Why Are Japanese So Depressed and Suicidal?
Don't get me wrong, I love the people and culture. But one must ask, what the heck is going on there? Suicide Forests? Depression, angst, mental issues, suicide are way to common.
shareI don't think I have an answer to your question but let me mention a couple of things.
If you look at the list of countries by suicide rate, Japan is only the 17th and we all know suicide in Japan has literally a whole culture built around it (harakiri, kamikaze, etc). I find it a lot more worrying that Central/Eastern European countries have very similar suicide statistics and while in Japan it's seen as an honorable thing to do, in Europe it's definitely not. A lot of Japanese kill themselves because they see it as a noble way to die or for some reason they think it's the "right thing to do", without having any mental issues.
Also, this book was published in 1987 and is set in the 1960s/70s. Things were different back then. I'm not sure in what way, since I'm not Japanese nor am I that old, but it wouldn't be fair to view this story in today's setting.
I spent a couple of weeks in Japan as an exchange student and in my experience they are very sheltered people. Very punctual, perfectionist, don't talk that much. They're not like Americans, where going to your psychologist to whine about how miserable your life is as an upper-middle class teenager is basically the new IT-thing. Being reserved does not equal depression though, just a different culture. Neither one is better, in my opinion.
In July, a guy working in a facility for the disabled killed 19 people and it was Japan's deadliest mass killing since WWII. Look at the western world: this is everyday life here. Just try to count how many murders the USA or Europe had in the last 70 years committed by mentally unstable people.
I'm not saying there's no problems around suicide in Japan and there's actually quite a few other factors that contribute to the relatively high rank (they work too much, the school system is basically designed to make you mental, family members spend too little time together), I'm saying that the way the issue is portrayed is very distorted. There's definitely no "suicide forests" lol, and no mass depression, it's more like a cultural thing there and if you look at it that way, that 17th place is actually a lot lower than what I would expect.
There's definitely no "suicide forests" lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aokigahara#Suicides
The OP is partly incorrect (singular, not plural; there's only one "suicide forest"), but you are too. I'm kind of surprised if you didn't know about Aokigahara.
Also, I don't mean this in a confrontational way, but I don't think you can talk like you're an expert on Japan because you've spent a couple weeks there as an exchange student. That's only a step above being a tourist, and two or three weeks is way too short in any case to form any kind of deep judgments about a country and its people. Even two or three months would be too short for that.
I also think, and again I don't mean this confrontationally, that your paragraph about suicide being "honorable" is a bit of a stereotype too. There is that aspect of Japanese history, with seppuku and the kamikaze pilots and all, but even then it's mostly played up that way by Japanese conservatives who portray the past in a certain light for ideological purposes and Westerners with their own prejudices trying to explain the "inscrutable Japanese".
I think the reasons for suicide in Japan, by and large, aren't so very different from the reasons people commit suicide anywhere else, and it has less to do with unique aspects of Japanese culture and history (though i'm sure there's some of that) than with decades of economic stagnation, people struggling to find work, declining job security for those who do have work, social welfare getting curtailed, poverty going up, people struggling between low wages and trying to afford expensive rent and food, the huge bullying epidemic in Japanese schools (which are already stressful enough in terms of the workload on students and the social pressure to succeed), the infamously oppressive Japanese workplace in which people work for 12 or 14 or more hours per day and enjoy very little in terms of benefits or vacation time (this has also given rise to another problem, Karoshi, "death by overwork"; see link below). I know you did mention some of this stuff, but you kind of did it in passing and over-emphasized the other bit, in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
So, while Japan does have its own unique conditions, I don't think the high suicide rate can be attributed too much to the history of "honorable suicide" in Japanese culture. There's some of that, for sure, every place has its own culture that affects the way people do things, but for the most part I think the reasons are pretty universal. I think it can be attributed mostly to the worldwide conditions of economic hardship of late-stage capitalism, with sluggish economic growth, recessions, austerity, export of capital from industrialized countries to the third world, the global free market causing fierce competition for jobs with lower-wage workers abroad, driving down living standards overall. Etc. Japan in particular has had it pretty bad since the early 1990s (and despite the much-vaunted "economic success" prior to that, things weren't all sunshine and candy before either; the Karoshi problem has been going on since at least the 1960s), and things got worse with the 2008 economic crisis. share