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Saitō Tamaki Translated by Jeffrey Angles, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013, 208 pp., $19.95 paper, ISBN: 978-0816654598
This is the first English translation of Tamaki Saitō’s groundbreaking 1998 book that popularized the term “hikikomori” in Japan by raising questions about, and proposing answers to, what seemed to be a new and perhaps uniquely Japanese affliction. Written for a popular audience, and geared particularly to families of people diagnosed as hikikomori, it is split into two sections: theory and practice. In describing the condition, the former indeed argues that it is a condition distinguishable from others, while the latter recommends a course of treatment.
“Shakaiteki hikikomori” is the Japanese translation of “social withdrawal.” Shortened to just hikikomori, it can mean both “withdrawal” as well as “a person who has withdrawn.” Though Saitō stresses that it is derived from the DSM, and thus is not specifically Japanese, the term nonetheless came to be used to describe a particular type of social withdrawal in late 20th century Japanese culture. “Hikikomori” now more often stands, somewhat problematically, for a specifically Japanese condition and those suffering from it. Saitō’s work concerns a rise in young people, mostly men in their late teens and early twenties, isolating themselves from the world, dropping out of school, and often confining themselves to their bedrooms for months or even years. One of the questions originally left to the reader, but thoroughly addressed by both Saitō and translator Jeffrey Angles in their prefaces to the English language edition, is where this term speaks to broader phenomena of social withdrawal and where to more historically and culturally