hikikomori

But you were there and kind of what was your sense of what was going on with these groups of people?

Well, I suppose, you know, when people think that isolation is necessarily a bad thing, and when they point to Hikikomori, and also the number of old people who die alone is two examples of, you know, the negative pictures of isolation.

I think it's interesting when you look closely at it because, as I said earlier, the internet allows people more autonomy and less need for other people.

And a lot of people do make that work.

So if you don't already, make sure you subscribe to Asia Pacific and enjoy this program from Mariko.

[instrumental music] Hikikomori or social recluse who isolate themselves at home for a long period of time, it's been an ongoing issue for many decades.

Japan is estimated to have one and a half million of them, and South Korea, hundreds of thousands.

But Sophie, AI might be able to provide a solution.

And it's, I think you did the reporting in such a good and sensitive way that, you know, it was, it's a real pleasure to have you on to sort of talk about it some more.

We are going to talk about, um, Britain's Hikikomori, the, the, the shut in generation as some people have called them.

Um, but yeah, we're going to, we're going to dig into that.

Like, uh, with some detail and like looking at some trends.

The story is like, as I sort of mentioned at the top, this is a really sensitively told story and also I imagine quite a challenging one.

um and the story sort of begins talking to a mother of uh a young man who uh lives at home and sort of lives a very kind of like specific type of lifestyle my first question and i guess like to open this up is we there's a lot of stuff going like there's a lot of like talk on the news about kind of like unemployed mass unemployment um young people are sort of like not really you know they're either moving out much much later or they're not moving out at all there's no sort of real promise of them kind of being able to sort of lead a particular idea of what an independent life looked like maybe a decade or so ago, and certainly pre-COVID.

But I wondered whether like, just as a starting point, we can maybe talk about if there is like a meaningful difference between NEETs, be people who are not in education, employment, or in training, and what Eve, you describe as Britain's Hikikomori.

So maybe we can begin there.

Yeah.

Hikikomoris.

Have you heard of hikikomoris?

No, no, no.