[verylittlemeat]

Does anyone else see huge similarities between what this paper is describing and the freeter/hikikomori/herbivore men trends going on in Japan since the late 1980s?

I don't have the time or inclination to look into it more deeply but it almost seems like the West is just living through a social reality that has been going on for decades in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting social and economic insights that can be gleaned from that change to predict the future in the west.

[toyg]

I was saying this in the late ‘90s. I would get out the relevant posts but they are in Italian anyway; I believe in Italy we saw the phenomenon a bit earlier because of a number of factors (the economy braked earlier than elsewhere, it’s a more traditionalist country than average, etc etc).

On the other hand, media and academia are always out to sensationalise. It’s entirely possible that a certain degree of social disaffection has always been there (see “young Werther”, Leopardi and so on), but the overall population growth was such that a small but constant percentage of a community is now a big number in absolute terms.