"Explanations for the lack of interest in sex include the poor quality of sex education and the decline of traditional matchmakers..."

"... who used to arrange unions between young people of marriageable age. Others attribute it to the habit among young Japanese of socialising in groups, making it harder for men and women to break off as couples, and the rise of hikikomori, or social recluses, who live at home and never go out. Some research suggests that much of the problem comes down to money. While salaries among male workers have declined since the 'Bubble Economy' of the 1980s, research shows that women’s expectations of income in a potential mate remain unrealistically high."

From "I don’t: marriage decline adds to Japan’s population woes" (London Times).

"It’s the opposite of a prison. It is freedom. There’s no one in here but me. I can do whatever, whenever. Going outside is a prison. But this room — this room is clarity.”​

I'm reading "When 'Going Outside Is Prison': The World of American Hikikomori" (New York Magazine):

For years, hikikomori was thought to be a “culture-bound syndrome” — something so specifically Japanese that it could never appear beyond its borders. That concept has since fallen out of favor, and now one researcher named Alan Teo believes that something similar is cropping up in the States...

Mr. H. wore a leather jacket that reeked of cigarette smoke, had mangy hair, didn’t shower, and had long fingernails. “During the first and most severe year, he remained within a walk-in closet, ate only-ready-to-eat food, did not bathe, and urinated and defecated in jars and bottles,” Teo would later write in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. “He passed the time surfing the internet and playing video games.”...  Mr. H. claimed his reclusiveness was based on something pretty simple: He just didn’t want to be a part of the world....

“We have a large number of people [in the United States] in their early 20s living in the basement bedroom,” Teo told me. “Often times it is younger men. Struggling with work. Struggling with launching. There is some element of still being stuck in an earlier developmental stage, like that of an adolescent, even though their physical age is that of an adult.”...

No matter what they call themselves, or why they decide to shut themselves away from the world, a generation’s worth of extreme shut-ins would potentially portend disaster for the American economy... What social safety net could the government realistically provide for people who haven’t gone outside — nevermind worked — for decades?

Isn't it in the Green New Deal? The universal basic income. It sounds like these people don't need much. Why not accept their difference and leave them alone?

The real question here isn't why half a million young Japanese stay inside all the time and have no social contacts.

As Bloomberg forefronts in "Why Half a Million Young Japanese Can't Face School or Work" — before admitting in the 4th paragraph that the issue — the "hikikomori" — is not new.

The current issue is that the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, sees this matter of life-style choice and psychological orientation as problem in need of government intervention because the population is dropping. That is, the nation needs these solitude-loving people to have babies. But, it seems (it's hard to read through the dross in this article) the government is funding this stay-at-home behavior with welfare.

The article puzzles over why young people are doing this. Were they bullied at school? Pressured by parents? But what's so hard to understand? People respond to government incentives. If you had told me when I was 20 that I could stay home, not work, and receive monthly payments to cover basic expenses, I'd have snapped up that deal with pleasure. I can stay out of the workplace and use my time however I want, free from economic need? Sign me up!

Now, maybe you'll tell me I don't understand hikikomori and that these are people who feel strongly reluctant to get out into the world of work. But if you'd given me that offer and I'd gotten set in my ways of collecting a monthly check while I stayed home in my safe, comfortable apartment and read books, drew pictures, and listened to music, and then you threatened to take it away unless I manifested anxiety about going to work and supporting myself, I'd have the requisite anxiety.

"There’s a global push to remove 'gender identity disorder' from the list of mental illnesses."

"But many transgender people in Japan aren’t on board with the idea...."

While calling something a “disorder” can make someone embarrassed or ashamed in many parts of the world, in Japan it can do the opposite: It makes behavior acceptable that would be shameful if seen as a personal eccentricity, said Junko Mitsuhashi, the historian.

GID was part of a pattern of pathologization in Japan — in the early 2000s, officials also gave a name to teenagers and young adults who were withdrawing from school and becoming hermits in their room: “hikikomori.” The Ministry of Health first defined the term in 2003, leading to a flood of coverage of the phenomenon; by 2010, the country was estimated to be home to 700,000 people with the condition and there were NGOs dedicated to helping them out of isolation.

“Anything that is kind of deviating from what is considered the general flow of society can be diagnosed as something, [like] children who don’t want to go to school… If they put a medical name to the symptom, people will feel relieved,” Mitsuhashi said. “What really pushed the conviction to allow [the GID Law] to pass was the argument that this was an illness, a medical symptom.”...

What if young people stopped having sex?

Case study: Japan.

The term is sekkusu shinai shokogun — "celibacy syndrome."

Think it won't happen here or that if it did, it would be good?

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060....

[A relationships counselor has clients] who have taken social withdrawal to a pathological extreme. They are recovering hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first steps to rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term parasaito shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s without managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million unmarried people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around three million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."

And these are the people who are seeking counseling. There must be far more who are not going to admit they have a problem.

Well, in fact, is it a problem to live the solitary life? The government — and society — may want you to pair up and form a family unit for the sake of the whole, but for the individual? Perhaps many people are discovering a great truth in living the life of solitude and simplicity.

(Consider: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.")

Those who portray solitude as a problem may say the individual isn't having a fully dimensional, deeply satisfying life. But that might be the propaganda, and the truth could be that we need to exploit the individual to generate wealth and new human beings so that the group can thrive. If it is not actually a problem for the individual, then those who see and fear the disastrous dysfunction of the group are tasked not only to cure a nonproblem but also to convince individuals to perceive a nonproblem as a problem and to submit to the cure.

"I felt as if my presence had been rejected....I wanted to erase my life."

Said Kazushi Suganum, who is working to help those who are, as he was, hikikomori.

Hikikomori.

"A person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home."

...Japanese culture and sex roles play a strong part in the hikikomori phenomenon. "Men start to feel the pressure in junior high school, and their success is largely defined in a couple of years," said James Roberson, a cultural anthropologist at Tokyo Jogakkan College and an editor of the book "Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan." "Hikikomori is a resistance to that pressure. Some of them are saying: 'To hell with it. I don't like it and I don't do well."' Also, this is a society where kids can drop out. In Japan, children commonly live with their parents into their 20's, and despite the economic downturn, plenty of parents can afford to support their children indefinitely - and do. As one hikikomori expert put it, "Japanese parents tell their children to fly while holding firmly to their ankles."... Many hikikomori also describe miserable school years when they didn't, or couldn't, conform to the norm. They were bullied for being too fat or too shy or even for being better than everyone else at sports or music. As the Japanese saying goes, "The nail that sticks out gets hammered in."... In other societies the response from many youths would be different. If they didn't fit into the mainstream, they might join a gang or become a Goth or be part of some other subculture. But in Japan, where uniformity is still prized and reputations and outward appearances are paramount, rebellion comes in muted forms, like hikikomori. Any urge a hikikomori might have to venture into the world to have a romantic relationship or sex, for instance, is overridden by his self-loathing and the need to shut his door so that his failures, real or perceived, will be cloaked from the world. "Japanese young people are considered the safest in the world because the crime rate is so low," Saito said. "But I think it's related to the emotional state of people. In every country, young people have adjustment disorders. In Western culture, people are homeless or drug addicts. In Japan, it's apathy problems like hikikomori."