Across Japan, more than one million men and boys like Jun and Hiro and Kenji have chosen to withdraw completely from society. These recluses hide in their homes for months or years at a time, refusing to leave the protective walls of their bedrooms. They are as frightened as small children abandoned in a dark forest. Some spend their days playing video games. A few-an estimated 10 percent-scroll the Internet. Many just pace, read books, or drink beer and shochu, a Japanese form of vodka. Others do nothing for weeks at a time. Unable to work, attend school, or interact with outsiders, they cannot latch onto the well-oiled conveyor belt that carries young boys from preschool through college, then deposits them directly into the workplace-a system that makes Japan seem orderly and purposeful to outsiders, even as it has begun to break down.

Men like Kenji, Hiro, and Jun-and 80 percent of them are men-are called hikikomori, which translates loosely as one who shuts himself away and becomes socially withdrawn. (The Japanese word joins together the term hiku or "pull," with the word komoru, or "retires''-to render the meaning "pulling in and retiring.") These men cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their own homes. When psychiatrists evaluate these hikikomori using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM IV, the standard guide used in the West to diagnose mental disorder, their symptoms cannot be attributed to any known psychiatric ailment. Instead, Japanese psychiatrists say that hikikomori is a social disorder, only recently observed, one that cannot be found within other cultures. These men-as I found during months of conversations with them and others just like them-are often intelligent, stimulating, highly open and responsive adults full of cogent ideas and fascinating insights into society and themselves.

There is ample mystery attached to this pathology, one that stubbornly pricks at the curiosity of someone hoping to fathom the plight of modern Japan. In Western Europe or the United States, many modern teenagers also resort to antisocial behavior, but exhibit it differently. In rebelling against parents and schools, many "act out" and explode in rage, or wear outrageous styles of dress to make a "statement," or play loud music sure to offend the older generation. In the United States, where guns and knives as well as drugs are so readily available, youth violence can be commonplace, as if representing an unspoken tradeoff for the openness, independence and self-expression the society demands. Yet a culture that encourages individual freedom from an early age, that instructs young children to "stand on their own two feet" and find their own way through life, actively encourages originality and risk-taking and is far more likely than Japanese society to accept certain strains of nonconformist behavior. In a vast and heterogeneous nation like America, a man like Kenji might end up designing computer games, hand-crafting furniture, launching a tiny software startup, editing music videos, or writing a web log.

Yet in the confinement of Japan's neo-Confucian society, which preaches the importance of obedience, discipline, self-inhibition, and group harmony-and where even individual identity is deeply swathed in mutual interdependence-men like Jun and Kenji have imploded like vacuum tubes, closing themselves in, cutting themselves off, and utterly marginalizing themselves. Unable or unwilling to go out, languishing alone in their rooms, they depend on their parents to leave their next meal at the bedroom door. Is this isolation, I wondered, simply these young adults' peculiar form of rebellion against their prevailing culture? Or are they too sensitive or inquisitive to accept it, and flee to their rooms both for protection and self-preservation? Or are they-as Taka, one 24 year old, suggested-simply and unsettlingly "different" from the society that surrounds them? "I was raised to have a good career and be a good boy," he told me. "My problem is that I can't go to work like other people. I'm different."

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