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Internet Suicide Pacts Surge in Japan
darkmonkeh writes "The number of Japanese who killed themselves in online suicide pacts rose sharply last year, according to the BBC. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and the pacts may appeal to those scared to die alone. These Japanese internet 'suicide clubs' accounted for at least 26 deaths in the last 2 months."
Good to see the Japanese people enjoy having a right to privacy :P
I have to wonder, what is it about Japanese culture that produces these people in such high numbers? In America, they'd listen to emo music.
I have hunches but no evidence. Could somebody explain this tragic issue?
So... 34000 Japanese killed themselves in 2003, and last year less than 100 people committed suicide as part of suicide clubs.
1 in 340, or 0.3 percent of suicides are accounted for by this?
People like to be horrified by the idea, but resources would be far better focused in pretty much any other way than worrying about this.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Oh, we slashdotters have known about them forever. We call them nightclubs.
This sort of thing is self-regulating.
The ______ Agenda
We'll be staging a group sucide next friday. Bring your own CAT5.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at Suicide Club, you HAVE to kill yourself.
Is that they never get out - see the sun or get excercise. 30 minutes a day wards off all types of ailments, including depression (when was the last time a psychologist prescribed this?)
I heard in China that they have mandatory exercise (in some parts, like around 20 minutes a day) throughout the day, including outdoor community facilities which people are encourage to use. I wonder how Japan, especially Tokyo, is in this regard - especially office workers.
Having lived here awhile now, the idea of suicide in Japan is completely different from what it was in America. There are a couple things you have to keep in mind:
A) Mental illness is heavily stigmatized
B) Suicide is legal and only vaguely stigmatized
Oh, and if you kill yourself by jumping in front of a train (I don't know how many times I've sat on a train where we couldn't move until they cleaned it off), your family has to pay Japan Railways for the cost of repairs/cleaning. So, if you're crazy and hate your family and work 70 hours a week, suicide doesn't seem that bad, really. Nobody seems to care that much about it either. People always laugh and joke when the train comes to an abrupt stop.
Internet suicide is old news here. Just like your silly "cellular phones" and "computers". Telepathic communication is the new thing.
Certainly I think you raise a very good point, but there is a fundamental difference between east and west that nobody so far has touched upon, and it is important. We have a large stigma against suicide - in Japan that doesn't really exist, from what I understand. And there is a reason for that difference.
Put simply, Western spirituality is about how human beings relate to a divine being (God, Allah, etc.), but there is an assumption that human beings are not themselves divine. Eastern spirituality is about understanding how human beings are divine - they have part of the divine in them. So, ending your life in Western spirituality is a source of judgement and damnation at the hands of the divine, whereas ending your life in Eastern spirituality is in part setting the divine part of you free - hence, no ill spiritual aftereffects, and no stigma.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Actually more girls attempt to commit suicide than boys in the US, but more girls fail because they tend to eschew more gruesome and reliable methods.
English is easier said than done.
Then I visited East Africa where I found a priviledged few among a sea of poverty and hopelessness. But what struck me is the ease the Africans took life as. They seemed to be happy, always thinking that the following day would be a better one. They even shared the little they had, something very rare in a major city in the USA for example.
This makes me wonder....What is it that we in the west miss out? Why is it that suicide rates in the so-called first world are significantly higher than those in the third world? Can we still call ourselves developed? I doubt.
Where is the world going?
You just pulled that out of your ass, didn't you?
The majority of suicides in Japan are older men, peaking at 71.1 people per 100,000 for men in the 55-59 age range. This is not particularly surprising, considering the pressures on men of that age (higher chance of being made unemployed, older parents to look after, higher rate of divorce, lower chance of promotion, etc.).
Young girls don't even come close; the 15-19 year old female suicide rate is 5.6 per 100,000.
Further statistics available here.
Yo, we're normal high school kids. Get over the stereotype. We may look funny or listen to weird music, but hey, wasn't that the goths a few years back when everyone poked fun at them? We're as human as you. Don't let a few rotten apples ruin the whole bunch.
That is because there is a distinct difference between wanting to kill oneself and wanting the world to THINK you wanted to kill yourself, aka a call for help. The numbers are also skewed somewhat because many young girls attempt suicide on more than one occasion, whereas if you are successful that pretty much means it is your last attempt.
Many women kill themselves in violent "reliable" ways, they truly wanted to die, and of course many of the women who took a bunch of pills truly DID want to die, but most who slash their wrists in a very shallow way or who take pills are really making a call for help. They do not truly wish to die and so should be differentiated somewhat from actual suicide attempts that failed (such as botched gunshot wounds, many people attempt to shoot themselves without realizing the parts of their brains which are actually essential, that should most certainly be considered an actual attempt).
You do the math.
Very well. With a 2005 suicide rate of 91(!) per 100,000 (and the U.S's falling to just over 10, according the WHO), that means that the Japanese suicide rate alone is still over five times the U.S suicide and homicide rates combined. Surely that must be cause for some concern. (Whether one country is "better" than another is not relevant to this topic, just an irrelevant troll you brought up.)
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
ne of the most controversial aspects of World War II history, in relation to the present-day world, is the Rape of Nanking in 1937 when the Japanese army was moving through China and attacked the city of Nanking (sometimes spelled Nanjing).
This all arose as a result of Japan's invasion of Manchuria and its eventual attack on China proper. This is where there are two terms involved as to when WWII actually started. For the U.S. , WWII started on December 7, 1941 with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The war lasted around four years, ending in 1945. However, from the Japanese viewpoint, the war was really fifteen years long and is referred to as "The Fifteen Years War" since some Japanese date the war as starting with the invasion of China, the fight against the U.S. not taking place for over a decade.
There was a lead-up in the public to the war as there is with virtually any war and the society waging it. According to the book The Imperial Screen: Japanese Flm Culture in the Fifteen Years' War 1931-1945, 2003:
"The prelude, lasting several months, featured a montage of 'Chinese-inspired incidents' reported by the newspapers in headlings that quivered with indignation. The pattern was to last throughout the thirties, each incident being presented as 'unprovoked' and therefore inexplicable in terms of rational, historical causes."
Censorship, both government inspired and individual-inspired, became important both in film and in newspaper reporting. Even books were used to fan the feelings in Japan. For example, in 1938 there were 38 books attacking the Jewish presence in Japan which was quite interesting since, for all practical purposes, there were no Jews in Japan.
Even the language became controlled which a reaction set in to the use of foreign words in the language and English was labeled "the enemy language." The people were being put into a mind-set of war by their government and by the media. This becomes important when considering why some people consider that the Japanese have not sufficiently apologized for the Nanking massacre and other actions. In effect, the population was being given the mind-set that it was the Japanese who were being attacked and provoked by the Chinese, not the other way around, and why apologize for something you didn't actually start?
"During the China incident, the Japanese popular imagination tended to conceive of the Chinese as hostile, faceless masses, as columns of refugees stolidly trudging roads to nowhere, or as clumps of lifeless flesh littering trenches and riverbeds."
If you dehumanize a group of people then it becomes easier to justify anything that you end up doing to them.
According to the book Japan in the 21st Century: Environment, Economy, and Society (2005):
"It is widely accepted among scholars that after the sudden collapse of the Chinese defense of Nanjing in December, 1937, rampaging Japanese soldiers executed thousands of prisoners of war, civilians as well as men suspected of being soldiers, and burned the homes of Chinese. According to some, as many as 300,000 were killed in Nanjing; Japanese accounts vary from several thousand to 200,000 dead, while some Japanese politicians deny that the massacre ever took place. The Tokyo War Crimes tribunal concluded that more than 140,000 people were killed...making it one of the worst atrocities committed by Japanese forces before and during World War II."
There are some Japanese, like the paragraph above notes, that simply deny that the massacre ever took place, much as some people are denying that the Holocaust ever took place, despite all the spoken, written and photographic evidence to the contrary. Even though over sixty years have passed since the events the feelings are still quite strong in China over what happened. That hurts Chinese-Japanese political relationships. Another thing that is a sticking point is when Japanese politicians visit war memorials to Japanese dead.
This all stems from the original invasion of China by Japan whe
Some of the culturally insensitive postings by slashdot readers is a bit disturbing. Having lived in Japan for several years, it is clear that Western morals regarding suicide do not necessarily apply in this complex and ancient culture.
In addition, readers need to do their homework before posting factual errors or made-up numbers regarding its prevalence. More than 40% of the suicides in Japan are motivated by health-related reasons (older people whose health is failing). These suicide pacts comprise a very small percentage (less than 1%).
Anyway, below are some statistics from 2003 in an article that appeared in The Japan Times on July 23, 2004:
"A record 34,427 people committed suicide in Japan last year. (2003)
The figure, up 7.1 percent from the previous year, remained above 30,000 for the sixth consecutive year, the National Police Agency said in a report released Thursday.
The report says 8,897 people killed themselves over financial difficulties, up 12.1 percent from a year earlier and topping 8,000 for the first time since the NPA began keeping statistics on suicides in 1978.
Suicides motivated by financial difficulties accounted for a quarter of all suicides in the year, comprising the second-largest group, compared with 11.2 percent in 1994.
Almost 60 percent of the suicides in 2003 were by people in their 50s and older, it said.
Health reasons were the motivation for the largest number of suicides in 2003, prompting 15,416, or 44.8 percent of the total, to take their lives. Some 8.5 percent committed suicide due to family problems.
Men accounted for a record 72.5 percent of all suicides in 2003, contributing to the wider gap -- 6.97 years -- between the average life expectancies of men and women, as released earlier this month by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry."
Hmm... I thought the first rule of suicide club was "Are you connected with yourself?"
that was a good movie, if you can take it...
Actually, it's very very on topic for this post. It's all about following trends, and knowing who you are and what you want. Most people don't, and fall prey to other things.
Also the most blood I've ever seen in a movie... wow.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
You're assuming that those who choose to commit suicide, for any reason, isn't worthy of living (or the world is better off without them). While I can see how someone can see it that way, I would have to disagree.
It is very possible that these people can be very creative or smart and are in a temporary rut. Or it is also possible that they have somekind of illness like bipolar or manic depression, which is treatable.
Plus, I bet that almost all of them have friends or family that would be very upset with this.
After living here for about 6-7 years, and working in a Japanese office environment, suicide is the result of the non-violent way that the Japanese have dealt with getting rid of people you don't like.
The Japanese are no longer a violent race of people after the war, having said that, they are no less at peace with themselves or with others. Since they refuse to use violence, they have had to use other ways of controlling others - and the result is that the Japanese have evolved into a race of people who have learnt to push people's emotional buttons to defend themselves and get what they want.
The fact is, if you can mentally make a person turn on THEMSELVES - then you don't have to kill them. You feed them guilt, you over work them, you deprive them of sleep, you bully them, you ignore them, you socially ostracize them... all the while faking a smile at them and telling them that you like them.
OK, so someone gets angry and tries to use violence.... socially ostracized, arrested, lose your job, nobody will employ you, have a nice homeless life.
This is what the younger generation has been fighting against by refusing full term employment. This is why you have a nation of recluses. This is why some people are bumping themselves off.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Pink Floyd 1983 Post war dream lyrics "and it can't be much fun for them beneath the rising sun with all their kids committing suicide"
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
...But with all the internet fraud out there, I'd be worried about the other guy not upholding his end of the deal...
...they need a pay-pal type thing...a sort of "death-pal", which says that if you don't kill yourself, we'll send people to finish the job.
POLICE: As if your life didn't suck enough, suicide is illegal, so now you have to go to jail.
Logic at work.
That's because of our views about suicide. It reminds me of some show about religion I once saw on the History Channel. A Rabbi was explaining his religion's policy on suicides, and it went something like this: A person who commits suicide can not be given full religious rites upon their death, but a special exemption is made for mentally-ill people, and all people who commit suicide are considered to be mentally ill. It was a cute little end-around their own beliefs, but I digress.
It's not that the US wants to throw suicidal people in jail, it's that if it's not illegal they have absolutely no way to have a judge force a suicidal person into counseling or psychiatric observation/care. The belief in the US is that something has to be wrong with you if you want to kill yourself, and they want to treat that. Whether or not that is a proper view is open for debate.
(Hawaiian music)
Man#1 (Michael Palin) Aye! Very fussable, eh? Very fussable bit, that? eh?
Man#2 (Graham Chapman): Grand meal, that was, eh?
Others: Yes, wonderful, yes very good..
Man#2: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau le Shlasseler, eh, Guissay?
Man#3 (Terry Jones): Oh, you're right there, Robidaier.
Man#4 (Eric Idle): Who'd 'ave thought, thirty year ago, we'd all be
sitting here drinking Chateau de Shlasseler, eh?
Man#1: Aye, in them days we was glad to have the price of a cup of tea!
Man#2: Aye, a cup of cold tea!
Man#4: Without milk or sugar!
Man#3: Or tea!
Man#1: Aye, in a cracked cup and all!
Man#4: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a
rolled-up newspaper!
Man#2: Aye, the best we could manage in those days was to suck on a piece
of damp cloth!
Man#3: Aye, but we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
Man#1: Because we were poor! My old dad used to say to me: Money
doesn't buy you happiness!
Man#4: Aye, he was right, I was happier then and I had nothing. We
used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the
roof.
Man#2: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We had to all live
in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor
was missing, and were all huddled together in a corner for
fear of falling!
Man#3: You were lucky to have a room! We used to 'ave to live in a corridor!
Man#1: Oh, we used to DREAM of living in a corridor. It would have
been a palace to us. We used to have to live in an old
water tank in a rubbish pit. We got woke up every morning
by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!
House! Huh!
Man#4: Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground
covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us!
Man#2: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and
live in a lake!
Man#3: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty
of us, living in a shoebox in the middle of the road!
Man#1: Cardboard box?
Man#3: Aye!
Man#1: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in
a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the
morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread,
go to work down at the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week
out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home, our dad would
thrash us to sleep with his belt.
(slight pause)
Man#2: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock
in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel,
work a twenty-hour
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Suicide pacts encourage people to commit suicide, while in normal conditions the person could decide not to do it at the last minute. But in a group, this could result in peer pressure conditions. Encouraging someone to commit suicide is equivalent to killing him.
I love how a bunch of white dorks who watch anime, listen to j-pop and beat off to tentacle rape suddenly have this vast insight into the culture of japan. STFU dorks.
According to TFA, 91 is the number of suicide pact-related deaths in Japan in 2005. That is, 91 out of the entire population of Japan (around 130 million) died via suicide pacts (which encompass only a portion of total suicides). The 2003 data quote in the article gives a more realistic rate of ~27 per 100,000 and the WHO lists the 2002 average rate at 24 per 100,000.
"I have to wonder, what is it about Japanese culture that produces these people in such high numbers?"
When you says these people I am going to assume you means suicides in general, and not just suicide clubs. First of all I want to say that 26 people in 2 months having died in suicide clubs, is likely FAR below the number that actually happened with clubs, and is definitely far below the number of actual suicides.
I take the train in Tokyo to work everyday often, probably once per week, a train that I am riding on is delyed due to a "jishin jikko" which basically means self death incidient. Suicide is common in Japan. As to what cultural aspects influence this, not being a cultural expert, I can only guess at several.
1) Historically suicide was a way to maintain, or regain your honour. Honour and spirit are very important in Japanese culture. It is more important to the older generation than the younger generation, however, the younger generation cannot help but having these ideals ingrained into their subconscious.
2) Group thinking. The Japanese are extremely group oriented. The group is more important than the individual. Being ostracized by your group, and being in a position where you have let your group down can be extremely painful. It can be painful in any culture, but in Japan it is something more. There is an expression in Japan that says "The nail that sticks out must be hammered down!" This means that everyone should be alike and that anyone who is different should be forced to comply or exiled. For people who have never been in a group, or have been exiled from a group, the idea of joining a group again, where you are understood if even for a short time, could be a big motivator to join a suicide club.
3) Pride. Japanese people are very proud and adverse to failure. There have been cases where people have starved to death rather than go onto any kind of government assitance. There are very clear cultural rules regarding what is proper or improper behaviour and people would rather literally die than break some of those rules and be shamed in front of their friends and family.
4) Gaman suru! Gama suru essentially means to endure. In Japan, it is expected for people to endure hardships. To silently put up with tough situations and keep going. This is seen in many aspects of life here, whether it is pain, tough business situations, or the loss of a loved one. When the pressures get too high, it is hard to be able to talk to people and often suicide is seen as the easiest, most honourable out.
5) School system. The school system here is incredibly competitive. The study ethic here is higher than anywhere else I have seen in the world, and the pressure to perform is incredible. Students often finish school and then go to a private school for more intense training in the evenings. Getting into a good university here is the hardest part, and it can determine your life. Pressure and failures at school are huge stresses on the students, and it is often easier to kill yourself, than to admit failure.
If you look at the reasons above, and combine them together, it paints a better picture. There are probably reasons I have missed but I think the picture I have drawn is essentially correct. I have been in Japan for 6 years now, and am getting married to a Japanese woman in April. When we have children, I won't want them to go through a typical school in Japan.
Cheers,
CB