Japan’s Suicide Rate
The latest issue of the Economist has an article focusing on Japan’s high suicide rate, which includes the following graph*:
The author of the article mentions financial trouble and unemployment as major causes of suicide, but also blames an unforgiving culture:
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries. Cultural factors are partly at play. Japanese society rarely lets people bounce back from the perceived shame of failure or bankruptcy. Suicide is sometimes even met with approval—as facing one’s fate, not shirking it. The samurai tradition views suicide as noble (though perhaps out of self-interest, since captured warriors were treated gruesomely). Japan’s main religions, Buddhism and Shintoism, are neutral on suicide, unlike Abrahamic faiths that explicitly prohibit it.
The author ends the article by calling for the Japanese society to give more chances to those who fail.
[*No, Japan does not have the world's highest suicide rate. A a larger graph from the same organization shows that Finland and Hungary have higher suicide rates than Japan.]
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Like I hit on before, it’s not necessarily as big of a problem as the media plays it up to be. Japan is 84th ranked on a list by crude death rate, below Russia [18th], Germany [51st], Italy [53rd], Sweden [58th], the UK [66th], and nearly the same as France [86th] and the US [96th].
And, again – I’m more afraid of homicide than I am of suicide!
The article is also disturbingly presented as a typical “Shogun” in the Western media. In modern Japan, suicide has nothing to do with samurai. It’s not that romantic. And it’s definitely not encouraged – That’s an outrageous claim to make. Society simply can’t come to terms with the idea that depression is an actual illness that needs medical treatment. The average person may not feel comfortable participating in an intervention.
Yeah, most of the people who commit suicide nowadays do it because they’re depressed, not because they think it’s honorable.
Read a front page article in the Yomiuri a couple weeks ago to the effect that a mere 10% of the around 25,000 “deaths under suspicious circumstances” are given clinical autopsies to discover the actual cause of death, due to a shortage of funds and doctors.
The article didn’t go into how the remaining 90% of deaths go down in the record books. Sure, probably many of them were strokes, or accidents, who knows?
And there are lots of anecdotes about lazy police leaving every stone unturned because “suicide” is a lot easier, and better for crime stats, than a murder.
But no statistics, how can one get accurate crime statistics when the cops are so reluctant to record any crime (unless a foreigner is named as a suspect)
Not all “suicides” in Japan are suicides.
WOHOO go Finland go! God I hate this country. The reason why we finns do so much suicides is mainly cos we drink too much and this a dark and rubbish country. We just take a shotgun and shoot our brains to the ceiling, not even very dignified.
Hey,You can always move to some other country and this way change the statistics here in Finland.
Kukaan ei pakota sinua asumaan täällä.
I’d say a major factor in Japan’s suicide rate is the relative suspicion towards psychiatry and the notion of depression as a disease. Throw in a little “gaman” nonsense and I’m not surprised by the number of suicides in this country.
Who cares. Who better then that person to decide if they want to end their own life (or not).
Too bad about 3 billion more people don’t think that way so the world wouldn’t be heading for a resource war in the future.
I think the suicide rate still remains high in Japan even since 2002. Looking into the near past history of Japan, the political and social climate in Japan has been fairly negative combined with poor economy performance by comparison. That is creating overall environment that makes younger people in particular feel helpless or no escape from ‘closed-in’. Even recently, I see in the news a few cases of suicides using poison gas from mixing of shampoo and some bath chemicals. What’s happening in Japan doesn’t have much to do with their moral booster nowadays.
What??!! Finland?
But it seems to be a great place to live!
I can’t believe it.
I know, France seems like a great place to live in .
I wonder why they’re after Japan on the chart.
WHY are so many Japanese taking their lives.? Please not one more wasted lives. Japanese our ancestor went through so much . Very sad to hear even one taking their live.
I was stunned recently to learn that in Japan, companies only hire newly-graduated people（新卒）. So that means, if you don’t find a job during your last year in college, your life is doomed. And they have a strict distinction between full-time and part-time employees. Stupid.. And they never change this tradition because they think it’d be unfair for the people who have gone through this.
“I was stunned recently to learn that in Japan, companies only hire newly-graduated people（新卒）. So that means, if you don’t find a job during your last year in college, your life is doomed.”
Like much information about Japan floating around, this is at best exaggerated, at worst just wrong.
well, isn’t it correct? cuz i’m trying to find a work in japan and it seems it’d be heard to find a job if i don’t find it right away. i saw that on japanese wikipedia also.
What work are you trying to find? I have friends who have changed employers several times, and they were not new university graduates when they applied for their current jobs.
Hell, I know some who changed jobs and weren’t even university graduates, new or not….
oo ya i’m just graduating next month from american university. so i guess 転職 is a bit different situation..
The reason why so many of us kill ourselves is that we have no idea as to what we want for ourselves. everything in life is just doing what is expected of us and never stopping because its bad. We must ‘gaman’ and we go crazy because of it. there is no hope… so we see nothing for us.