Japanese Way of Death
By Brian Bremner
BusinessWeek
August 22, 2000 

The country's attitudes toward suicide -- now at epidemic levels -- illustrate the limits of a common global culture

We're often told that this is the age of convergence. As global optimists see it, free-market capitalism, democratic norms, and maybe even a better appreciation for the sanctity of life are gaining ascendancy across borders. In the rich world at least, you get the sense that a country's unique way of looking at the world will eventually be submerged by these big global trends.

There's some truth to that. But every once in a while here in Japan, I'm abruptly reminded that some things about this remarkable culture I'll never begin to fathom. To my mind, the most fundamental one is the prevalence of suicide in a nation that boasts some of the highest living standards and longest life expectancies in the world.

If you haven't heard, something of a suicide epidemic is raging in Japan. The government this month reported that 33,000 Japanese took their lives in 1999. Many had health or psychological problems. Even so, the trend has been increasing since the mid-1990s -- not coincidentally, as the economy has stagnated.

DESPERATE CALCULUS. 
 One in five of those suicides, usually involving middle-aged family men, were linked to financial difficulties last year. In some cases, for these men it came down to a desperate calculus that his family would be better off without him -- in exchange for a lump-sum life-insurance payment -- than with him and the debt collectors.

To put this number in perspective, Japan's suicide victims number three times the nation's traffic fatalities. On a relative basis, the suicide rate is the highest in Asia and twice that of the U.S. The Japanese can take some solace in the fact that the country doesn't come close to suicide superpowers like Lithuania, Hungary, or Finland -- but that's not much comfort.

Anybody who has spent a fair amount of time in Japan is certainly aware of the problem. Stories of middle-aged corporate warriors stringing themselves up to atone for a business failure or some sort of scandal are regular newspaper fare. East Japan Railway Co. has even taken to hiring more security guards and improving the lighting on station platforms to discourage jumpers. Nor are cases in which someone kills others before taking his or her own life all that rare.

SITUATION: CRITICAL.  
The latest figures have proven a major embarrassment for the government. And newspaper editorialists have had a field day of late. The mass-circulation Yomiuri newspaper recently opined that, "If suicides reflect a distortion in society, we regret to say that the situation is already critical."

Of course, plenty of pundits, academics, and government officials are saying sensible things about what to do. Better counseling, education, prevention programs, and, yes, a return to economic prosperity would certainly help. There's no denying the current suicide rate, roughly 26 deaths per every 100,000 citizens, is far higher than Japan's historical average (about 20 per 100,000) during the 1980s and most of the 1990s.

With a bit more effort and luck, many Japanese living on the edge can be helped and turned around. But is this a problem that can ever really be fixed for good in a country that seems to tolerate or even glorify the act of taking one's life? Anyone evenly vaguely interested in Japanese culture is familiar with such terms as seppuku or harakiri.

SAMURAI VALUES.  
Think of the ritualized suicide etiquette of feudal Japan, the kamikaze pilots of the Pacific War, and the loss of literary lion Yukio Mishima, whose self-inflicted demise in 1970 symbolized his call for a return to Samurai values and drew worldwide attention. Come to think of it, you needn't bother. The image of Japan as a nation of suicide-prone subjects has been hard-wired into the minds of Westerners for decades, thanks to Hollywood.

Westerners on balance tend to see suicide as the last resort of the deranged, the disenfranchised, the desperate, or even the selfish. Some Japanese would probably agree. Yet the idea of inseki jisatsu, of suicide as the supreme act of atonement, is deeply ingrained in Japan's culture.

To its advocates, leaving this world by one's own hand is something close to sublime. That's a minority view these days, to be sure. But it's also true from my experience that suicides, though tragic for loved ones, don't carry the same cultural stigma or religious abhorrence that they do in North America.

NOT FOR EXPORT.  
You may not like it, and I may not like it, but when it comes to suicide, Japan (can't speak for Lithuania) is really different. In other words, the collective values of a society -- its unique culture -- do persevere even in a world some would tell you is becoming very much the same. The Japanese find plenty of things about the U.S. baffling, of course -- the comparatively huge homicide rate and easy availability of guns come to mind.

So one can certainly point to big trends reshaping the global economy and society. Many of them are for the good. But don't get lulled into the idea that human values can be standardized like accounting principles or exported like Starbucks. Japan, at least, is far too culturally unique for that. 

Bremner, Tokyo bureau chief for Business Week, offers his views every week for BW Online
Edited by Beth Belton

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