/biz/ - Business & Finance

> Hikikomori - Ten million Japanese singles refuse to leave home...Living with Ma and Da until your 30s is common in a recession - but in Japan, with the lowest birth rate in the world, the increase ...(this was in 2003)

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ten-million-japanese-singles-refuse-to-leave-home-1.345300

> "My worst case is a 45-year-old man who has been holed up in his room for 30 years," says Dr Tamaki Saito, a psychiatrist who has written a bestselling book about the problem.

> "His parents hardly ever see him even though he lives in the same house, because he gets up at midnight to eat and read and goes back to sleep before his parents are up." Dr Saito, who estimates there could be as many as one million hikikomori in Japan, runs the only clinic in the country that treats the disorder.

> "The government only started to notice the problem a few years ago when there was a spate of crimes involving children and their parents." The most notorious was a man who kept a young girl captive in his room for nine years under the nose of his mother. "I knew there was something going on but I was afraid to go into his room," the mother later told an astonished Japan.