Japan in 2009 was a busy place — for the Grim Reaper. A National Police Agency report revealed that there were 32,753 suicides in the country last year, exceeding 30,000 for the 12th consecutive year and accounting for 3% of all deaths. Current World Health Organization figures show that of OECD countries, Japan has the second highest suicide rate, at 24.7 per 100,000 people. Only Russians kill themselves at a greater rate.
Unfortunately, in a country of 135 million people, such statistics lend themselves to abstraction, so let’s put a human face on things. Imagine standing at your local train station from morning to night and having to choose six people an hour to take their own lives. Who will it be? The salaryman? The young mother? The high school student?
Last year, the government set up a task force to address the suicide crisis, but there have been a number of such efforts made over the past decade, and the rate shows no sign of declining. This is because the task forces deal not in cures but in treatments, like the latest action of assigning mental health professionals to “Hello Work” employment offices. The rationale is that unemployment is a factor in suicide, but other countries with greater economic woes have much lower suicide rates. Why? Because a perpetually high suicide rate doesn’t just reflect a set of temporary circumstances — it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional society.
In his novel “A Long Way Down,” Nick Hornby offers a striking insight: people commit suicide not because they hate life, but because they love it and can’t endure separation from it. I take this to mean that we all want to lead lives as we choose but are constrained from doing so. The stronger the constraints, the wider and more painful the separation.
