In the Field: Hear from CNN reporters across the globe Blog Archive - Struggling and suicidal «

March 20, 2009

Posted: 1405 GMT

What gives Taro's history away is not a look in his eye or the shuffle in his walk. It's the slashes across his wrist, wounds that one year after his suicide attempt appear to still be healing. He pulled up his sleeve to show me, saying he still thinks about killing himself as the job offers never come.

Aokigahara Forest near the base of Mount Fuji.

"I'd lost my identity," 46-year-old Taro said, explaining how he'd been fired from his job as a driver for an iron manufacturing company.In Japan, where your job is your identity, that made him worthless in his own eyes. Taro had heard about Aokigahara Forest, known in Japan as the suicide forest. He decided to go there and disappear into the sea of trees.

He wandered for days, waiting for death to come. But the cuts into his wrist weren't deep enough and the weather not quite harsh enough. He eventually stumbled into some bushes, dehydrated, starved and suffering from frostbite on his toes. He would eventually lose some of the toes because of that frostbite. He would have died, had a hiker not stumbled across his nearly dead body. The hiker called paramedics and the police.

The hospitals didn't want to take him, Taro explained. Since he had no job and was homeless, he kept getting rejected. The police finally connected Taro with a credit counseling organization that found him a hospital that would treat his injuries.

For four months, Taro stayed in the hospital. When he was well enough to leave, the same credit counseling agency found him a shelter where he could live and try to look for work. So far, he hasn't found a job - a challenge in Japan's deepening recession.

There's not a lot of help for people like us, Taro says. By us, he means the unemployed and the bankrupt. Taro believes as Japan's corporations cut tens of thousands of workers, most of them temporary workers who already are considered the working poor, the suicide problem will escalate.

National statistics show that's indeed the case; January 2009 saw a 15 percent increase in successful suicides from January 2008.

Japan also has a cultural history that embraces suicide. Seppuku is a form of Japanese ritual suicide originally reserved only for samurai. Seppuku was part of the samurai honor code, where warriors killed themselves rather than fall into the hands of their enemies or for reasons that shamed them. It's a notion that still persists in a culture that doesn't adhere to a religious notion of spending an eternity in hell if you commit suicide.

Taro says he still thinks about suicide but that the will to live is stronger, for now. What would erase those thoughts, he says, is a job.

Posted by: CNN Tokyo correspondent, Kyung Lah
Filed under: Asia • Economy • General • Japan

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Ray Hu

March 28th, 2009 1705 GMT

Somebody out there, why don't you give Taro a JOB?

Andrew Grimes JFP, JSCCP

September 20th, 2009 456 GMT

I would like to put forward a perspective on the real reasons behind the unacceptably high suicide Japan from Japan and so will limit my comments to what I know about here in Japan but would first like to suggest that western media reports on suicide rates in Asian countries should try harder to get away from the tendency to orientalize the serious and preventable problem of increased suicide rates here over the last 10 years by reverting to stereotypical ideas of Asian people in general.

Mental health professionals in Japan have long known that the prime causes for the unnecessarily high suicide rate in Japan are unemployment, the effects of 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 an 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 very proactive and well funded local and nation wide suicide prevention programs and initiatives are immediately it is very difficult to foresee the governments previously stated intention to reduce the suicide rate to around 23,000 by the year 2016 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) 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.

Useful telephone number 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

Andrew Grimes

Tokyo Counseling Services

http://tokyocounseling.com/english/
http://tokyocounseling.com/jp/
http://www.counselingjapan.com

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