TOKYO, Oct 24 — When well-known Japanese musician Kazuhiko Kato hanged himself at a hotel recently, his death sent shock waves throughout Japan’s entertainment industry.
The 62-year-old was the founder of the once internationally successful Sadistic Mika Band and even better known in Japan as a member of the popular Folk Crusaders pop group in the 1960s.
However, no one batted an eyelid at the news that depression was probably the main factor behind Kato’s death.
While illness of all kinds was the main reason that drove people to take their own lives, in the past few years, depression has emerged as the main reason.
Police said that last year, almost half of the suicide cases were due to depression.
Last year, people between the ages of 50 and 69 made up nearly 40 per cent of the suicide cases in Japan.
The depression was in many instances caused by factors such as retrenchment and family problems. Many who took their own lives were said to be unaware that they were suffering from depression.
Experts said that many people experience shock when diagnosed with depression. They suffer a second shock when confronted with the idea of having to go for psychiatric analysis.
The serious-minded and methodical — a description that fits many middle-aged Japanese — are said to be more prone to depression than others.
But it is not only the old who suffer.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, particularly among developed nations.
Its annual number of suicide cases has topped 30,000 people for 10 years running, and increasingly, these days, people below the age of 40 are also taking their own lives. For most, it is depression brought on by the economic crisis.
Drastic cost-cutting by employers has come to mean less well-paying permanent jobs for young people in recent years.
A 39-year-old man, who was out of work for half a year, took an overdose of drugs when he failed to find a job after 50 interviews.
The last interviewer told him that the job offered would pay only one-fifth of what he used to earn, with no salary increments, bonuses, health benefits and of course, no career path. Doctors managed to save the man’s life.
For the first half of this year, the number of suicides has already climbed to 17,076, or 768 more than for the same period last year. Of the dead, 71 per cent were male. With the Japanese economy showing little sign of an early up-turn, the total for this year could well exceed the existing record of 34,427 deaths in 2003.
Among Japanese children, bullying by peers is often cited as the cause of suicide.
But one 11-year-old pupil in a public school took his own life after his teacher shook him violently by his coat lapels and demanded that he apologise to a fellow pupil for a prank.
The court decided that the teacher’s action constituted corporal punishment and awarded damages to the dead boy’s parents, who had sued the local authorities.
Suicides by company presidents caught up in financial scandals, or politicians implicated in major corruption cases are, however, largely a thing of the past in Japan.
The shame from losing one’s parliamentary seat seems to be greater.
Former parliamentarian Hisayasu Nagata jumped from the 10th floor of a building in January this year after suffering from mental illness. He was forced to give up his Lower House seat in 2006 after he tried to frame a ruling politician using an e-mail that turned out to be fake.
In neighbouring South Korea, where suicides have climbed rapidly in recent years, the many deaths of well-known people have focused national attention on the growing problem.
In May, thousands of Koreans mourned the death of former president Roh Moo Hyun, who ended his life by jumping off a cliff. He was under suspicions of corruption, which he had denied.
Severe bouts of depression were cited as the cause of death of Korean actress — turned-singer U Nee (also known as Lee Hye Ryeon) in January 2007 and another actress, Lee Eun Joo, in 2005.
Korean attitudes towards depression as a treatable illness remain undeveloped.
Suicides are said to have doubled in South Korea in the past decade. A total of 12,858 people took their own lives last year.
Suicide is the main cause of death among young Korean adults. About 60 per cent of deaths in the South Korean military in the past four years were by suicide. A majority of the dead were young conscripts.
Saturation coverage of high-profile suicides by the Korean media is also said to have induced many copycat suicides among young people. The rise in suicides in South Korea has been attributed not only to the tough economic times, but also to factors such as the high divorce rate and the rise in credit card debt.
The state’s response has been to use television commercials to urge people not to kill themselves, to set up more suicide hotlines and to train more suicide counsellors.
The Japanese have not found answers as to how to bring down their own suicide rate, though the government has been urged to provide more financial help for the retrenched or the destitute.
Meanwhile, the Japanese retain a morbid fascination with well-known people such as writers who take their own lives.
This year has seen a number of movies, books and television programmes celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Osamu Dazai, regarded as one of Japan’s greatest fiction writers.
Dazai, known for his gloomy wit and obsession with suicide, finally took his own life in 1948 at the age of 38 by jumping with his lover into a river swollen with rainwater, after several unsuccessful attempts in the past to kill himself. One of his best-known works is No Longer Human, about a character plunging down the road to self-destruction, which he finished a month before he killed himself. — The Straits Times
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Mental health professionals in Japan have long known that the reason for the unnecessarily high suicide rate in Japan is due to unemployment, bankruptcies, and the increasing levels of stress on businessmen and other salaried workers who have suffered enormous hardship in Japan since the bursting of the stock market bubble here that peaked around 1997. Until that year Japan had annual suicide of rate figures between 22,000 and 24,000 each year. Following the bursting of the stock market and the long term economic downturn that has followed here since the suicide rate in 1998 increased by around 35% and since 1998 the number of people killing themselves each year in Japan has consistently remained well over 30,000 each and every year to the present day.
The current worldwide recession is of course impacting Japan too, so unless the new administration initiates very proactive and well funded local and nationwide suicide prevention programs and other mental health care initiatives, including tackling the widespread problem of clinical depression suffered by so many of the general population, it is very difficult to foresee the previous government's stated target to reduce the suicide rate to around 23,000 by the year 2016 as being achievable. On the contrary the numbers, and the human suffering and the depression and misery that the people who become part of these numbers, have to endure may well stay at the current levels that have persistently been the case here for the last ten years. It could even get worse unless even more is done to prevent this terrible loss of life.
During these last ten years of these relentlessly high annual suicide rate numbers the English media seems in the main to have done little more than have someone goes through the files and do a story on the so-called suicide forest or internet suicide clubs and copycat suicides (whether cheap heating fuel like charcoal briquettes or even cheaper household cleaning chemicals) and mirrors at stations, and now lights at stations, without focusing on the bigger picture and need for effective action and solutions.
Economic hardship, bankruptcies and unemployment have been the main cause of suicide in Japan over the last 10 years, as the well detailed reports behind the suicide rate numbers that have been issued every year until now by the National Police Agency in Japan show only to clearly if any journalist is prepared to learn Japanese or get a bilingual researcher to do the research to get to the real heart of the tragic story of the long term and unnecessarily high suicide rate problem in Japan.
I would also like to suggest that as many Japanese people have very high reading skills in English that any articles (or works of fiction which I appreciate this is) dealing with suicide in Japan could usefully provide contact details for hotlines and support services for people who are depressed and feeling suicidal.
Useful telephone numbers and links for Japanese residents of Japan who speak Japanese and are feeling depressed or suicidal:
Inochi no Denwa (Lifeline Telephone Service)：
Japan: 0120-738-556
Tokyo: 3264 4343
Tokyo Counseling Services:
http://tokyocounseling.com/english/
http://tokyocounseling.com/jp/
http://www.counselingjapan.com