Join the dots
06/05/2006 @ 5:47 pm
OK, a bit late with this one, but I figured last week’s government stats surrounding both suicide and fertility should not pass without mention on here.
The problem is not just limited to the more traditional methods of ending it all, according to the UK Guardian:
The number of Japanese people killing themselves in online death pacts rose alarmingly again last year, despite government efforts to monitor websites where suicidal people meet.
So, suicide up again, birthrate down again. Make of that what you will.
Poor Mari….she’s my favorite. If I ever become a j-pop singer and part of the...
Shes definitely at the top of my hot list.
perfeckt 10:10
Well, if those stats keep up, eventuallu there will be no people. Simple as that. The huge number of suicides is puzzling, though. In a country that most foreigners admire and love, why do so many Japanese want to commit suicide there? Must be the social pressure, and the invisible walls of do this do that, which we foreigners do not face in such a society.
Then again, lots of people suicide in USA, Sweden, France, which nation has highest stats per population? I don’t think Japan is tops. But the high rate really is alarming.
June 5th, 2006 at 10:45 pmObviously Japan does not have the same taboo surrounding suicide as in the (Christian) West and you could also point to the near-glamourisation of seppuku.
In particular, mental health provision in Japan is near non-existent — there’s probably a lot of people who’d still be alive if they’d sought help earlier down the line. Rather than say ‘Oh what a pity’, the onus is on the state to make amends for this through public policy.
The mental health issue is for another post, but there’s a certainly a lot of ‘knock-on’ issues which have a statistical high rate in Japan when compared (pro-rata) to elsewhere.
June 5th, 2006 at 11:02 pmI have no problem with this. Japan is too crowded anyway.
June 6th, 2006 at 4:02 am“Well, if those stats keep up, eventuallu there will be no people. Simple as that.”–Danny Bloom
I don’t quite see it that way. Like Paul said, Japan is overcrowded. We all know that. The slowing birthrate and decline in population is a CORRECTION. You can’t have exponential growth forever, or we’d populate ourselves out of a planet.
The stock market corrects itself all the time. The same happens with the human population. In the case of Japan, the correction is happening without a plague, war or revolution. Everybody just got depressed, stopped having sex, and started killing themselves.
In other countries where cultural and environmental factors are different, it might take a more catastrophic event to trigger a population correction.
June 6th, 2006 at 8:27 amStill wishing death on people, Paul? Delightful habit.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:25 amaren’t you all exaggerating a little bit? It’s not like “everybody started killing themselves”
June 6th, 2006 at 9:49 amit is a bit outdated but japan is not the first.
One theory I heard about the high Japanese suicide rate correlated that with the comparatively low crime rate (comparatively vs. the West.) It suggested that while people in most cultures worldwide tend to take their frustrations out on other people the Japanese are conditioned to direct that aggression toward themselves.
I’m not a sociologist but somehow that just doesn’t mesh for me. What do you guys think?
June 6th, 2006 at 10:36 amI thought the biggest surprise in the figures was the very high rate of old people killing themselves. I had a look at Australian figures for comparison, and while we share the “middle age” hump that Japan seems to, suicide in Australia then drops away for older ages.
That the Japanese figures are skewed this way surprises me because I would have thought that the system where there is less institutional aged care in Japan compared to western countries, might mean less suicide there. Seems not to be the case.
Actually, the article notes the very high number of suicides related to health issues. I am sure I read before that in Japan there is quite a bit of reluctance in hospitals to withdraw treatment and let people die. Maybe it is a combination of a fear of a long lingering death through their health system, and being a burden on their families, that leads to such a high suicide rate in the aged?
June 7th, 2006 at 9:42 am