My interpretation reads far too little of it, compared to what the Japanese think. It seems there is no consensus, but lots of opinion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
From my point of view, I was more concerned with the American version, because our society is ripe for the equivalent phenomenon.
Right now, America’s “real” unemployment rate is 22% or greater. So why aren’t the streets full of homeless and destitute people?
There’s always lots of opinions, but mostly it’s because people try to make it something it isn’t. It’s actually pretty simple: many people don’t like people, and in this modern world you can lead a pretty good life that way. It used to be that people who didn’t like people had to find a way to fake it, now you don’t have to.
Our society HAS the equivalent phenomenon, we just don’t freak out about it the way the Japanese do. There’s plenty of people in America that just plain aren’t interested in socializing unnecessarily, they stay home. The big difference is that Japanese culture has a drive to “fix” the outliers, while American culture has a drive to accept (sometimes by ignoring, somethings by embracing, largely depending on how entertaining they are) the outliers. Japanese culture sees someone that goes straight home from work without socializing with anybody as a problem and studies them, we see them as odd and then go do something else.
Because the “real” unemployment rate is mostly a made up stat that’s basically just doubling the published unemployment rate.