Japan: A Great Refusal?

I can't quite figure out whether to file this one under "Japan" or "Testosterone Poisoning" or just "Marketing Hype," but Michael Zielenziger's Shutting Out the Sun sketches an arresting picture of a generation hikikomori--young people (mostly men) in Japan who simply turn off, tune and drop back, typically to the spare bedroom. They aren't (that is to say) street thugs or party animals or obsessive gamesters--they re just Japanese Bartelbys, declaring "I should prefer not to." (wonder how that sounds in Japsanese?).

Zielzinger was a foreign correspondent in Japan for a while and for all that appears, a pretty good one. He (or is agent) is smart enough to realize that one more account of Sport and Travel in the Far East is not likely to fly off the bookracks. There is thus an inevitable tendency to suspect that he is overselling to grab shelf space, but maybe not: there is a Wiki page on hikikomori with a fair number of independent references, i.e., not just echo-chamber cites back to Zielenziger himself. But then, the independent references do not inspire total confidence. For example, we have here a citation to one Tamaki Saito, a psychologist who is said to have coined the term, and to have estimated that it afflicted 20 percent of all male adolescents, or one percent of all Japanese society--a number he later admitted he pretty much spun out of his own gizzard. There is also, I suppose, the related problem of defning when something becomes a "pathology:" hikikomori may belong beside Asperger Syndrome, where it is not at all easy to distinguishs the truly afflicted from the merely seriously annoying (e.g., my colleagues at a faculty meeting, or the Buce family at a holiday dinner).