Biopower: Hikikomori is not mental illness
Ozawa de-Silva’s article analyzing depression and suicide in Japan helps distinguish their differences and establish them as entirely separate entities. It is evident from this article that the depressed and suicidal in Japan are not seeking autonomy from, but are giving themselves up to the pressures acting upon them in society. Ozawa de-Silva references Kitanaka whose “research argues that ‘choice’ is not the same as ‘autonomy’, as choices (such as making a decision how to die) are limited… [and] not separable from social limitations” in order to emphasize that suicide is not an act of social liberation, but of social desperation (Ozawa de-Silva, 521-522). In Japan, suicide is observed to bring about healing from a state of existential loneliness. This depressed status derives from an absence of ikigai, which is “a feeling that one is needed, essential, not merely a nameless cog in the machine that could be replaced without anyone noticing” (Ibid., 534). This sentiment is emblematic of “the cultural nightmare of Japanese [which] is to be excluded from others”; a sentiment that is only a facet of the culture because of sovereign insistence that “interdependence is imperative” and that “individual desire [is] with selfishness or arrogance” (Ibid., 537). The practice of Hikikomori is not only incongruent, but directly undermines the ideals of communal collectivity and belonging propagated by the nation-state. They are communal only in their decision to isolate themselves from the community. Each hikikomori individual is not upset that they could be replaced by another cog in the machine, but that they exist in the machine at all. By removing their body from the social network, they are being the selfish and arrogant citizens antagonized by the nation-state. Thus, the hikikomori prove to be at least seeking agency while the depressed and suicidal prove blind to or accepting of their embeddedness in the circulation of power that is society.