The Men Who Choose to Disappear

Greetings from The Underground,

There’s something that I think has crossed all of our minds at one point or another…

Imagining just leaving.

Not dying or some mental health morbidity. Nothing about abandoning the people you love or starting over. You just imagine what it would feel like to step outside one morning, keep walking, and become unreachable.

No phone calls, no emails, no texts, no bills waiting in the mailbox, nobody asking where you are or what you need to do tomorrow… whether you remembered to feed the pets or did the thing you promised you wouldn’t forget.

That’s usually where the fantasy ends.

We go to work, answer the text, pay the utility bill, feed the dog… Whatever crisis convinced us that a remote beach with no cell service sounded like paradise passes and we return to the bullshit obligations that constitute our ordinary lives.

But every year, some people keep walking.

In Japan, they have a name for that. Jōhatsu.

The word literally means evaporation. Over time it’s been associated with people who deliberately disappear from their own lives. They leave marriages, jobs, families, debt, apartments, and sometimes entire identities behind. They aren’t fugitives and most haven’t even committed a crime. Nobody kidnapped them. They just decided that being the person they had become was no longer tolerable.

Some disappear because a marriage collapsed. Others lost a job or accumulated so much debt they couldn’t repay it. They might have experienced humiliation they couldn’t face. Sometimes they’re escaping abuse or collapsing underneath social expectations they’ll never meet.

A lot of times the reason is only known by the person who left.

An entire clandestine industry has developed around the phenomenon. Yonige-ya or “night moving” companies, help people quietly pack their belongings, leave their homes, and relocate somewhere they’re unlikely to be found.

Imagine making that phone call to a moving company, not because you bought a house or found a new job, but because you want your old life to stop knowing where you are.

There’s something unsettling about jōhatsu because the instinct behind it isn’t as crazy as we might want to believe. Most people will never disappear. They don’t abandon their families and change their names before they wake up in another city where nobody knows who they used to be. But ask someone who has been overwhelmed by debt, grief, responsibility, failure, anxiety, work, relationships, or the relentless accumulation of regular problems whether they have ever thought about running away from everything…

They’ll almost certainly tell you “yes.”

Which raises another question other than why some people disappear…

Why do so many of us understand that feeling?

There’s a burden that comes along with being a human… being known.

Every person in your life carries a version of you around with them. You’re your parents’ child. To your partner, you’re the person who is supposed to answer the phone. You’re a slave to your employer most times. And to your friends, you’re a collection of memories.

Eventually, an identity becomes something other people expect you to maintain. Psychologists describe this with the concept of role strain: the stress that develops when the expectations attached to our societal roles become difficult to satisfy. People occupy several roles simultaneously and each comes with obligations. Those obligations rarely coordinate with one another.

Your employer doesn’t care that your marriage is falling apart. Your mortgage company doesn’t give a damn if you’re grieving. Your children don’t stop needing breakfast because you’re depressed. The utility bill doesn’t go away because you’ve reached the emotional limit of what you can handle.

Life keeps demanding that you perform these roles even when the person you are underneath is exhausted. That might help explain why fantasies about disappearing become strongest when we’re dealing with overwhelming stress. The fantasy creates a world without expectations… If nobody knows where you are, nobody can ask things from you… If they don’t know your history, they can’t remind you of your failures… and for someone overwhelmed by responsibility or the anxiety of regular life, that can sound less like abandonment and more like silence or peace of mind.

There’s another psychological concept that explains the appeal. Researchers studying human motivation have recognized the importance of perceived control. People tend to tolerate difficult circumstances better when they believe they have some ability to influence what happens next. The opposite, feeling trapped inside those circumstances you can’t change, can produce immense psychological distress.

That’s why two people experiencing similar hardships can experience them differently. One sees choices, the other sees walls closing in. When enough walls appear at once, the mind begins to search for doors. Sometimes they’re imaginary ones, sometimes they’re a cabin in Montana. A beach where nobody knows your name, or a one-way ticket purchased without telling anyone. A new phone number. A different city. Twenty million dollars and an island in the middle of nowhere.

Most people who entertain those fantasies aren’t actually planning an escape. They’re not secretly packing a suitcase or researching countries without extradition treaties. Tomorrow morning they’ll wake up, make coffee, answer their messages, and continue living the same life they were yesterday.

The fantasy itself serves another purpose. For a few minutes the mind gets to imagine having some sort of control again. But there’s a distinction there because the desire to disappear is sometimes interpreted as a desire to die. They can overlap in some circumstances, but they’re not the same thing. One fantasy is strikingly alive… You picture yourself somewhere else, you imagine the house, you smell the ocean, you can see yourself waking up without an alarm and walking somewhere where no one recognizes you.

You still want breakfast, music, books, and dogs. You want sunlight and those stupid television shows or whatever else makes being alive wonderful. You don’t want life to end, you just want this version of life demanding so much from you.

That’s why disappearance occupies such a strange place in our imagination. It offers something ordinary life never allows us to experience: the possibility of becoming free from our own biography… because wherever we normally go, we bring our history with us. Our identities accumulate weight because they accumulate history. People begin wondering what it would feel like to put it all down.

For most of us, the answer remains safely in our imagination.

For the jōhatsu, it doesn’t.

They walk through the door.

Disappearing sounds easier in theory than it is in practice.

You can turn off your phone and delete your social media accounts. You can pack a suitcase and leave your apartment, but eventually you’re going to need somewhere to sleep. You need money, food, and work. Every ordinary necessity of life creates another opportunity for the world you left behind to find you.

This is where jōhatsu becomes stranger than the fantasy surrounding it. If you have enough money, there are people who will help you disappear. The yonige-ya’s clients include victims escaping abusive partners or stalkers, or debts, broken relationships, families, failed businesses, or lives they no longer think they can endure.

Possessions are removed and transportation arranged. A new apartment might be secured far enough away that an accidental encounter is almost impossible. Depending on the circumstances, the person being moved probably won’t tell anyone where they’re going.

Then the morning arrives. Your co-worker doesn’t show up. Your spouse realizes there are clothes missing. The parent calls a phone number that’s been disconnected. Someone starts to look for a person who has made a deliberate decision not to be found and it creates one of the most bizarre aspects of voluntary disappearance… being missing isn’t a crime.

An adult has the right to leave.

Unless police have a reason to suspect a crime, immediate danger, or some other circumstance requiring intervention… a person who walks away from their life occupies a different category from someone who has been abducted or forcibly disappeared.

Japan also has strong protections surrounding personal information, which makes it difficult for ordinary people to simply search government records and discover where another adult has moved. The result is a space where a person can remain alive, sometimes a few hours away from the people searching for them, while becoming difficult to locate.

Disappearing is only the first problem though… You have to remain disappeared. That means avoiding the people who knew you. Working jobs that don’t draw attention while living somewhere inexpensive. You must give vague answers when new acquaintances ask where you’re from or why you moved there. You have to understand that even contacting an old friend can reopen the door you worked so hard to close.

Slowly, the fantasy starts to look different. From the outside, disappearing seems like absolute freedom. You don’t have any expectations or responsibilities. No history. But freedom purchased by making yourself impossible to find carries its own cost. Eventually you might discover that anonymity and loneliness are very similar.

You escaped everyone who needed something from you, but you also escaped everyone who would have noticed if you didn’t come home.

You can disappear from your life without ever managing to disappear from yourself.

The hard thing about starting over is that eventually it stops being a new beginning.

It becomes Tuesday.

The room you disappeared into has to have the rent paid. The groceries still need to be bought. The job you found becomes one you don’t really want to go to. You get tired and sick. The neighbors start recognizing you… Eventually, even a new life becomes an ordinary one. That’s the part of disappearing that doesn’t survive the fantasy.

When we imagine running away, we tend to imagine the moment immediately after. The first morning, the hotel room in a city where nobody knows us, the coffee shop where nobody recognizes you. The lightness of realizing that, for the first time in years, there is nowhere we are supposed to be.

We never imagine the 400th morning.

Some of Japan’s disappeared end up living in the margins of society by taking informal, low-paying work, and settling in places where anonymity is easier to maintain… Others build something resembling an ordinary life again. But even successful disappearance creates a contradiction. To be free from your old identity, you have to surrender what came with it: the people you loved, the friendships, the photographs, the familiar streets. No more person who knows exactly what you mean when you mention something from fifteen years ago. No more calling your mom on her birthday.

The freedom to disappear comes with the obligation of remaining gone and that liberation becomes another kind of confinement.

A person who leaves because they felt trapped by expectations discovers that their new life contains a different set of restrictions. They have to be careful about who they trust. They avoid old neighborhoods and hesitate before reconnecting with someone they miss. Even nostalgia becomes dangerous.

Human identity isn’t something we construct by ourselves, we build it socially. We understand who we are through the people who remember who we’ve been. Parents, friends, coworkers, and lovers become archives of our existence because they carry pieces of our history that we couldn’t reconstruct even if we wanted to.

Disappear from all of them and something unexpected happens… You get the freedom to become anybody, but you also lose the people who helped you know who you were. Then there’s another problem waiting in your new life, you’re still there. Whatever part of yourself you hoped geography would erase climbed into the passenger seat without asking your permission.

Psychologists have long understood that avoidance can provide short term relief. Remove yourself from whatever produces fear or stress and the nervous system rewards you almost immediately while the anxiety decreases. That relief can be powerful. It can also trick you into thinking something dangerous: that escape worked.

The next time the distress appears, leaving becomes even more attractive.

It doesn’t mean leaving is always wrong… There are lives that people genuinely need to escape, like an abusive home. A dangerous relationship… Sometimes the healthiest thing a person can do is walk through a door and never return. But there’s a difference between escaping a dangerous environment and trying to escape your own existence.

Geography is incredibly bad at accomplishing the latter. You can move from Tokyo to Osaka. New York to Montana. Denver to some imaginary island… For a while, everything feels different. Then one morning you wake up, stare at an unfamiliar ceiling, and realize the person you were trying to get away from made the journey with you.

That’s the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath the fantasy. Sometimes we don’t want another life. We want relief from the one we’re already living, and those aren’t the same thing.

That’s probably why the fantasy of disappearing is so universal.

Most of us don’t want to become somebody else or abandon the people we love or erase the thing that came before. We just want the weight to become lighter. We want the phone to stop ringing and the problem we can’t solve to resolve itself. We want one morning where nobody needs anything from us and there isn’t something terrible waiting around the corner.

The jōhatsu take that desire farther than most of us ever will. They walk away and discover whatever waits on the other side.

The rest of us stay.

We answer the phone and pay the bills. We feed the dog. We wake up tomorrow and continue to carry lives that feel heavier than we know how to hold.

Maybe the fantasy was never about disappearing at all.

Maybe we just want the world to let us put everything down once in a while…

And then we’re ready to pick it back up.

Until next time,

Evan.