They always frame this as a Japanese thing since that is where you first hear that term but the same phenomenon can happen anywhere (they don’t call it hikikomori), like isolating themselves from society, being in their own room. (The meme: “guy living in moms basement” may be the cloest analogy). Also Housing is much cheaper in Japan than in the US where it’s expensive to even rent an apartment, let alone buy a home.
Part of me thinks it’s because that it’s an easier jab for them to focus on (non-Western) countries upon discussing it on media while the same thing can happen in where they live but refuse to address it, why is that the case? Hikikomori is possible in Japan because they provide people with housing assitance. They have public housing for low income people and provide financial assistance in which one can apply.
Convenience store food like ramen are cheap, so if they can scrape together enough money for food that’s all they need to leave the house for. The same thing in the US is too distant and car dependent (you need to drive to such place) while in Japan you can easily walk up to a kobini and buy food and drinks if you reside near one. Convenience store food in America is a rip off and carries a reputation of having bad quality.
Hikikomori? I always thought that was what otaku meant. It was explained to me that “otaku means house… as in you never leave it.”
But that’s the thing about languages, different words can mean different things, and they don’t even have to be specific to the country the language originated.
Take isekai for instance. Sekai is the Japanese world for “world.” Isekai means “another world.” As in, you’re in another world, or someone is. The most famous Japanese isekai is probably Sword Art Online, but that was based on an earlier anime called .hack//SIGN, though the latter probably wasn’t the first Japanese isekai. The first isekai from any country I am aware of is Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — the English novel which is the basis for the Disney film Alice in Wonderland, and to which season 3 of Sword Art Online pays tribute. You also have A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain from 1889, which is almost as old as Carrol’s work. I asked ChatGPT (sorry!) and it did name Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the first hugely influential Western isekai; however, it names it fifth, after Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-1200 BCE), Odyssey (8th century BCE), Urashima Tarō (8th century), and The Voyage of Bran (8th century). Twain’s book was 24 years after Carrol’s. And it would appear that, depending on how you define isekai, it’s much older.
(GenAI disclaimer: I only took the titles and dates from ChatGPT. The rest is in my own words.)