Analyzing how Japan has paid for its economy, but shutting out the future

Michael Zielenziger , a visiting scholar at Berkeley and former Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder , writes in "Shutting Out the Sun" that it's no accident Japan Inc. became Japan Stink. Burdened by a culture that disdains individualism in favor of "Stepford Wives" conformity, the nation lumbered like a brontosaurus into the Internet age, when the need for entrepreneurial nimbleness and initiative makes the Japanese model hopelessly prehistoric, according to Zielenziger.

Packed with fascinating details -- too many, ultimately, for all but Japanophiles -- "Shutting Out the Sun" puts an entire nation on the psychiatric couch. As Zielenziger describes it, the most well-adjusted Japanese citizen may be Godzilla. Kids are raised by parents who rarely have sex, including dads who are often absentee workaholics and who make mama's boys out of many male Japanese. Unhealthy pressure to conform begins in schools, where bullying -- far from the outrage it is considered by American parents -- is seen as character - building. The extreme examples are grotesque: Zielenziger says one 15-year-old was beaten and tortured with lit cigarettes to the point of needing hospitalization.

A chunk of the book focuses on the hikikomori , the estimated million-plus Japanese, almost all boys and men, who quit society and become recluses in their bedrooms. Zielenziger says theirs is a rational response to a broken society that bullied them as youths and ostracizes creative loners. But his empathy with the hikikomori seems a bit stretched. While his take on Japan suggests you wouldn't want to live there (at least if you're immersed in Western values), some of these shut-ins' pathology seems personal rather than collective: Several have assaulted and even murdered their parents. By Zielenziger's count, the hikikomori are a fraction of the nation's 126 million people. For all their culture's problems, the vast majority of Japanese get out of their bedrooms.