In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the alleged isolation of a stratum of young people who were said to have trouble making friends, working or attending school surfaced as a prominent social problem in Japan. One of the most curious of the country’s many youth issues, the phenomenon came to be known as ‘ hikikomori ’ and it quickly entered the vocabulary of citizens and policy-makers alike. Fascination with the idea that hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Japanese youth might be ‘socially withdrawn’, disengaged or even mentally unwell was so strong that the issue soon splashed beyond the borders of Japan. 1 In 2006 the American journalist Michael Zielenziger published one of the earliest accounts of hikikomori in the English-speaking world, which raised the visibility of this phenomenon in the west (Zielenziger 2006 ). Intriguingly, Zielenziger ( 2006 ) argues that hikikomori has now come to stand for the entire Japanese nation.