Your Daily Awesome

It’s a year and a half old at this point, but Maggie Jones’ “Shutting Themselves In” is one of my favorite articles of all time. Reporting on hikikomori—Japanese teen boys who don’t leave their rooms for six months or longer—the article sounded like a Murakami story come to life. Jones goes deep into the motivating psychological factors and spends time, however improbably, with many of these boys, and reports on their unusual rehab programs, which start with a knock on the door from an attractive teen girl.

One Friday afternoon not long ago, Yoshimi Kawakami waited at a doorstep near Kyoto, expecting to be stood up. It has happened in the snow in Tokyo and in the heat of Kyoto summer afternoons. She has waited for two hours or more, fueled by the hope that - this time - someone will answer.

It is part of being a “rental sister,” as the outreach counselors are known at New Start. Rental sisters are often a hikikomori’s first point of contact and his route back to the outside world. (There are a few rental brothers, too, but “women are softer, and hikikomori respond better to them,” one counselor told me.)

The relationship usually begins after a parent telephones New Start and arranges for consultations and routine visits from a rental sister, which costs about $8,000 a year. The rental sister then writes a letter to the hikikomori, introducing herself and the program. “I never read it; I threw it away,” said Y.S., the 28-year-old with the shy smile I’d met at New Start’s potluck. When Kawakami arrived at his house in Chiba, near Tokyo, for the first time, Y.S. opened his bedroom door long enough to tell her, “Please, go home.”

It was a typical first meeting. “We’ll just talk through the door,” Kumi Hashizume, a counselor at New Start, said. “And tell them our interests and hobbies. Very rarely do we get any words back. And if they do speak, it’s very stressed.” Months can go by before a hikikomori opens his door and more months before he ventures out with a rental sister to the park or to the movies. The goal is that eventually he will enroll in New Start and live in the program’s dorms and participate in its job-training programs, at a day-care center, a coffee shop, a restaurant.