Would anyone care to join me in death?

(This first appeared in Japan Close-Up, August 2008)


A peculiar smell one night last March abruptly roused a 64-year-old man from sleep.

The odor led him downstairs to the first floor of his Kobe home. Taped to the bathroom door was a handwritten note whose message soon reverberated throughout Japan: “Generating poison gas. Don’t open.”

Frantic, the man kicked open the door. Immediately the gas overcame him. We’ll never know how much he took in of what he saw. The circumstances were pieced together later. The man’s 27-year-old son had found on the Internet a relatively new suicide method, horrifying in its simplicity: You mix bath crystals with toilet cleanser to generate toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. An anonymous comment on a website promoting its use---there were many such sites, before police intervened in April with requests that they be shut down---summed up the gas’s supposed attraction: “You can die easily and beautifully.”

That in fact may not be true. Experts have disputed the advertised painlessness of the method.

As for the young man, he never lived to know that in killing himself he killed his father.

It was no isolated case. A week later, a 23-year-old Osaka woman took her life in a similar manner. Three family members who attempted a rescue had to be hospitalized; fortunately they survived. All spring, it seemed, media reports of bathroom suicide recurred on an almost daily basis---a 31-year-old temporary office worker; an 18-year-old girl who had just graduated from senior high school; a 14-year-old girl whose apartment building had to be evacuated until the gas cleared; a 24-year-old man whose entire neighborhood, some 350 people, were forced to flee; and so on. NHK, the national broadcaster, reported 80 hydrogen sulfide suicides in April alone. The Japan Suicide Prevention Association estimates 300 of them in the course of the year beginning March 2007, when a 24-year-old student unwittingly triggered the trend, his own hydrogen sulfide suicide having received wide coverage.

“Modern slaves”

Much has been written about suicide in Japan. It is a terrifying subject. Since 1998, at least 30,000 Japanese a year have died by their own hand. In the late 1990s a prime cause was held to be a seemingly intractable economic slump, with its mass layoffs, bankruptcies and vague intimations of worse to come as government succeeded government, each more helpless than its predecessor.

The slump ended at last, the economy slowly recovered---and yet the suicides continued, and continue still; the National Police Agency counted 33,093 in 2007, up 2.9 percent from 2006. In international terms, says the World Health Organization, Japan, with a 2004 suicide rate of 24.3 per 100,000 people, ranked tenth worldwide and second among the G-8 nations only to Russia (34.3)---well above France (18.0), Germany (13.0), the U.S. (11.0) and the global average (16.0 in 2000) .

A survey released in May by the government’s Cabinet Office deflates hope of a downturn anytime soon. Among its findings: nearly one Japanese adult in five---19.1 percent---has at one time or another seriously contemplated suicide.

An obvious question is, why? Twenty-first-century Japan is no self-evident seedbed of despair. It is among the world’s most prosperous nations. It is free and at peace. Its streets are comparatively safe. Its social welfare system is reasonably comprehensive. Its technology and its pop culture are widely admired and, presumably, life-enriching.

There is a dark side. The population is aging and shrinking. The birth rate hovers year after year among the world’s lowest. Job security is not what it was in the days of the traditional lifetime employment system, which the slump and subsequent market-oriented reforms effectively laid to rest. One consequence has been an army of three million-odd “freeters”---part-time workers, many now in their mid-thirties, drifting from job to low-paying, dead-end, temporary job. Below them on the social scale are the so-called NEETS, individuals “Neither in Education, Employment or Training”---in short, doing nothing, having essentially given up. They are said to number 800,000 nationwide.

As for the regular workforce, the “salarymen” and “office ladies” of “Japan Inc.,” might they be succumbing to sheer exhaustion? Modern life sets a relentless pace, allowing few pauses for rest and reflection. That is true of all developed nations. Is Japan a special case in this regard? OECD statistics for 2004 show the Japanese work on average 1828 hours a year, fewer than South Koreans (2390) but more than Americans (1777), Britons (1652) and Germans (1362). These figures are revealing but incomplete. They do not reflect a commonplace Japanese workplace institution known euphemistically as “service” overtime--- “service” meaning unpaid. “One in three [Japanese] men aged 30 to 40 works over 60 hours a week,” reported the British magazine The Economist last December. “Half say they get no overtime [pay].”

“They’re modern slaves,” wrote labor lawyer Ichiro Natsume in the Japanese weekly Shukan Economist (July 25, 2006). “Day after day they’re worked without limit. When they finally collapse, they’re thrown away like worn-out rags.”

In a 1983 special issue on Japan, the American weekly Time Magazine quoted one of 12 company rules of a certain Osaka-based tent manufacturer: “Once you’ve grabbed hold of a potential piece of business, never let it go, no matter what---even at the risk of your own life.” Making due allowances for rhetorical hyperbole, we still discern in this a grim foreshadowing of a phenomenon that was soon to become something of a national disease: karoshi, death from overwork.

The figures speak in clashing voices. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry counts annual karoshi cases in tens. Labor lawyers count them in tens of thousands. There are no hard and fast rules for determining whether the heart attack, brain hemorrhage or suicide---the likeliest official causes of premature death among workers---resulted from karoshi. The government has an obvious interest in challenging karoshi claims. When recognized, they trigger compensation awards to surviving family members. A landmark case in that regard pertains to Kenichi Uchino, a quality control engineer with Toyota Motors who, during the last 30 days of his life---he died in February 2002 of a heart attack at age 30--- reportedly worked 144 hours of overtime. He collapsed at 4 a.m.--- at work. In November 2007 the Nagoya District Court accepted his widow Hiroko’s claim that Uchino was indeed a victim of karoshi.

Rapid change triggers anxiety, which fuels depression---and depression in Japan has a history of being stigmatized rather than treated. It was only in 1999 that anti-depressant drugs were first approved for use in Japan, more than a decade after Prozac had begun revolutionizing treatment of clinical depression in the U.S. In Japan depression tended to be seen less as an illness than as shameful proof of personal inadequacy. A foreign drug-maker sought to counter that perception with a cajoling advertising slogan describing depression as “kokoro no kaze”---a mere “cold in the soul.” Sufferers took note, but age-old attitudes change slowly.

“Do not hesitate to choose the way of death”

Age-old attitudes towards death in general are starkly revealing. All cultures seem to agree on one point: Death is a mystery, unknown and, this side of the grave, unknowable. With no hard facts to fetter the imagination, sages and mystics down the ages have left us their various visions---of heaven, hell, Nirvana, Samsara, nothingness, eternal sleep and so on. The details matter less than the feeling they symbolize, which is, for the most part, awe.

And almost everywhere and at all times, that awe has sufficed to stay the hand of the suicide. Men and women suffer, sometimes atrociously, but they prefer to endure rather than escape into they know not what. Individual exceptions there have always been, in whom despair is stronger than awe, and their numbers are growing---worldwide, WHO calculates, there was one suicide every 40 seconds throughout the year 2000---but in committing suicide they depart not only from this life but from the life-affirming traditions and culture that nurtured them. The Bible (1 Corinthians 6:19) expresses the Christian horror of suicide in these words: “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” The Quran (Al-Baqarah 2:156, 2:195) says, “We belong to Allah and to Him we are returning… do not throw yourselves with your own hands into destruction. .”

Here Japan parts company with other major world civilizations. A military tradition with roots a thousand years deep glorified first death in battle, and then, by extension, death itself. A readiness to die passed via Zen Buddhism from the samurai class into the culture at large. “When you are at the parting of the ways,” says the 18th-century military treatise known as the Hagakure, “do not hesitate to choose the way of death.”

This was not so much an exhortation to the faint-hearted as the simple expression of a long-established fact of Japanese cultural life. Ivan Morris, in his seminal study The Nobility of Failure, shows that it is the manner of a Japanese warrior’s death, more than anything he stood for in life, that marks him as a hero. From Minamoto Yoshitsune in the 12th century to the kamikaze suicide pilots of the 20th, all his representative heroes fought on the losing side but died beautifully. Yoshitsune’s is the archetypal beautiful death on the brink of defeat. It is described as follows: “Seizing the sword, Yoshitsune plunged it into his body below the left breast, thrusting it in so far that the blade almost emerged through his back. Then he cut deeply into the stomach and, tearing the wound wide open in three directions, pulled out his intestines.” This is a very early example of a practice later to proliferate under the name seppuku or hara-kiri.

Commoners too had their notions of beautiful death. Their great chronicler is the 18th-century puppet theater playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, whose famous love-suicide tragedies were inspired by---and, in turn, inspired---real-life incidents. The one on which he based his “Love Suicides at Sonezaki” had occurred only a month before the play was first staged in 1703.

Its two main characters are Tokubei, a somewhat feckless Osaka soy-sauce merchant, and Ohatsu, the courtesan he loves; but she is under contract to a house in the pleasure quarter, and he lacks the money to ransom her. It is remarkable how quickly they both accept the hopelessness of the situation, and embrace death as the only fulfillment open to them. “Did our promises of love hold only for this world?” declaims Ohatsu. “Others before us have chosen reunion through death.” So be it. “Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell.” Their midnight dash to freedom ends in the Sonezaki Forest, where, exchanging sublime lines of love poetry, they end their lives, Tokube cutting first Ohatsu’s throat and then his own.

That the lovers turn poets at such a moment is not surprising. Death is the supreme moment of life, in a sense its climax; how can it fail to bring out the latent poet in anyone nurtured by a culture that accords to poetry an almost religious status? Nothing better shows the Japanese incorporation of death into life, and into art, than the tradition of the death poem. “A feeling for poetry,” writes Morris, “was a confirmation of the warrior’s sincerity.” The 20th-century Zen master Daisetsu Suzuki put it this way: “Death is the most serious affair absorbing all one’s attention, but the cultured Japanese think they ought to be able to transcend it and view it objectively,” composing a “parting-with-life verse” in the very face of death.

The moon, symbolizing enlightenment, and cherry blossoms, symbolizing transience, are recurring images in death poems. The 16th-century warrior Uesugi Kenshin gazed upon his imminent death in this spirit: “I stand in the moonlit dawn,/ Free from clouds of attachment.” More than 400 years later a kamikaze pilot, dying in combat in February 1945 at age 22, left this behind: “If only we might fall/ Like cherry blossoms in the spring---/ So pure and radiant!”

Virtual life, virtual death

The 20th century closed with a technological revolution that rendered life largely virtual. Long before the expression “virtual reality” became current there occurred a dreadful portent of a brave new world in the making. In 1989 a young man named Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of seven little girls in and around Tokyo. (He was eventually sentenced to death, and executed in June.) Warped criminality, of course, has always existed, but an intimation of something unprecedented was the discovery by police of some 6000 videos and erotic manga comic books in Miyazaki’s room. Were the emerging new media creating an alternative universe which could come to seem as real as the conventional one? In videos, as later in cyberspace, you can kill and resurrect at the touch of a button. If you spend enough time doing this, does it alter your view of life and death?

There have been more than a few moments over the past decade and a half in which an observer could be forgiven for wondering if Japan itself was turning into a live horror video. In 1995 a religious cult called AUM Shinrikyo released toxic sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 and injuring thousands. In 1997 an 8-year-old Osaka girl was stabbed to death on her way to school. “Any little girl would have done,” the 46-year-old man arrested as a suspect reportedly told police. Weeks later in Kobe a 14-year-old boy murdered two children at random, beheading one of them and carefully placing the head on the sidewalk outside his junior high school. 1999 saw two random mass stabbings, one in Shimonoseki, the other in Tokyo---five dead altogether. Blind rage and sinister compulsions had loosed their bonds. A mass stabbing in June in Tokyo’s Akihabara, nerve center of the culture spawned by virtual reality’s leading citizens, the Net- and manga-obsessed otaku, remind us that the upheaval is ongoing. The numbers are not formidable compared to crime rates in many other countries, but the nature of the crimes raises a question: Are the perpetrators simply insane, or are they symbols of their “virtual” time and its apparent indifference to the significance of life and death?

Suicide too entered a new phase. It became part of pop culture. A Japanese bestseller of 1993 was “The Complete Manual of Suicide.” Like sex books, it bore a warning-cum-enticement on its jacket: “If under 18 please refrain from buying.” It sold over a million copies. One of the suicide methods it touted was tobiori jisatsu---self-destruction by jumping from high buildings. “Not only is it painless,” explains the book, “it even feels good.” One wonders how the author knew. The ensuing tobiori boom was dramatic but, fortunately, short-lived.

The fact is, suicide itself was about to go virtual. In February 2003 a man and two women who had apparently met through the man’s suicide Web site were found asphyxiated in his apartment in Saitama near Tokyo. Similar cases followed in quick succession. The term “Net shinju” came into vogue. “Shinju” is an old word originally designating love suicide of the sort that claimed Chikamatsu’s lovers Tokubei and Ohatsu. Today it describes the spreading phenomenon of would-be suicides seeking each other out on the Internet and dying together.

The weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun in 2004 described a grotesque twist the trend was taking. It introduced a high school girl pseudonymously named Yui. For reasons not given she had long wanted to die, and had repeatedly attempted suicide, but she hanged herself and slashed her wrists in vain. Fate seemed to want her to live, and she began to wonder in despair if she was indestructible. At her wits’ end, she left a message at a Net suicide site: Would anyone care to join her in death?

A reply came from a 45-year-old man, a company employee who said he too wanted to die and would provide everything necessary---car, sleeping pills, and charcoal briquettes for carbon monoxide.

They met at Tokyo Station, drove to a secluded mountain road, had a few drinks, and the man passed Yui the sleeping pills. But it was not death he had in mind; it was rape. Groggy and disoriented, Yui was vaguely conscious but in no condition to resist.

“The next thing I knew,” she told Shukan Bunshun, “I was standing at a bus stop somewhere, the man and the car nowhere in sight.”

The case, the magazine claimed, is by no means unique.

Samurai ethos

Japan’s samurai ethos is invariably mentioned in connection with Japan’s high suicide rate. Both Bushido (the Way of the Warrior) and the Zen Buddhism which helped mold it extolled the perpetual readiness to die whose symbol was the “sword of life.” “The idea most vital and essential to the samurai,” says Suzuki, quoting a 17th-century Bushido text, “is that of death, which he ought to have before his mind day and night, night and day, from the dawn of the first day of the year till the last minute of the last day of it.”

The samurai, of course, have been extinct for 130 years; their ideals no longer prevail and their cultivated intimacy with death has been submerged beneath the life-affirming pursuits of a modern, economy-driven technologically advanced society.

Or so it would seem; but “submerged” does not necessarily mean dead. Might old, supposedly supplanted attitudes towards life and death be present, unacknowledged and perhaps distorted, in the subconscious minds of the descendants of people for whom they were second nature? WHO claims mental disorders are associated with more than 90 percent of suicide cases. Might charcoal briquettes and hydrogen sulfide be the “sword of life” to the disturbed and distressed minds of the virtual era?

Yui, significantly, emerged from her horrifying experience determined never to visit another suicide Website again. However, she told Shukan Bunshun, she still wants to die.