Johatsu (evaporated)
Every year, around 90,000 people are reported missing in Japan. There is even a Japanese word for the phenomenon: "johatsu", or evaporation. Men are more likely to disappear than women. The main reasons for disappearing are work-related issues, depression, debt, escaping religious cults, stalkers, or oppressive employers, and elopement. Mostly people who vanish do so after a breakdown in family relations, but running away from unscrupulous companies or gambling debts is also common.
They are often driven by shame and hopelessness, leaving behind lost jobs, disappointed families, and mounting debts. Immediately after the bursting of the bubble economy in 1992, the number of people who had a large amount of debt due to their extravagant lifestyle increased during the bubble period, so johatsu was common.
Many who cannot lose the black dog of depression, throw the monkey of addiction from their backs, or buck the horns of sexual impropriety, remove themselves from their communities. They shed their addresses, jobs and families like unwanted costumes; sometimes they changed their names or their faces. These outcomes may stem in part from the well-known phenomenon of karoshi or “death by overwork” (officially there are about 200 karoshi cases each year but one expert estimates the real figure could exceed 10,000.) Faced with a choice of suicide, working to death, or simply vanishing and starting life over, vanishing would seem a better option.
At the same time, society cares less about the "johatsu", considering them losers. These losers can survive in construction trades, brothels, nightclubs, or shady businesses without showing ID. Some people may commit suicide, but finding their bodies there is almost impossible. Others may become homeless.
Japan is claimed by some to have more missing persons than other countries. A cultural prevalence of vanishing, however, is not reflected in the country’s official statistics. In Britain, which has about half the population of Japan, more than 300,000 calls were made to police in 2015 to report a missing person.
There were about 85,000 missing person reports in 2018, according to police reports. A total of 84,753 missing persons reports were filed. Of these, police have located 72,949 people. A total of 3,833 deaths have been confirmed. 7,971 were other. Nearly half (47%) of the missing were found on the same day. 79.9 percent of missing person whereabouts. 79.8% were found within a week. The so-called number of missing persons is about 25,000. Others include missing seniors with dementia and runaway teens. The Missing Persons Search Support Association of Japan (MPS), a non-profit set up to provide support to the families of the evaporated, argues that official numbers reflect under-reporting and are way too low.
Most of them are found or return home, but thousands of others simply vanish. It seems they don't want to be found. Many make meticulous plans for their disappearance and cut all ties with their families to build new lives elsewhere. "Johatsu" seemingly disappear from their existing lives, often due to social pressures, debt, or other personal problems. As a rule, the police usually only allow family members or intimates to file a missing persons report.
The pressure and expectations of Japanese society can be overwhelming for some people. It can lead to shame, isolation, and the desire to escape. The phenomenon of "johatsu" reflects a unique cultural response to these societal pressures. These people often go off the grid, cutting off contact with family and friends, and sometimes even change their identities to avoid being found. This phenomenon has been the subject of several books and documentaries that delve into why it happens and its implications for Japanese society.
The businesses that cater to them are easy to find. Collectively they are called yonige-ya, which translates as “fly-by-night shops.” The act of disappearing is often facilitated by "night moving" companies, which specialize in moving people out of their homes in the dead of night, leaving no trace that they were ever there.
While the johatsu are by definition hard to find, there can be no doubting the unique pressures and alienation felt by Japanese in a society that many would like to disappear from if they could. The phenomenon of "johatsu" was often shrouded in secrecy and mystery due to the associated social stigma and the personal nature of the circumstances leading to the act of disappearance.
Japanese mothers are notorious for kidnapping their children. It happens quite often in Japan and is becoming a social problem. This is not called Johatsu. It is called parental child abduction. However, it comes from the same root as Johatsu. A mother wants to start her life over by disappearing with her child from her father. They face marital problems and choose to run away from them rather than trying to solve them by getting over them.
Hidden worlds are a part of Japanese popular culture as they are anywhere. Elephants vanish and women climb down ladders into parallel realities in Haruki Murakami stories. In Mario games, the titular plumber squeezes through drainpipes into netherworlds populated by angry turtles. The country’s highest-grossing film—an animation feature about a family trapped in a supernatural world—is called Spirited Away.
This is no new phenomenon. Ancient myths of kamikaushi or to be hidden by the gods, were created to make sense of johatsu. In English, to "spirit away" means to remove without anyone's noticing. In Japanese folklore, spiriting away refers to the mysterious disappearance or death of a person, after they had angered the gods. There are numerous legends of humans being abducted to the spirit world by kami. The concept that people who go missing in sacred mountains and forests, or who disappear from towns and villages without warning, are the work of gods. This name has been used since ancient times, but it is still used today to refer to sudden disappearances. It is also called tengu-kakushi.
Since before the Jomon period , the existence of Japanese gods and spirits has been believed . It is considered to be the boundary between the eternal world and the ghost world) and the real world (the real world in which people live), and shimenawa was put up as a barrier and forbidden grounds were set up so that divine spirits that bring misfortune could not easily come and go . . This is the same for humans, because it was thought that they would not enter the divine realm, which is also the world after death, by mistake. Until the middle of the Meiji period, and sometimes even after that, children suddenly disappeared for unknown reasons in the springtime, when the farmers were busy harvesting wheat. In fact, it is thought that the reasons for the disappearance were various, such as running away from home, kidnapping , mental disorder, and accidental death.
Kami-kakushi refers to the sudden loss of sight of a child. It is most common in children, but in adults it is seen in pregnant women and in men and women who are sickly or have an abnormal psychologic state. It used to be common in farming villages, that they had been kidnapped by a long -nosed goblin. The "gods" of kami-kakushi are not only the abstract so-called old Shinto gods enshrined in Kannabi, Shinto shrines, rock seats, etc., but also mountain gods, mountain witches, and demons as representatives of folk beliefs ( old Shinto ) represented by Tengu, a hidden god. The tengu says he likes children and takes them with him to fly in the sky and across rivers. Amulets were set up as barriers to prevent people from going back and forth between the present world and the eternal world.
A culture that encouraged kamikaze missions for the greater good will never understand why the evaporated have chosen to walk away from it all.
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