Hikikomori by Another Name: Britain’s NEETs Crisis

Britain is suffering from a hikikomori crisis and refuses to recognise it as such. 

That’s not a far-fetched, metaphorical claim. Alan Milburn’s government-commissioned review into Britain’s NEET predicament—over a million 16-to-24-year-olds out of work, education, and training—outlines a ‘bedroom generation;’ young people today are ‘living in their bedrooms,’ ‘on all the time,’ ‘never off.’ Milburn calls them the ‘anxious generation,’ far from lazy and soft. Strip away the British vocabulary, and you are reading a textbook description of hikikomori, a behaviour characterised by extreme social isolation, which Japan has been recording, measuring, and failing to fix for more than two decades. Britain is not facing an unprecedented problem, but a familiar one, dressed up in new labels. And that pretence is proving to be very expensive. 

Coined by psychiatrist Tamaki Saito in 1998, the term has been used in Japan to describe withdrawal from work, school, and social life that lasts six months and longer. A 2021 government survey put the prevalence at 2.3% of Japan’s working-age population, over a million lying outside a workforce the country desperately needs, in an economy already grappling with labour shortages. Scholars have since pointed to the causes: the collapse of the traditional ‘salaryman’ pathway during the 90s bubble economy burst, a surge in non-regular employment, and a culture that prizes tatemae—public facade of harmony— over honne—one’s private reality. All plausible. But all, crucially, not unique to Japan. 

What should worry British policymakers is that each one of these pressures has a British counterpart. 

A horizon of precarious work stretching further out than it ever did for the previous generation—Britain is experiencing this. A broken promise of career stability in return for loyalty—Britain has that too. A generation whose formative years were spent isolated indoors and social life narrowed to a screen, all the while institutions meant to catch them simply weren’t there? Milburn’s review says as much. Britain’s youth have grown up in a digital world that has ‘rewired how they communicate, form relationships, and manage stress.’ The consequences for public life are beginning to show. This is a description of hikikomori, delivered by a former Labour health secretary who has probably never used the term. 

The evidence isn’t purely anecdotal. A 2025 study using the Hikikomori Risk Inventory, the first tool of its kind applied to a British sample, found social withdrawal risk correlating strongly with anxiety and depression alongside compulsive internet use in 63% of respondents. These kinds of alarming figures, however, have been reported in academic journals which  I can only guess that nobody in Whitehall has read them. 

So why might Whitehall have paid little attention to these studies? Because Britain has no vocabulary for what it’s looking for. With hikikomori having no formal status in the DSM-5 nor ICD-11, British clinicians have only folded these representations into respective categories on the ordinary mental health track, namely anxiety, depression, and agoraphobia. All real diagnoses, but all treated in isolation, never as symptoms of an overarching phenomenon. It is impossible to design a national policy response to a phenomenon you have filed under three unrelated categories. Just how many people are being treated for anxiety when what they actually might have is a name Japan invented about twenty-five years ago, which Britain has simply never bothered to consider, let alone import? 

Cultural exceptionalism is a culprit that has done real damage in this case. Treating hikikomori as a mystical, uniquely Japanese pathology doesn’t only misdescribe Japan’s situation; it actively prevents Britain and the West from learning anything from Japan’s head start. Since the upsurge of this behavioural condition, Japan has developed screening tools, a prevalence methodology, and a vocational rehabilitation infrastructure, however imperfect as it currently stands. Britain, meanwhile, is witnessing its own critical spike in anxious young adults and a welfare system with no real idea of what it’s looking at. In treating Japan merely as a cautionary tale, Britain is wasting time it doesn’t have. 

Tackling this phenomenon and its measurable impacts shouldn’t require novel inventions but the will to leverage what already exists as well as a multilateral approach. Britain should look to partner with Japan and other increasingly impacted nations in funding joint research to build upon existing structures such as the Hikikomori Risk Inventory, which are already under way. Rather than continuing to measure this crisis blindly, clinicians and policymakers ought to stop boxing hikikomori-presenting individuals into narrow diagnoses or simply placing them on a benefits programme, as this aids only in treating symptoms without asking what produced them. 

Ultimately, the government’s presentation of this population as a lost and screen-addicted ‘bedroom generation’ should not be treated as an individual failing or an exclusively British puzzle. Instead, we should be investigating these circumstances as a predictable behavioural response to overlapping structural pressures such as precarious labour markets and modern-day hyper-digitalisation, whose prevalence has already started being documented by advanced industrial nations like Japan. 

Japan’s hikikomori crisis is not a one-off cultural curiosity; it is Britain looking at its own future and calling it foreign.

Image: Unsplash/Nima Ahmadzadeh

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