

His last hope rests on another son, who is two years older than the social recluse.
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He has taught the son how to do online shopping at Amazon. His wife has left recipe books in her son's room so that he can learn to cook for himself.

His parents have paid the son’s national pension payments.

He has estimated the son would have to live on his own for about 35 years, and so has saved half of his work bonuses so that the son will not die of starvation. Now, left in an 8050 household, he is somber as if he has heavy lead in his stomach, wondering what will happen to the son after he and his wife die. But most of the parents of his generation whom he met there and worked together with have since passed away. At the same time, I feel mortified and sad.”Īfter retirement, the father participated actively in a group of families who have hikikomori children. “I want him to feel proud about it as a monument of his struggle for self-independence. That’s the income of one person’s entire life,” the octogenarian father said, pouring out his emotions. He earned about 3 million yen in total during the time. He and his wife took the son to a university hospital and even put him into a psychotherapy facility that charged 10,000 yen ($90.31) per day.įor several years up until his mid-30s, the son tried to work and took various part-time jobs but quit repeatedly. It all changed when his son developed anthrophobia, a fear of people, when he was in high school. “My family has a problem-free life,” he thought. The father used to be a workaholic office worker amid the high-growth period of the Japanese economy, working as a manager at a leading manufacturer. "Thank you for not forgetting us who are in our 80s and 50s.” “Thank you for delivering spring to our garden," he wrote. The 83-year-old father of the Aichi Prefecture hikikomori wrote a message and posted it with a picture of plum flowers blooming in his garden on a social networking service in March. It is encapsulated by the so-called “8050 problem,” in which elderly parents in their 80s are forced to take care of their grown unmarried children in their 50s in one household, leading both to social isolation. The results highlight a dire situation of the increasingly aging nation, the prolongation of the hikikomori problem and the aging of people who suffer from it.

“We now know that hikikomori is not a phenomenon exclusive to youth,” he said. Koichi Kitakaze, director for Policy of Youth Affairs of the Cabinet Office, who analyzed the survey data, said that the number exceeded the government’s expectation. The estimate was unveiled on March 29 by the Cabinet Office, which conducted the nationwide survey of hikikomori, targeting those aged 40 to 64, for the first time. The shut-in is emblematic of a “hikikomori,” a social recluse who stays home all the time, sometimes for years, which has long been considered a young people’s problem.īut a new government survey reveals a shocking reality: An estimated 613,000 people between 40 and 64 years of age, predominantly men, have been found to be withdrawn from society, exceeding the number of hikikomori aged from 15 to 39. He never goes out in the daytime to avoid being seen by neighbors, but will only go out by car at night to a far-away convenience store for shopping. A 53-year-old man in Aichi Prefecture rarely leaves the house and eats the meals his mother cooks for him in his room with the curtains shut.
