Are the Japanese Really the Loneliest People in the World?

“Japanese people are the loneliest in the world.”
It’s a phrase that often appears in international surveys, in news headlines, or in candid remarks from foreigners.

Recently, during a conversation with a Ukrainian friend, she told me: “Japanese people don’t say what they really think. That kind of culture leads to loneliness.” At first, her words sounded reasonable.

And yet, something about that explanation didn’t sit right with me.

This is where we need to pause and ask: what do we actually mean by loneliness?
In sociology, researchers distinguish between social isolation and subjective loneliness. The first refers to an objective lack of social contact. The second refers to an inner emptiness that can persist even when surrounded by others. In other words, you can live with family and still feel lonely, or live alone and not feel lonely at all.

Most of the tools used to measure loneliness, however, were developed in the West.
The UCLA Loneliness Scale in the United States, or the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale from the Netherlands, both focus on the absence of close, intimate relationships. But the very definition of intimacy differs greatly across cultures. In Western societies, sharing emotions through words is considered proof of connection. In Japan, by contrast, feeling at ease in silence is often taken as a sign of trust. From this perspective, simple numerical…