Meet Britain's hikikomori

There’s one particular family memory that sticks clearly in Claire’s mind, of her son Daniel as a toddler, in mid-2000s Dorset. 

“It was like one of those idyllic holiday days from a TV show,” she recalls. “We’d been on the beach all afternoon. Daniel was having the time of his life, playing in the sand a few metres away from me. I turned around for a minute or two, and when I looked back he was instructing a whole group of other children on how to make a sandcastle.”

There are a few reasons, she thinks, why the memory sticks so clearly — immediately conjuring up the smell of sunscreen, the sound of the waves, the sight of Daniel’s small, chubby hand clutching tightly onto a shiny red spade. 

It was just a funny sight, for one: a ragtag congregation of other people’s sandy children blinking into the sun as they listened intently to Daniel. And it was a great holiday; our brains hold on most strongly to memories we have a positive association with, Claire thinks. 

But, perhaps, most of all, she remembers it clearly because of what came later. 

“It’s almost hard to believe it’s the same boy,” she says now, her voice catching. “The Daniel I know now can hardly look me in the eye, let alone command a whole group’s attention. I don’t remember the last time he actually spoke to anyone outside the immediate family in person.”

Daniel, now 22, still lives with Claire and his two younger siblings in their family home in Somerset. He’s never moved out, but neither have around a third of young men in the UK. He’s not in employment, education or training, but neither are an estimated one million 16-to-24-year-olds around the country. 

So far, so normal.

But what makes Daniel different is his identification with a phenomenon first identified in Japan in the 1990s: hikikomori, literally “pulled inward”, a form of extreme social isolation most commonly witnessed in young adults. The phenomenon has been on the increase in Japan ever since, and it seems to be catching elsewhere — especially in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. 

A 2025 study of hikikomori in the UK identified a number of key characteristics, including staying at home most of the day; avoiding social interactions including school or work; and prolonged isolation for at least six months. Typically, researchers found, it affects people aged 20-27, but can begin as young as 13. It also appears most common in boys and men — a 2022 study found that 76% of its self-selected sample were male.

For Daniel, Claire thinks, it seemed to start when school stopped. He was never a particularly extroverted teenager, but he dutifully trudged the 20 minutes to school each morning without complaint. The latter years of his schooling were disrupted by the pandemic, a stop-start rhythm of lockdowns, school closures and virtual learning with a chaotic blend of online and in-person exams thrown into the mix. Claire feels with hindsight that this must have played a part in what happened next, but at the time she was just relieved when, despite the disruption, Daniel ultimately achieved the results he needed to get into college or university.