In Japan, an adult has no legal way to sever ties with a birth parent. Even so, a growing number of people want to stop all contact and leave everything else, from elder care to the funeral and the burial of the ashes, to someone outside the family. The practice is called kazoku jimai, roughly "closing down the family." Osaka broadcaster Yomiuri Telecasting, reporting on one agency that does this work, says consultations have grown roughly sixfold in four years, and that people in their 20s and 30s now make up 40% of those asking for help.

Paying someone to do the family's job

The News to segment, aired on October 22, 2026, and posted online on November 3, centered on LMN, a general incorporated association. It reported 55 consultations in January to March 2022 and 320 in the same period of 2026. About 80% of them concerned kazoku jimai.

LMN takes on, for a fee, the tasks a family would normally handle: arranging care, being present at the end of life, organizing the funeral. According to the program, registration costs 550,000 yen (about $3,500). Day-to-day support costs 11,000 yen (about $70) per visit of up to about four hours. (Dollar figures use the rate of 158.4 yen to the dollar on November 5, 2026.) On average, clients use it once or 1.5 times a month.

The segment also featured a man in his 60s. Years of conflict with his mother had spilled over into his own marriage, and in the end he moved without telling her his new address and cut contact. Asked if he had regrets, he mentioned that she had raised him, then said that today he thinks it was the right call.

"Oinige": the parent who leaves without apologizing

Who asks for help has changed too. In the past, the program said, the typical client was a child in their 60s or 70s who had spent decades dealing with an overbearing parent or harsh discipline. Now more consultations come from people in their 20s and 30s who describe neglect, emotional abuse or domestic violence. They account for 40% of the total.

Hideki Endo, LMN's representative director, sees a mood spreading through this generation: they won't let their parents get away with oinige. Oinige is not a dictionary word but a term Endo uses. It describes a parent who hurt a child through verbal abuse or control, never admits it or apologizes, and then dies leaving the child nothing but the burden of care.

Still, most clients do not seem to want a clean cut. Speaking to Shukan Josei PRIME in 2022, Endo said that people who want no contact with a parent at all don't even get in touch with an agency. A 2022 article in Bunshun Online likewise reported that requests to hand over everything, care and deathbed included, were a small minority. In the new segment, Endo said that even after a relationship has collapsed, some people still cannot let go of their feelings for the parent.

A bond the law won't cut, a duty it doesn't impose

Under Japanese law, an adult cannot end the legal relationship with a birth parent on their own. Article 877 of the Civil Code says lineal relatives and siblings owe each other support. Leaving a parent's family register, a step called bunseki, does not change that: the parent-child relationship stays on the books, and so does the duty of support.

Yet the duty is limited. According to a Japanese law firm's explainer, a grown child's obligation to a parent is mainly financial, and it does not go beyond what the child can afford. It does not require the child to provide hands-on care.

Government practice has shifted a little as well. When someone applies for welfare in Japan, the local office usually asks relatives whether they can help support the applicant. Since March 2021, Japan's health ministry has said offices need not send that inquiry in cases of abuse, or when the family has had no contact for about 10 years. The earlier guideline was 20 years.

But the tie itself remains. The 2022 Bunshun Online article noted that authorities are set up to contact relatives when something happens, and that simply walking away from a parent's care or death can carry legal risk. When a parent collapses or dies, the call from the hospital or city hall still goes to the child. Clients of kazoku jimai services are paying to fill that gap.

A country that "closes down" things

Japanese already had haka jimai, "closing down the grave," for removing a family tomb. In 2020, Shino Sakuragi applied the same word to the family in the title of her novel Kazoku Jimai, which won the Chuokoron Literary Prize. The word dokuoya, "toxic parent," is said to come from the 1999 Japanese edition of Susan Forward's Toxic Parents (1989).

Japan's aging adds to the pressure. Japan's Cabinet Office says that as of October 1, 2025, there were 36.22 million people aged 65 or older, an aging rate of 29.4%. A 2022 government labor survey found that 106,000 people had quit their jobs in the previous year to care for a family member.

What remains after a child steps away? By a Cabinet Office estimate, 22,222 people in 2025 died alone at home and were not found for at least 8 days. Of them, 15,911 were 65 or older. Not every one of those deaths has anything to do with kazoku jimai. But a child keeping their distance for self-protection and an aging parent with no one checking in can be two sides of the same story. Agencies like LMN are trying to stand in between.

How this differs from "no contact"

Cutting off a parent is not a Japanese invention. For his 2020 book Fault Lines, Cornell University's Karl Pillemer ran a national survey and found that 27% of American adults were estranged from at least one relative, and 10% from a parent or child. A 2022 study led by Ohio State University's Rin Reczek found that 26% of adult children had been estranged from their father at some point, and 6% from their mother. Most of those rifts ended later: 81% of estrangements from mothers and 69% from fathers. In the UK, the charity Stand Alone, which closed in 2024, estimated that more than 5 million people had cut contact with at least one family member. For Japan, we could not find any national count of estrangement between adult children and parents.

In English, the choice is sometimes called going "no contact," and the cutoff itself tends to be framed as the end point. Kazoku jimai seems to reach further. It covers what is left after contact stops: the care arrangements, the funeral, the urn. In a country where the law won't let you sever the bond, adult children are paying for a way not to deal with their parents directly.

Is it abandonment or self-protection? People in Japan are split. Among comments on the article on the bookmarking site Hatena Bookmark, some described cutting ties as a last resort after years of strain, while others worried that "toxic parent" is used too loosely. Where you live, how much distance do adult children keep from aging parents?

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