—could underlie this phenomenon, in Japan, South Korea, the US or anywhere else in the world where men are giving up and dropping out en masse. For all the ink that’s spilled about the “crisis of masculinity” by people like Jordan B. Peterson, Richard Reeves and Senator Josh Hawley, very little is said about male biology and the civilisational decline in testosterone levels—1% year on year—that’s been happening for decades, and appears to be getting worse.

Why is that? I’m not sure, but there appears to be some kind of deep conditioning at work. Perhaps it’s a desire not to “reduce” men to their biology, as if that somehow strips them of agency and the ability to change their situation, when in fact it does nothing of the sort. Nobody’s saying the answer is just to give ten million Japanese men a shot of testosterone, or six million gamer-gooners in the US—but, then again, I think it might be a start.