I saw a post here asking about this and it’s the first time I heard it
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I don’t know much about or its origins, but essentialy consist in a person retiring in their bedroom, with closed shutters, no social interaction and the only light it’s usually only from the person’s pc.
Young people voluntarily living as shut-ins, not leaving the house. Therefore not having in-person social contact, romantic relationships/kids, or stable mental health.
You’re probably better off just searching that term for it if you want any more “why / how” info but here’s why people care: It’s obviously bad for the person who is shutting themselves off, but Japan cares as a country because it’s also bad for the country’s already dangerously-low-and-falling birth rates. Japan’s population is already not having even a self-sustaining number of kids, and also doesn’t want to allow more than a tiny amount of immigrants. That’s a bad combination, and way worse if young adults are increasingly swearing off all human interaction in favour of being bedroom hermits.
As other people explained it already, shut ins, but to the extreme….. It’s not something to be made light of
Adding to other comments, Japan has a pretty unique culture of “family being a part of you”, and as such you are often judged by society on acts that your biological family members make as much as your own, and that’s a major enabler for the hikikomori phenomenon – while the main reason why people shut themselves in is unrealistic social pressures that current Japanese society puts on young adults, the “family culture” allows them to escape from those pressures by becoming shut-ins – having someone get thrown out of their house often makes everyone, like neighbours of that family or even coworkers, look at them down as in “their family stands out” or “their son is a looser and they don’t want to help him, so they are bad people”, so instead of throwing them out like what would probably happen in other places in the world a lot of parents just allow their kids to sit in their home without contributing because they are afraid of being ostracized from the local community.
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