Shutting out the Sun: How Japan has created its own lost generation

Shutting out the Sun: How Japan has created its own lost generation, by Michael Zielenziger

It seems like only a few years ago Japan was on the cusp of becoming the new global superpower. The nation today is in disarray. Journalist Zielenziger, who lived for ten years in the country working as a Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder newspapers, went inside this largely closed culture and wrote
Shutting out the Sun: How Japan has created its own lost generation. His troubling book examines the clash between the older, entrenched, and younger, floundering generations. Japan's rigid education and work systems and the the unhealthy interlocking alliance between government and industry, helped to give rise over the past several decades to a class of young people known as hikikomori, who literally shut themselves up in their rooms. Through interviews with several of these "lost generation" figures, Zielenziger reveals how the pressures on Japanese youths have caused many to give up and totally retreat from society. Young women, too, are rejecting traditional roles in large numbers, choosing careers with foreign companies over having families. Shutting out the Sun is a piercing, and yes, depressing look at how a society's refusal to embrace change has been so detrimental to its younger generation and a nation's health.
-Susan