A Country That Appointed a Minister for It

In February 2021 Japan appointed a minister responsible for loneliness and isolation — the second country in the world to create such a post, after the United Kingdom three years earlier. In 2023 the legislature passed a law on it, in force from April 2024.

Governments do not appoint ministers for feelings. They appoint ministers for measured public health problems with costs attached. Which means the state of Japan has formally taken the position that being alone in a way you did not choose is a health matter rather than a personal shortcoming — a position most individual Japanese people have not yet extended to themselves.

This chamber has already made a full defence of being alone on purpose, and nothing here retracts it. The two states get confused constantly and the confusion damages both groups: it shames people who are perfectly well alone into believing they are failing at something, and it hides people who are not well alone behind the assumption that they simply prefer it.

The working distinction is simple and does not require anyone to count their friends. Solitude is a supply of time you have and want. Loneliness is a gap between the contact you have and the contact you want, and it is entirely possible to be lonely in a full house and entirely possible to live alone for years without it. The only person who can tell which one is in the room is the person in it.

Because of a body of work that surprised the field when it appeared. Pooled analyses of very large numbers of people have found social connection associated with mortality at a magnitude comparable to some of the physical risk factors everybody already takes seriously. The careful statement is association rather than proof, and nobody should be promised years of life by a website. But the size of the association is why this stopped being filed under social life and started being filed under public health.

Japan has its own vocabulary for the end of that curve. 孤独死 is an ordinary word here, understood by everybody, requiring no explanation — and a language only produces a ready-made word for something it encounters regularly. Meanwhile single-person households are now the most common household type in the country, which is not itself a problem and becomes one only where everything else is still built for a household of four.

There is a specific local obstacle and it is made of something admirable. 迷惑をかけない — do not impose, do not become a burden — is genuinely one of the better things about this society, and it is a disaster applied to friendship. Because friendships are not built out of balanced exchanges between people who need nothing from each other. They are built out of small asymmetrical requests: can you come, can you help me carry this, can I call you, I am not doing well this month.

A person who has correctly internalised never imposing has quietly removed from herself the entire mechanism by which adult friendship deepens. She will be liked. She will be included, invited, thought well of, described by everyone as lovely. And at eleven at night, sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa after something has gone wrong, she will scroll through a phone full of people and find that there is nobody in it she is allowed to ring. Then — and this is the cruel part, the part that deserves anger — she will take that as evidence about how likeable she is. It is not. It is the arithmetic result of having been an excellent person who never once made a request.

There is an older word here that names the missing thing exactly: 甘え, the permitted dependence on another person’s goodwill. It is treated as slightly childish and it is the load-bearing material of every close relationship anybody has ever had. A friendship in which nobody has ever leaned is a good acquaintance.

This chamber has argued that what gets sold here as 家族 is really three separable goods bundled together: company, touch, and legal-economic partnership. The practical consequence is that a person short of one of them frequently goes shopping for all three, which is why so many people who are simply short of company end up in a relationship, and why so many who are short of touch end up in one too.

So it is worth being precise with yourself about which one is actually short, because the three have completely different suppliers. Company is answered by repetition and proximity — the same people, at the same time, every week, for long enough that nobody has to be interesting. Touch is answered by arrangements that are honest about being arrangements. Partnership is a legal and financial decision that should be made on its own terms, by somebody who is not currently short of the other two and therefore not bidding against herself.

The most useful practical note anybody gives on the first of those: stop looking for the right person and start looking for the recurring slot. Adult friendship in a busy country is not produced by chemistry. It is produced by a fixed weekly or monthly thing that continues whether or not anyone felt like it that day, which is exactly how friendships worked at school and exactly what disappears at about twenty-five.

It is not a friendship, and this house will not imply otherwise in order to sell anything. A friendship is mutual, unscheduled, and involves being needed as well as attended to. Moonlight supplies none of those and should not pretend to.

What it honestly is: one instance of the second good, bought on its own, from someone who is not going to be hurt by the arrangement being an arrangement. Attention, unhurried time, and contact, with nothing owed afterwards. For a person who is genuinely short of touch — which is a real and physical shortage, not a metaphor — that is a reasonable thing to buy, in the same way a massage is. For a person who is short of company, it is the wrong purchase, and this house would rather say so than take the booking.

And where isolation has gone past that — where the days have no one in them at all, or the mood has not lifted for months — the correct addresses are a doctor and the public services that now exist by statute. There is a national framework and there are municipal consultation lines, and using them is not an imposition on anybody. That is what they were legislated for.

A country with a minister, a law, and a ready-made word for dying unnoticed has already conceded the argument on your behalf: this was never a private failure of personality. It is a supply problem, in a society that rebuilt itself around households of four and then stopped having them, and you happen to be standing in the gap. So work out which of the three goods is actually short — that alone stops a great deal of wasted looking. Make the small request you were brought up never to make, and watch what it does to the person receiving it, because being asked is not a burden, it is a promotion. And take the fixed slot over the right person, every single time. The right person turns up inside the fixed slot eventually. They have never once turned up instead of it. If you have gone a long time without anyone to call at eleven at night, nothing about that is a verdict on you — it is a door that was quietly closed by a virtue, and you are allowed to open it again.