Japanese suicide bag

Japan is actually famous for suicide: seppuku, kamikaze,  hari-kari are all words familiar to Western readers on Japan. There are indeed ritual methods of suicide in Japan and often, Japanese who take their own lives are doing so essentially on a point of honor—Minister Matsuoka included. With a Confucian  heritage that stresses the group over the individual, there is a case to be made that this bias makes Japanese more predisposed  towards suicide i.e. people are more likely to see ‘beneficial’  aspects for other people in their own exit from life. 

By 1998, suicides topped 30-thousand a year, a 45-percent one year increase. That is still the number of Japanese taking their own lives today.Japan’s mental health experts were shocked when a cabinet minister hanged himself hours before facing a bribery probe. The shock was over praise from Tokyo’s governor, calling the dead man a real samurai.

One famous incident, three men who partied and then killed themselves at this hotel so their failing company would collect the insurance money and keep its doors open.

Then yesterday a woman leaped from an 11-story Tokyo apartment Wednesday in an apparent suicide, striking and seriously injuring a passer-by, a news report said Wednesday.

The unidentified woman, who appeared to be in her 30s or 40s, appeared to have jumped from the building onto a busy Tokyo street and was declared dead at the scene, Kyodo News agency reported.

She hit a 47-year-old male pedestrian who suffered a brain injury, the report said.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police said they could not immediately confirm the report.

Japan has one of the industrial world’s highest suicide rates, with more than 32,000 people taking their own lives in 2006.

Source: Fox

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim who wrote an entire book on the subject of suicide argued, ‘It is too great comfort that turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.’ For Durkheim it was much more the lack of social regulation and social integration that caused people to take their own lives than any physical hardship endured as a result of economic poverty. Thus the breakdown in social networks produced by the forces of industrialization, in tandem with its Protestant ideology and emphasis on the individual, were behind the rise of suicide figures in the West.

The Japanese government aims to cut suicides by 20% by 2016. It plans to do this by providing extra counseling services for depressives, ‘preventive education’, stress reduction for the overworked and unemployed, and a crackdown on Internet suicide notices. While hopefully some of these measures will help cut the current rates it is hard to be optimistic - social problems tend
to require organic social responses and solutions more than government targets and regulation. And Japan is probably not so different from anywhere else in the developed world where Prozac is a household name.

Source:  J@pan Inc magazine

Filed under: Japan, News, people, suicide