Tune Out, Stay In.(Japanese youth suffering social withdrawal)(Brief Article)

In 1997 Haruo resigned from the gas company and stayed in his bedroom for three years. "I closed the rain shutters and listened to music," he says. "I didn't know if it was day or night." Another recluse, a chatty 29-year-old, passed the national bus driver's exam three times but can't muster the courage to sit for an interview. "How," he frets, "should I explain the five-year gap in my resume?"

Both men, patients at a pioneering psychiatric hospital outside Tokyo, share a uniquely Japanese malady. Called hikikomori, or social withdrawal, the ill-defined but debilitating syndrome afflicts as many as 1.2 million young people--seven in 10 of them male. Symptoms include agoraphobia, paranoia, aversion to sunlight and severe anxiety; sufferers become antisocial in their teens or 20s and spend months or years holed up in their bedrooms. "They see themselves as ugly. They think they smell," says Tamaki Saito, who runs the outpatient program at Sasaki Hospital in Chiba. "They fear that they're being watched by neighbors, so they cover windows with curtains or black paper."

Hikikomori is a baffling public-health problem, one that has grown to epidemic proportions in Japan. Many Japanese associate the disorder with pathological teenage criminals--an impression etched by a string of headline murders perpetrated by juvenile loners since the mid-1990s. That view fans public hysteria and masks hikikomori's true breadth. Scholars first noticed the condition in the 1970s, and many now believe that victims have accrued largely untreated since then. Published in May, the Mental HealthCenter for Young People found that most victims are in their 20s and 30s, and that a significant number (nearly 8 percent) have been hiding away for more than a decade. And if experts debate most aspects of hikikomori, they agree on an essential point: it's getting worse.

Japan's teen troubles first appeared inside the classroom when truancy skyrocketed in the 1970s. Scholars rushed to explain the "school refusal" phenomenon. One of them, a prominent psychiatrist named Hiroshi Inamura, claimed to have discerned a mental disorder he called "apathy syndrome." In 1981 he began committing teen dropouts to mental hospitals. They were locked away, force-fed tranquilizers and isolated from their parents for weeks at a stretch--all to "cure" truancy. Criticism from colleagues and the media ultimately forced him to halt his treatments, but not before almost 5,000 teenagers had been institutionalized for skipping school.

Saito studied under ...