Chew your way into a new world. Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt again. Self-reinvention is everything. Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging bristles. Don’t get sentimental about your discarded skins.
Amy Gerstler, an excerpt from the poem ‘Advice from a Caterpillar’
Kunihisa Koyama, CEO of Little Ones, a nonprofit supporting single mothers and their children, said the taboo has diminished on some mental health issues women face, such as postpartum depression, but not on others. He attributes that to the government’s concerns about Japan’s declining fertility rate—not about women’s well-being. “Isolation and loneliness are constant for many women, but the government only focuses on what happens during pregnancy,” he said, describing a “compartmentalized” approach to women’s issues. The government can focus on employment, or on motherhood, but “they’ll never take the big picture view of how women are faring in society as a whole.”
It’s no surprise, then, that attention to depression and loneliness has focused primarily on men. The case of hikikomori, extreme recluses who hole themselves up for years at a time, is an example. While surveys indicate that some 70 to 80 percent of hikikomori are men, experts say these numbers exclude many women by overlooking their experiences with social isolation.
In her research, Sachiko Horiguchi, a professor of anthropology at Temple University in Tokyo who studies hikikomori, has increasingly encountered housewives who became isolated after being pushed out of the labor force. In essence, she explained, they become hikikomori, but are never described as such. Women are expected to be at home, handling domestic tasks. Their solitariness is, in a sense, a given. “For men, marriage is a way to break patterns of isolation, whereas for women, it’s a driver of loneliness,” she told me.
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