Hikikomori: Two Hundred Years of Housework Devalued
Please don't say they ran away. They are preparing.
1. The Person in the Room
In South Korea, up to 540,000 young people do not leave their rooms. That is the upper estimate released by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2023. Japan is further along. The Cabinet Office's 2022 survey estimated 1.46 million "hikikomori" between the ages of 15 and 64—2 percent of that age group. In China, a similar phenomenon is spreading under the name "full-time children" (全职儿女). The names and numbers differ, but three East Asian countries are now facing the same thing.
The names we give these people are many. Hikikomori, eundun-hyeong oetol-i in Korean, social withdrawal in English. The words differ, but all three languages point at the same thing: "a person who has retreated from society." Inside that name, a judgment already lives. "Retreat" means leaving a place where one is supposed to be, and leaving that place means one should be brought back. For the past thirty years, Japanese policy, Korea's belated response, and China's public discourse have all rested on this judgment. Bring the retreated back. Counseling, group programs, vocational training, re-entry support. Thirty years have passed, and the numbers have not fallen. In Japan, the problem has spread from youth to middle age, giving rise to the "8050 problem"—parents in their eighties supporting children in their fifties. If the method were correct, this would not be the result. The method is wrong.
The reason is simple. These people did not run away.
They are preparing. They are preparing for the next stage of life, and that preparation is invisible from the outside. What happens inside the room is not "nothing happening." Recovery is happening. Thinking is being organized. The stamina needed for the next step is being rebuilt. From the outside it looks like doing nothing, but what happens inside is not small at all. The moment we call this preparation "escape," we have already buttoned the shirt wrong at the first hole.
I know this. I was once shut in my room for months because I could not find a job. That period was a considerable kind of pain for me. The sound of family footsteps outside the door, the angle of the sun marking the passing hours, an inbox where no replies came back to the résumés I had sent. There is something you only know if you have been in that room. It is not escape. If one could escape, one would not be in that room. It is when one no longer has the strength even to escape that one stays in the room.
Then a question follows. Since when, exactly, did being at home become such a problem?
2. Since When Has a Young Person at Home Been Abnormal?
Today, when we see a young person at home, we judge reflexively: "That person is not working." This judgment fires automatically. So automatically that we forget it is a judgment. It feels as natural as water flowing downhill. It sounds natural when parents ask their adult children "when will you leave?"; natural when employment gaps on a résumé require explanation; natural when someone in their thirties living with their parents is treated as "a person who has failed to become independent."
But this naturalness itself is strange.
Humanity stayed at home for thousands of years. A young person at home being treated as abnormal is an extremely recent event. A young person in Joseon-dynasty Korea lived at home. Even after marriage, they remained inside the extended family. Leaving one's parents was considered a form of filial failure. European medieval peasant households were no different. It was common for children past twenty to remain at their parents' farm and work there. From ancient China to the early modern period, three generations in one house was the standard, and in Japan, too, until the Meiji restoration it was natural for a young person inheriting the family trade to remain at home.
The way we today read "young person at home = abnormal" would be incomprehensible to the countless civilizations and generations of history. For them, the more natural judgment would have been the opposite: "young person away from home = abnormal." Only when war conscripted them, when debt drove them out, or when a serious family rupture had occurred would a young person leave the house. The sense that it is normal to leave home voluntarily and commute to an unfamiliar building in another city did not exist for most of human history.
So when was this sense manufactured?
When did the home cease to be a workplace, and when did being at home become "doing nothing," and when did domestic labor stop being labor?
3. When the Home Was a Workplace
For thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, the home was not a place to sleep. The home was a place to work. More precisely, it was the place where "all the work of living" happened. This fact is unfamiliar to us now, but it has long been scholarly common sense. The British historical demographer Peter Laslett, in his 1965 book The World We Have Lost, documented what the pre-modern European household looked like. In his terms, the pre-industrial family was not merely a residential unit but a "unit of production." Every family member participated in the same economic activity in the same space, and the home was the center where all those activities converged.
Consider a traditional Korean farmhouse. There was a courtyard, rice paddies, fields. There was a kitchen, a hearth, rows of fermentation jars. There was a stable for livestock, a well for drawing water, a loom for weaving cloth. All of these spaces were the home, and labor took place in all of them. Men mostly worked in the paddies and fields; women in the kitchen and at the loom; but the essential fact is that everyone worked "at home." If a young person was at home, they were automatically inside the labor system. Helping with their father's farming, helping with their mother's domestic work, tending livestock, running errands—whatever it was, they were "a person who works."
Europe was no different. From the 14th to the 17th centuries, the European agrarian economy was organized around the family, and men and women performed their specialized labors in the same space. The British historian Alice Clark, in her 1919 book Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, called this era's household "the family economy." A wife was a partner to her husband, and together they ran the same household enterprise. Brewing beer, baking bread, weaving cloth, milking cows—these activities were not peripheral to the household; they were the central axis of household income.
In this period, "work" and "home" were not conceptually separated. Or more precisely, they did not need to be. The workplace was the home. The phrase "going to work" would have sounded foreign to these people. Work was not something one traveled elsewhere to do. It was something one did right here.
This system collapsed. In an extremely short time, and extremely thoroughly.
4. Two Hundred Years of Housework Devalued
The force that broke it is called the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in England around 1760 and spreading through Europe and North America, this change completely reorganized human labor in two hundred years. And in that reorganization, one thing was decisively demoted. The labor performed at home, that is, domestic work.
The Separation of Space
What happened first was the separation of space. In the craft stage, the artisan's home was also the workshop, and the farmer's home was also the farm. But with the arrival of the factory, things changed. Machines could not be placed inside the home. Enormous spinning and weaving machines, steam engines, and the factories that ran them were installed in enormous buildings separate from the home, and workers had to "commute" to those buildings. For the first time in human history, the concept of "commuting" was born. The strange act of leaving home in order to go work became the norm.
This separation was not merely a spatial change. It split human life into two realms. The realm outside the home and the realm inside. The public realm and the private. The realm of wages and the realm without them. And with this splitting, a hierarchy between the realms emerged.
The Ideology of "Separate Spheres"
Scholars call this hierarchy "separate spheres." From the late 18th century through the 19th, Western society institutionalized the dichotomy of "men in the public sphere, women in the private." Friedrich Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, sharply identified this change. With the rise of capitalism, the home lost control of the means of production, and as a result the home was demoted to a "private and separate sphere," and the labor performed in the home became the object of social devaluation.
What must be noticed is that the amount of domestic labor did not decrease. Cooking was still necessary, cleaning was still necessary, childcare was still necessary. What decreased was the status of domestic labor. Because it did not exchange wages, because it did not register in measurable economic indicators, this labor was pushed out of the category of "real work." The husband who worked in the factory and brought home money became "a person who works," while the wife who worked equally hard at home from dawn to night became "a person who does not work."
This peculiar dichotomy still operates inside our heads. When someone says, "I am not working now; I am staying home to raise my children," we hardly register how contradictory this statement is. Raising children is a twenty-four-hour, high-intensity form of labor, but because it is unpaid, it is removed from the category of work.
Korea's Compressed Two Hundred Years
What the West experienced over roughly two hundred years, Korea went through in thirty to forty. Well into the 1960s, the Korean home was still an agricultural home. There were paddies, fields, livestock. It was a space where family-unit labor occurred. But with the Park Chung-hee government's industrialization policy in full force in the 1970s, the situation changed rapidly. Factories concentrated in large cities, and young people left the countryside to commute to factories in Seoul, Busan, and Ulsan. What the West took two centuries to experience was completed in Korea within a single generation.
Think of a Korean city apartment. There is no paddy in it. No field. No livestock. No courtyard. No loom, no row of fermentation jars. What remains is the kitchen, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner. And even those are increasingly outsourced to restaurants, delivery services, and cleaning services. The apartment is the home with the least productive activity in human history. In such a space, it is only natural that an adult child staying for long hours appears to be a problem. There is no work left. Even if one wanted to do something, there is nothing one can do.
And right at this point, hikikomori hangs.
The Two-Hundred-Year Root of Hikikomori
It is no coincidence that hikikomori first emerged as a social concept in the 1990s. When the Japanese psychiatrist Tamaki Saitō published Shakaiteki Hikikomori (Social Hikikomori) in 1998 and established the concept, Japan had already passed the postwar high-growth period and was facing the collapse of the bubble economy. The memory of the era when the home was a workplace lingered only in the grandfather generation; for the new generation, "work" was "the office outside the home." On this premise, a young person at home became, automatically, "a person not working."
In Korea, public discourse on the isolated-withdrawn youth began later still. Civic organizations started discussing it in the early 2000s; Seoul City enacted the nation's first related ordinance in 2021; and Seoul Youth Gijigae Center, the first dedicated center, opened in 2024. At the central-government level, the first "Support Plan for Isolated and Withdrawn Youth" was announced only at the end of 2023. The policy is barely two years old. Compared with Japan's thirty years, it has only just begun.
Given this lag, hikikomori should be seen not as a phenomenon discovered in 1998 but as a seed planted two hundred years ago now coming into bloom. The seed was planted the moment the home stopped being a workplace. The logical conditions for this problem were assembled the moment the labor left in the home ceased to be recognized as "work." For the two hundred years since, the young person at home has been defined, increasingly, as "abnormal." And the final form of that definition now stands at the door of our time, bearing the name hikikomori.
A Double Devaluation
One more thing must be noted. Housework's devaluation actually has two layers stacked on top of each other. The first layer is devaluation on the grounds of being "unpaid." The second is devaluation on the grounds of being "mostly women's work." These two layers combined and compounded so that housework has been doubly demoted over the past two centuries.
The reason society reacts to a man doing housework with either special praise or special mockery lives here. Praise says "a man has done even women's work"; mockery says "a man has done women's work." Both reactions assume housework is "women's work." As long as this premise remains, a male hikikomori doing housework is not read as "doing something valuable" but as "doing what women do." This is a wrong premise. Even before the Industrial Revolution, the work of men and women was divided, but both divisions were recognized as "work." When a woman brewed beer, made cheese, or wove cloth at home, these were productive activities of the household economy, and her contribution was merely different from a man's farm labor, never rated below it. Housework was demoted to "not real work" only after the Industrial Revolution. As production moved to the factory and "work" came to mean only what was exchanged for wages, the labor left at home was pushed outside the definition. And because that labor was mostly done by women, two layers of devaluation stacked on top of each other. Today's view of housework as "women's work" is not a natural order of gender but a byproduct of a two-hundred-year-old economic structure.
5. From Housework: Starting with the Smallest Step
Then what might we see differently? There is something the person in the room—and the family and the people around that person—can look at differently right now. It is housework.
The Principle of Small Achievements
If you demand something big of an exhausted person, they become exhausted again. This is a long-confirmed principle in psychology. The theory of Behavioral Activation proposed by Peter Lewinsohn in the 1970s offered a way to break the vicious cycle of depression and avoidance through small actions, starting from the bottom. When activity decreases, reward decreases; when reward decreases, activity decreases further—and this loop sustains depression. The way to break the loop is not to wait for great motivation but to perform small actions first. Small action → small reward → slightly increased motivation → slightly larger action. This is how one climbs, step by step.
This principle is being increasingly applied to hikikomori intervention. The Japanese clinical researcher Kubo and colleagues included "small-step approach" as an explicit element of their randomized controlled trial published in Japanese Psychological Research in 2023. The Japanese government's hikikomori support guideline recommends a four-stage approach: family support → individual support → intermediate group training → social participation. A person is not sent back to society all at once but by stairs.
What should be the lowest step of this staircase? Current clinical literature generally proposes "go for a walk," "contact a friend," "visit a counseling center," and so on. But for a person who cannot leave the room, these are still too high. A lower first step is needed.
That first step must be inside the house.
Housework Is the First Step
The lowest thing a person inside the house can start with inside the house is housework. One dish washed, one load of laundry done, one trip to the corner store. One might ask what kind of great achievement this is. But to a person who has spent days, weeks, months in a room, washing a single dish becomes comparable to finishing a marathon. The size of an achievement is not absolute. It is determined by one's current location. Three steps from the bed to the kitchen sink may, for some person, weigh more than climbing Everest.
And this first step matters for one more reason. Housework produces results the eyes can see immediately. You wash dishes and the dishes become clean. You run the laundry and clean clothes come out. You clean the room and the room is clean. This visibility confirms small achievements as "achievements." They are not abstract goals but changes one can verify with one's eyes. The first step out of exhaustion needs exactly this kind of visibility.
What changes when housework accumulates? Daily rhythm returns. The repetition of waking at a fixed time, cooking meals, washing dishes, running the laundry re-synchronizes a disrupted body clock. And the sense of "I did something today" begins, little by little, to accumulate. When this sense accumulates, the next step becomes possible. Going to the convenience store in front of the house. Taking a walk. Contacting a friend. Inquiring about a short-term part-time job. And finally, moving toward work that counts as a social achievement. This is what I mean by "preparation to do the work one truly wants, the work one truly loves." Housework is the lowest starting point for that preparation.
The Device of Parental Compensation
One more step is needed here. Parents should pay compensation for that housework. One can begin with the simple agreement of paying a set allowance on the days housework is done. The amount matters less than the structural fact that a "labor → compensation" relationship has been established.
Why is this necessary? I said earlier that what confirms an achievement as an achievement is the visibility of its result. But that visibility takes two forms. One is the visibility of the result itself (clean dishes, folded laundry). The other is the visibility of social recognition (money, gratitude, praise). When both are present, the sense of achievement holds most strongly. If housework produces no response, it becomes "what one is supposed to do." But if housework is followed by a small financial acknowledgment, it becomes "something I did and received something for."
This mechanism is not merely emotional reassurance. It is a localized restoration of the two-hundred-year historical inversion this essay has traced. If the reason housework was pushed out of the category of "work" was "no wages," then attaching wages is the smallest possible gesture to reverse that push. Pocket money exchanged between parent and child will not change the world economy. But inside one household, it creates the moment in which housework is redefined as "work."
The Case of China
This is not imagination; it is already happening. Since the early 2020s in China, a phenomenon called "full-time children" (全职儿女) has been spreading. Adult children receive a salary from their parents in exchange for handling household chores and family care full-time. The salary varies by region but is typically 4,000 to 8,000 yuan—roughly the level of an average worker's monthly pay. Tasks include cooking, grocery shopping, accompanying parents to hospitals, planning weekend family trips. On the Chinese social platform Xiaohongshu, hundreds of thousands of posts appear under hashtags like "#full-time children."
This phenomenon draws attention from both critics and supporters. Critics see it as a rebranding of the 2000s derogatory term "kěn lǎo" (啃老), "eating the old." Supporters see it as a new form of family care in an aging society. I think both readings are only partly right. The real significance of full-time children lies in this: it is a real-world experiment showing that the redefinition of housework and family care as "work" is possible within a society. If this experiment becomes permanent it becomes problematic, but if it functions as a time-limited period of preparation, it becomes a designable social device.
The Condition of the Industrial Age
One caveat is needed here. All of these proposals presume that we still live in the industrial age. There is no paddy inside the home. No loom for weaving cloth. No stable for raising livestock. Therefore, housework alone cannot sustain an entire life. In a Joseon-era farmhouse, working at home for life was normal, but today's apartment is not a space that allows it. The labor inside the home alone cannot sustainably solve food, clothing, and shelter, nor can it enable the expansion of economic activity.
So housework is the first step, not the last. This point must be clear. This is not a proposal to keep the hikikomori youth permanently at home. It is a proposal to design a journey that starts at home and eventually leaves home. Housework is the starting line of that journey. Once small achievements accumulate at that starting line, the next step begins to show itself. A trip to a nearby store, a small transaction with someone, a daily habit of going out once, a short part-time job, a sustained income activity. Climbing these stairs, eventually, to the point where the person reaches work they truly want to do. That point differs for each person. Some enter a company, some start a small business, some create, some find another path entirely. What matters is the sense of being "on the way." Housework is the device that enables the first step of that being-on-the-way.
When Parental Support Is Absent
This proposal has a clear limit. The preparation period built through housework works only when parents or family can support it economically. In fact, the hikikomori state itself holds only when "someone is paying." When parents cannot support, the young person must eventually go outside. Economic necessity pushes them out.
There is no need to deny this limit. But the limit does not nullify the proposal, for three reasons. First, among Korea's 540,000 isolated-withdrawn youth, a substantial number do in fact live with parents. As a response to that reality, this proposal remains valid. Second, in cases where parents cannot support, the state or local government can take over part of that role. Korea's youth job-search support grants, basic income experiments, emergency livelihood support from local governments are early forms of this direction. Some European countries' family-care allowances share a similar structure. The principle established at the household level has a path of expansion to the social level. Third, and most importantly, the core of this proposal is not "pay money" but "see housework as work." Money is only one form of that recognition. Even if parents lack economic means, a single sentence—"Because you cleaned the house today, mother feels easier"—can partly play the role of confirming achievement. Language can substitute for money.
6. In a Room Two Hundred Years Later
Hikikomori is not a phenomenon discovered in 1998. It is a seed planted two hundred years ago, now revealed before us. The moment the home stopped being a workplace, the person at home began to be redefined as "a person not working." That redefinition pushed housework out of the category of labor, and that pushing made being at home especially shameful for men, and that shame now piles heavily in front of a certain young person's closed door.
Getting them out of the room is not the answer. Seeing the work they are doing in that room as work is the beginning. A single dish washed is labor. A single load of laundry is labor. Humanity lived that way for thousands of years. Only the past two hundred were an exception. The moment we treat that exception as historical normality, a young person's preparation is misread as escape, misreading becomes pressure, and pressure pushes them into a deeper room.
The proposal is one. See housework again as "work." Attach a small compensation to that housework. And together, draw the staircase by which those small achievements lead to larger achievements. At the end of this staircase is the work that the person truly wants to do. Along the way to that work, housework is not evidence of dropping out but evidence of preparing.
If, instead of someone asking "when will you leave the room?", they could ask "what did you prepare today?"—the moment that single phrase changes would be the moment a two-hundred-year-old misunderstanding begins, however slightly, to be undone.
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Seungwon An / Wonbrand / https://wonbrand.co.kr