Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

Well, it's just a fiction so you can't expect it to be super realistic either, but it gives insights as to why the main character ended up this way. I don't think it replaces a proper study of the phenomenon but it's a good place to start with to become acquainted with the everyday life of these people.

On this topic, I recommend to watch a movie called Tokyo [1]. It's in fact 3 short films. One of them is about Hikikomori. Very well done indie series.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976060/

There are degrees of isolation. Paul Graham talked about suburbs being a place designed to raise children. He said that as you grow older a suburb starts to seem fake. Another reason suburbs seem fake is their demographics. A place designed to raise children will primarily have children in it. After a certain age it is no longer acceptable to talk to kids as equals. You bite your tongue and talk in a sing song voice or risk the ire of parental suspicion. In their eyes anyone who would want to talk to a child is a pedophile or other bogeyman.

You have friends who grow up with you. A few generations of teens live in your town at best. Should they not enjoy your company you are SOL. Adults are suspicious of your youth, energetic youngsters scare them. They are held to the same sort of rule about talking to children except to them you are a child. That in mind it should not be hard to imagine how you end up a social pariah in the Americas.

You know there is somebody else out there just like you. You will never meet them because they are inside just like you. The large pool of bored kids that hang out on IRC and talk about whatever it is other kids talk about has dried up. Twitter is not a replacement. Facebook is not a replacement. Those services are localist. They focus on the people you know in your town.

When you have nobody to talk to books become your conversation partners. Stacks of them in a sort of personal library. What F. T. Marinetti called "Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know.". You start to hate yourself for not reading them. You start to hate yourself for reading them. You desperately want to talk about what you are reading yet you know it is boring and nobody wants to listen.

The loneliness starts to break you. It eats away at your sanity. You start daydreaming of smashing the monitor that glows against your face in the night. Throwing the books from piles into the walls their pages slamming into drawers and dressers. Pages litter the floor as you step forward to the CRT television and knock it from the stand. Blood trails behind your step as the glass cuts your feet coagulating into a pool around you. Sitting in the fetal position against the wall of that destroyed room looking up at the face of your shocked mother.

"Son, I think you need to see a doctor." she says in an almost whisper.

"I know" you whisper back.

I don't know, it seems to me that in the Western world, parents try to talk to their kids, or try to go counselling or something. It does not always work but they are not usually passive about it. In Japan there is virtually no dialog - probably because there is so much respect for the "private sphere" of the individual.

That's also why in Japan you never have "deep" discussions with anyone. All the stuff you talk with people is very, very superficial. Or maybe its just my impression.

Well, it's pronounced "Hee-day" to be fair.

But yeah, ironic.