In February 2021, the Japanese government decided that loneliness was a matter of state.

The decision took a specific form. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga did not build a new department. He handed the loneliness and isolation brief to Tetsushi Sakamoto, a sitting cabinet minister who was already responsible for regional revitalisation and for the country’s falling birthrate, and set up a small Office for Policy on Loneliness and Isolation inside the Cabinet Office to carry the work. Japan became the second country to place a minister over the problem, after the United Kingdom created its own such post in 2018.

We are writers, not clinicians, and what follows is reading and observation rather than guidance. At the time, the title was treated mostly as a curiosity. The question underneath it is harder. What does a government actually do when it names a private feeling as public business?

Loneliness is an interior condition. It is not a virus, a shortfall in a budget, or a bridge that has failed inspection. A state can measure it only by asking people how they feel, and reach it only indirectly, through the conditions around a person. That gap, between what a government can touch and what it is trying to reach, is the real subject here.

What actually prompted it

In early 2021 the government pointed to something immediate. Suicides had risen sharply during the pandemic, in an unusual pattern.

A study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that suicide in Japan fell by about 14 per cent during the first wave of the pandemic, from February to June 2020, before climbing 16 per cent through the second wave, from July to October. That rise was not evenly spread. Among women it ran to 37 per cent, and among children and adolescents to nearly half.

The scale registered in a single month. Japan reports suicide data promptly, and in October 2020 the monthly figure reached 2,153, which was more than the country’s total recorded COVID-19 deaths for the year to that point, as CNN reported at the time. Women’s suicides that October ran roughly 83 per cent above the same month a year earlier, against about 22 per cent for men.

When Suga assigned the brief, his instruction to Sakamoto, as reported then, pointed directly at the rising suicide rate among women. In its origins the loneliness office was a response to mortality data.

That is not to say the post appeared from nowhere. An opposition party, the Democratic Party For the People, had pressed the chief cabinet secretary on loneliness and isolation in December 2020, within its proposals on the pandemic, as documented by the Japan NPO Center. The template already existed abroad, in the British post created in 2018. The pandemic’s contribution was urgency, and a death toll that made deferral impossible.

The longer background

None of this arrived without precedent. Japan had been describing the shape of the problem for half a century, though mostly through journalism and public unease rather than a settled body of policy science.

The word kodokushi, usually translated as lonely death, describes a person who dies alone and is not found for a long time. Terms of this kind began appearing in Japanese newspapers around 1970, as the country recognised it was ageing, and welfare bodies were running surveys on isolated deaths as early as 1973. Research at Ritsumeikan University that traced this coverage found it intensified after the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, when survivors moved into temporary housing and lost the neighbourhood ties they had relied on.

The idea reached a wider audience in 2010, when the public broadcaster NHK ran a documentary series on what it called muen shakai, a society without ties.

The phrase stuck.

It named a worry many people already held about a country where more households were single, more men were reaching old age unmarried, and the company and the extended family, the two institutions that had organised much of postwar social life, were both thinning out.

So the “decades of warning” often attached to this story is real, but its character is worth stating plainly. It was carried by reporters, broadcasters, welfare workers and demographers, all describing a change people could feel happening around them.

What a ministry can and cannot do

The office did not stop at the appointment. In December 2021 it launched an annual national survey to measure how many people felt lonely and under what circumstances, using both direct questions and the UCLA Loneliness Scale, an instrument developed in 1978 that asks around the feeling rather than naming it. In 2023 Japan passed the Act on the Advancement of Measures to Address Loneliness and Isolation, which took effect in April 2024 and is often described as the first national law of its kind to cover a whole population. It placed a coordinating body under the prime minister and asked local governments to build their own support networks.

That is a substantial apparatus. What it has not done, so far, is move the number it was built to change.

The Cabinet Office survey found that the share of people reporting some degree of loneliness was 36.4 per cent in 2021, rose to 40.3 per cent in 2022, and has since settled near 39 per cent, sitting at 39.3 per cent in the most recent published results. The law took effect and the figure stayed where it was. For now, the measurement is too uncertain to call that a failure. But it suggests how stubbornly a feeling spread across a population resists the tools that work on a road or a subsidy.

The measurement problem

This is where the Japanese case becomes interesting beyond Japan. Isolation is one of the few human conditions we study most closely at the extremes, in the small literatures on long-duration spaceflight and on the crews who overwinter at Antarctic stations, precisely because those settings strip social life down to something observable. A whole society is a different scale of the same question, and it turns out to be far harder to see clearly.

Part of the difficulty is definitional. In its December 2022 survey, when the Cabinet Office asked people directly whether they felt lonely, about 60 per cent said rarely or never. When it asked indirectly, whether they felt left out, or lacked anyone to turn to, that share fell to around 50 per cent, a gap of about ten points from the wording alone. The same person answers differently depending on the wording, and on the day. The World Health Organization’s commission on social connection made the point in 2025 that there is still no agreed instrument for measuring this across countries, which is a plain way of saying that everyone working on it is partly working in the dark.

Japan’s contribution, in our reading, is an honest experiment run in public. The country now holds the most consistent long-term record of a national mood that anyone has, and that record shows the mood barely shifting while the machinery around it grows.

If any of this is describing something heavier in your own life, an article is not the place to take it. In Japan, the TELL Lifeline offers free, anonymous counselling in English on 03-5774-0992, and readers elsewhere can find local crisis lines through Find a Helpline. A doctor or counsellor will be more use than a policy story.

What stays with us is the modesty the episode enforces. A government can name loneliness, fund an office, pass a law, and count the result every year, and still find the figure sitting almost exactly where it began. That is worth doing. It is also the edge of what a state can reach.