Serial Solitudes: Exploring Loneliness in Japanese Discourses and Screen Culture

My research on loneliness starts from the assumption that loneliness is not only an individual psychological experience, but also a socially and culturally shaped phenomenon articulated through different forms of knowledge. I therefore combine two forms of discourse analysis: scholarly debates on loneliness and audiovisual representations in films and television series. Taken together, they offer a broader understanding of how loneliness is conceptualized, represented and socially negotiated. The project Serial Solitudes: Audiovisual Cultures of Loneliness and Belonging in Contemporary Japan transfers this approach to Japan by bringing Japanese scholarly discourses into dialogue with audiovisual worlds of solitude, withdrawal and belonging.

The presentation introduces the project at an early stage and uses the Study Group to discuss its methodological design. A key challenge is gaining systematic access to Japanese vocabulary and literature on loneliness without reducing the field to familiar concepts such as hikikomori or kodokushi. To address this, a source-based text-mining workflow supported by language models is being developed around sixty Japanese books, supplemented by Japanese translations of influential Western works. The digitized texts are systematically processed and incorporated into a structured database, allowing relevant passages, concepts, recurring patterns and connections to be identified across the corpus and subsequently checked against their original sources. The presentation will outline the workflow, show preliminary examples, and invite discussion of its possibilities and limitations.