Is there any way to have Hibernate initialize a mapped class's components, even when the columns underneath are empty?

Your question is strange could you give us more details,?

When you map a component to a class, the mapped component returns null when the component's mapped columns are empty. Here's how the Hibernate documentation explains this:

"When reloading the containing object, Hibernate will assume that if all component columns are null, then the entire component is null. This should be okay for most purposes. "

This is fine in some instances but not when you try to populate or retrieve data from your containing object through a beanwrapper. This is often done in web frameworks such as Spring.

I believe you should have the option to retrieve a non-null component even if the component columns are empty.