What does it mean to be hikikomori? In popular media, hikikomori is often depicted as the epitome of social isolation. In psychiatry, it is more commonly approached as an individual condition or psychiatric state. Japanese government definitions draw the boundary at six months of social withdrawal, while in everyday life someone might casually describe themselves as being “hikikomori for a day.”

In my article for HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, “Rehabilitating Hikikomori: Classification, Care, and the Totalizing Category,” I explore these shifting meanings through ethnographic research in two residential rehabilitation centers in Japan. The centers offered strikingly different responses to hikikomori: one emphasized discipline, independence, and reintegration, while the other prioritized rest, connection, and gradual recovery.

Yet across these differences, hikikomori did more than describe social withdrawal. The category shaped how residents’ pasts were interpreted, how their difficulties were understood, what forms of care they received, and what recovery was imagined to look like. I argue that hikikomori can therefore operate as what I call a “totalizing category”: a classificatory framework in which diagnosis, moral evaluation, care, and trajectories of recovery become increasingly intertwined.

The article asks what happens when a category used to identify a social problem begins to organize the lives, identities, and futures of those it names.

The article has been accepted for publication in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The manuscript is available upon request.