In this guest post, Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han describes the ideas behind Co-researching with withdrawing subjects in Osaka and Seoul: Towards an urban political ecology of emancipatory metabolism, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Co-researching with Withdrawing Subjects in Osaka and Seoul: Towards an Urban Political Ecology of Emancipatory Metabolism is a collaborative research project running from October 2026 to March 2028, supported by the Urban Studies Foundation’s Urban Urgencies scheme.
Thirty years have passed since hikikomori — Japan’s word for prolonged social withdrawal — came into use. Since then, those who have withdrawn have been met with education, training, treatment, and assistance aimed at returning them to society, and at times with neglect. Yet as budgets grew and programmes multiplied, withdrawal has continued to rise. Nor is it any longer a Japanese phenomenon: severe social withdrawal is now reported in Nigeria, Singapore, the United States, and across the Middle East. Why?
Because support that tries to fit people back into the society they left does not ask what produced their withdrawal in the first place — and so reinforces it.
We approach withdrawal through urban metabolism. Everyday urban infrastructures, from commuting networks to digital platforms, do not only carry water and data. To keep the city running, they continuously extract and exhaust the mental, emotional, and physical energies of human bodies. Bodies are themselves infrastructure — the living substrate of what urban political ecology calls urban metabolism.
Like canaries in a coal mine, withdrawing individuals are the first to sense in their bodies the overload that capitalist urban metabolism produces. Retreating into the room is, of course, a deeply ambivalent choice. It is a refusal the body issues before anything else, and it may open onto a different metabolic process — but it may equally harden into irreversible disconnection, or be resubordinated to the dominant metabolism through the connections that reach into the room, the internet among them.
We set out to document the relations already being assembled within withdrawal, and to ask from them what an emancipatory rather than exploitative urban metabolism might look like. If withdrawal is a signal of metabolic overload, it stands alongside other urban subjectivities pushed out by the same pressures — precarious platform workers, the urban homeless — and becomes a question for cities well beyond East Asia.
The project is co-led by Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han (Saitama University) and Mr Atsutoshi Takahashi, a director of New Start Kansai (NSK), an Osaka-based non-profit whose social withdrawal self-advocacy work spans twenty-five years. Mr Hajime Imamasa, Dr Kazuki Watanabe, Ms Eun Koh, Ms Yoonji Song, and Dr Hyun-Chul Kim join as co-researchers.
Repositioning withdrawing people as producers of knowledge rather than objects of study is the political premise of this research. At least ten participants in each city will take part in shaping the design and interpretation of the work. Our core method is experiential cartography — a participatory mapping of embodied urban experience, sensation, and feeling — adapted to the temporality of withdrawal through asynchronous formats that let each person take part at their own pace.
Fieldwork begins in late 2026. A cross-city dialogue session will be held in Osaka in mid-2027, and public events in both cities in early 2028, alongside two journal articles, a bilingual Korean/Japanese zine, and guidelines for frontline practitioners and policymakers. We will share news as the work develops, and we welcome researchers, practitioners, and support communities who would like to take part. Enquiries: handidi@mail.saitama-u.ac.jp