Tung’s hat was pulled low to cover half her face. She dressed like someone who wanted to remain anonymous, like her clothes were a protective barrier between herself and rest of the world. A thick scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her gray Snoopy hoodie was layered under a denim jacket. But what she chose to show was telling—a drawing of a fish inked on her hand. Tung told me that she has a thing for fish because, in a very real way, she wished she could be more like them and less like herself. That’s because fish, she said, always see the world through fresh eyes.

Tung is trying to see the world in a new way. Two years ago, she pulled the edges of her world tighter and tighter until her entire life was enclosed within her parent’s cramped Hong Kong apartment. It's where she spent her days in self-imposed confinement. Tung, like millions of others, was afflicted with a hidden psychological problem that is plaguing cities and perplexing doctors across East Asia, one that causes young people, men and women in the prime of their lives, to just… stop. Stop trying. Stop engaging. Stop everything—shy of just existing.

“A fish is always under the water,” she explained. “They only have seven seconds of memory. After seven seconds, it's a new world to them again. This sort of mindset is what I would love to learn. Maybe the world seems to be one way. But if you change [your] perspective, it might be another thing.”

Soon, dozens of books and hundreds of articles were written about the phenomenon and the image of the hikikomori male—most of those afflicted are men—had cemented itself in the global consciousness to the point that it became a character archetype in numerous anime series and was the focus of a short film by Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho for the omnibus movie TOKYO!.

Tung lives in Hong Kong, but her condition was first classified in Japan—where this extreme social isolation phenomenon is called hikikomori. The condition was first described in the ‘90s by Tamaki Saitō, a psychologist who claimed there were one million hikikomori in Japan at the time. Each of them had become, to varying degrees, a shut-in, someone who remains in their home and refuses to go outside or engage with other people. The idea, that there was this huge, hidden population of young hermits struggling to even walk out into the world, let alone find success inside it, quickly captivated attentions worldwide.

To many, the psychological condition seemed like the perfect metaphor for pop-Bubble Economy Japan—a nation that was outwardly healthy and functional, yet still unable to respond to the shifting demands of the modern world.

In Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, journalist Michael Zielenzinger, who met several hikikomori during the course of researching his book, wrote:

These men … cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their homes. When psychiatrists evaluate hikikomori … their symptoms cannot be attributed to any known psychiatric ailment. Instead, Japanese psychiatrists say hikikomori is a social disorder, only recently observed, that cannot be found in other cultures.

In the confinement of Japan’s neo-Confucian society, which preaches the importance of obedience, discipline, self-inhibition, and group harmony - and where even individual identity is deeply swathed in mutual interdependence - men like Jun and Kenji have imploded like vacuum tubes, closing themselves in, cutting themselves off, and utterly marginalising themselves.

...I began to see that their tragic syndrome might indeed reflect something unique about Japan’s history and its culture as it collided with the modern world.

For some, this “discovery” of a huge number of disengaged young people right at a time when Japan needed a scapegoat for its economic failings seemed a little too convenient. And later, much like otaku, hentai, and waifu, it became a kind of shorthand for the eccentricities of Japan as a whole, regardless of the fact that none of those things could accurately capture the national consciousness of a nation of 126 million people.