Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han, Mr Atsutoshi Takahashi
Funding period: 1 October 2026 – 31 March 2028
Type of funding:
Urban Urgencies
Award Number: USF-URU-260705
Partner organisations: Centre for Multicultural Collaborative Learning, Saitama University (Japan), New Start Kansai (Japan)
Investigators: Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han, Mr Atsutoshi Takahashi
Team members: Mr Hajime Imamasa (Independent Researcher), Dr Kazuki Watanabe (Mie University), Ms Eun Koh (Independent Researcher), Ms Yoonji Song (Seoul National University)
Contact: Dr Didi Kyoung-Ae Han
Abstract:
Social withdrawal—severe, prolonged social isolation often lasting many months or years—was once thought to be uniquely Japanese, but has since emerged as a shared urban phenomenon across many societies. Public responses still tend to treat it as an individual psychological problem, and an urban studies perspective has been largely absent. This project asks what happens if we understand withdrawal instead as a signal about the city itself.
Drawing on Urban Political Ecology, the project reframes the city as a “metabolic” system that continuously draws on people’s mental, emotional, and physical energies to keep functioning. From this angle, those who withdraw can be understood not as failing individuals but as sensing—somatically, in the body—the overload this system produces. The research explores how withdrawal has emerged in two East Asian cities, Osaka and Seoul, how state institutions have responded, and what alternative, peer-led practices withdrawing people and their support networks have quietly built in each place.
Grounded in more than a decade of dialogue with New Start Kansai, an Osaka-based non-profit supporting withdrawing individuals, and a peer support network in Seoul, this is a collaborative co-research project. It treats withdrawing people themselves as knowledge producers rather than research subjects. At least ten participants in each city will help shape the research through accessible, asynchronous methods—written reflection, journaling, and online exchange—designed to accommodate the realities of withdrawal. A participatory “experiential mapping” approach is used to make visible the bodily and emotional experience of the city, and the practices assembled in response.
By comparing Osaka and Seoul, the project seeks a shared language for a more humane and less exhausting urban life. Its outputs include two peer-reviewed journal articles, practice-oriented guidelines for social welfare professionals and policymakers in Japan and Korea, a bilingual Korean–Japanese zine co-produced with support communities, and public events in each city bringing together researchers, practitioners, and community members. Together these aim to move from diagnosis toward alternative urban infrastructures that allow exhausted bodies to remain in, and reconnect with, the city.