Japan on April 1 enacted a law to prevent loneliness and isolation, problems that affect an estimated 39 percent of the population.
The law positions “loneliness and isolation” as “an issue for society as a whole,” and it obliges local governments to make efforts to establish regional councils comprising support groups for lonely people.
In addition, the central government will train special supporters in each region to help people who are suffering from loneliness and isolation. It will also promote the creation of a database of effective measures taken throughout the country to address the problem.
The law was created out of concern that the problems with loneliness would be aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ISOLATION AND DEPRESSION
A 23-year-old man said the pandemic turned his life upside-down.
Everything was running smooth when he entered a university in 2019, majoring in education.
But after the novel coronavirus spread the following year, all lectures were given online, and the number of assignments he received more than doubled.
He spent most of his time in front of a computer, and there were days when he did not talk to anyone.
The student began feeling sick and would vomit after eating. He lost 5 kilograms in weight.
In the summer of his sophomore year, he collapsed on a train. He was diagnosed with depression by a psychiatrist.
He quit a school club activity and then took a leave of absence from the university.
“When you suffer from depression at a young age, you have nowhere to go,” he said.
He volunteered to help manage a club for depressed people in their teens and 20s.
Although he has become more positive, he said he still feels ill and, at times, cannot go outside for the entire day.
SCARED HER CHILD
A 32-year-old woman in Nagano sometimes could not stop crying while washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Once again, I couldn’t talk to anyone about how I felt today,” she said was a constant thought.
The woman works full time for an insurance company. She and her husband, 35, an employee of a manufacturing company, have young children.
But the mother was almost solely responsible for child care and housework, including cooking, cleaning and laundry.
When her eldest daughter was nursery school age, she insisted on playing at a park, even though it was raining. Despite her mother’s refusal, the girl kept asking and asking.
Finally, the mother snapped. She forced the daughter to come to the door and yelled at her, “Enough!”
The girl bawled and said, “I’m scared.” The mother came to her senses and realized she needed help.
When she asked her husband for advice after he came home from work, he only said, “I’m tired from work,” and went to bed.
When she suggested that they share the household chores, he just brushed it off.
“I feel lonely. I feel isolated,” she said she thought from the bottom of her heart.
WIDE RANGE OF PROBLEMS
Yoshimi Kikuchi, a professor of social security law at Waseda University, chairs a panel of experts who examined the government’s measures for the loneliness issue.
“There are a wide range of problems related to loneliness and isolation, including economic deprivation and the resulting lonely deaths, and the 80-50 problem, where parents in their 80s live together with their shut-in children in their 50s and are socially isolated,” Kikuchi said.
According to a nationwide government survey covering 20,000 people aged 16 and older about their situations in December 2023, 39.3 percent said they felt lonely “often or always,” “sometimes” or “occasionally.”
A comparison by age group shows the working-age population feels more isolated.
Those in their 30s had the highest ratio of lonely people, at 46.1 percent, followed by those in their 20s at 45.3 percent, those in their 50s at 44.5 percent, and those in their 40s at 42.5 percent.
Tomosuke Inoue, a psychiatrist who has dealt with more than 10,000 people suffering from mental anxieties, said, “It is significant that the law has established the principle of dealing with loneliness in all its forms.”
He also said it is difficult to single out one factor that causes loneliness, and many people have problems in multiple areas, such as child rearing, work and poverty.
Inoue urged the government to “consider measures from the viewpoint of how to detect loneliness that is difficult to see.”
(This article was written by Ryuichiro Fukuoka and Yusuke Nagano.)