Withdrawal syndrome.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged

When I was four or five, I was fascinated by sporadic National Geographic stories of the lone Japanese soldier emerging from some island jungle to surrender years after the war was over. He's squinting into the sun, waving a tiny shred of white, frail but proud in the immaculate tatters of his uniform. I was so embarrassed for him. It's painful to be the last to know.

Full disclosure: In this era of Oprahokayed emotionally redemptive "truth," and given my unreliable memory, perhaps it was not National Geographic but a scene from the movie Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison that I rented from Netflix. I don't know.

Jogging this memory, though, was the new phenomenon of hikikomori, a Japanese word meaning withdrawal. Ironically, the withdrawal syndrome is finally coming out of the closet in Japan. Given the media tendency toward laziness and its attendant swarming, many stories about this phenomenon of withdrawal have appeared recently. No telling if it is as catastrophic as it is portrayed.

It certainly must be for the parents of the (mostly) boys who in their teens retreat to their rooms for years at a time, occasionally venturing out to the convenience store for a to-go bento box if their parents are trying last-ditch tough love and are no longer leaving meals outside their bedroom doors. Experts in hikikomori posit that the condition is caused by a combination of Japan's sagging economy, job insecurity, parental and school pressures, declining birthrates, and feelings of humiliation.

Equally fascinating is the role of the "rental sister." After a distraught parent telephones a hikikomori help line, these women are dispatched as outreach counselors to the boy's home to try to coax him out of his self-imposed exile. The rental sisters, who sound like distant cousins of comfort women, have more success than the...