One reason for this is the primacy of the workplace/school, to the total exclusion of any third place. If you don't have a job or are harassed out of your school, what does one do when not working? Japan does not have great ready-made answers to this question, for many people. (It seems like a silly question, but after six years here, I honestly struggled with it after leaving the day job. Where should one be at 3 PM on a Thursday? Is it allowed for me to just go to the gym? Shouldn't I just stay home a few more hours so that the lady behind the counter will assume I am coming in after getting home from work early at 8 or so?)
There exist people with similar levels of social isolation who nonetheless go to work every day. They are occasionally written about in reports of him hikikomori, which strikes at least some people as odd, since "I go to a place where nobody cares about me and spend my entire day there" is not exactly out of the mainstream of Japanese experience.
There exist people with similar levels of social isolation who nonetheless go to work every day. They are occasionally written about in reports of him hikikomori, which strikes at least some people as odd, since "I go to a place where nobody cares about me and spend my entire day there" is not exactly out of the mainstream of Japanese experience.