The reality behind Japan’s “vanishing phenomenon” and how people disappear
Global media’s obsession with sensationalising Japan into its eccentric, often stereotyped image is reductive. The much-discussed yet decades-old phenomenon of ‘johatsu’ is just one example.
From rental families to islands filled with cats, Japan is fertile ground for global media outlets peddling stories that feed into the idea of exotic “otherness”. Johatsu is another subject to file in this category. To young Japanese, the word means “evaporation” but to an older generation it is a term that was once used for people who voluntarily disappeared from their own lives without a trace. The problem is that foreign media keep rehashing the phenomenon – so is it really still happening?
The term hit public consciousness in 1967 with the release of Shohei Imamura’s film Ningen Johatsu (A Man Vanishes), which told the story of a Niigata salesman’s sudden disappearance. Johatsu came to apply to people who wished to exit a stressful job or an unhappy marriage (wholesale disappearance being preferable to the social stigma of divorce). When Japan’s booming postwar economy stuttered in the 1990s and debts piled up, so too did the prevalence of johatsu.
It seems to reveal something important about the social pressures of life in Japan and its strict privacy laws. But the term, once widely used by the Japanese media, is rarely mentioned today. “When people hear the word, it’s questionable whether they would think of it as the phenomenon of people going missing,” says Hiroki Nakamori, an associate professor at Rikkyo University’s Graduate School of Social Design Studies and an expert on the subject. “It’s a relic of the past.”
The widely cited figure of up to 100,000 people vanishing every year in Japan requires unpacking. This number dropped below 100,000 from the late 2000s (and is now roughly half the number of those who go missing annually in the UK, for example). Almost a third of the “missing” have dementia or other medical conditions. And of those who are reported as gone, 90 per cent are eventually found.
So does our fascination with johatsu derive from a need to pigeonhole Japan or a craving to disappear ourselves? “There is often a narrative that it is taboo but the reason why Japanese people don’t really talk about it is because they’re not familiar with the phenomenon,” says Nakamori. It’s not to say that these disappearances don’t happen in Japan – they do – but perhaps it’s easier to see them as particular to that country, rather than universal to all.
