Just another suicide?
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Chou
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Each day some two and a half million commuters pass through the turnstiles at Tokyo's Ikebukuro metro station. For the uninitiated the experience can be so exhilarating it is overwhelming. Thousands of passengers crowd its platforms with little clemency or room to spare. Pushing and shoving these passengers into carriages is all that the attendants, oshiya, can do to maintain order. Which, surprisingly, they do. In this, the world's second-busiest train station, chaos has never seemed so orderly. Of course, a lot of it rides literally on the trains, which seem to come frequently and on time – every time. No visitor to the city leaves this or any of its other metro stations thinking any different.
Still, delays occur; though when they do it's often not for reasons one expects. Having ridden the trains from Ikebukuro station on enough occasions, I know how ordered, efficient and punctual the metro is. Trains that come after their allotted slot risk being passed by the next train, and then the one after that.
In early 2004, having not long arrived in the city, I experienced one of these rare delays. The scheduled train, clearly late, was a source of visible consternation for the morning passengers. Five, then ten minutes passed. Still no train. After several more tense and impatient moments, the frustrated and confused crowd was hoarded onto another platform and into a different train. Before boarding I asked a station attendant what had happened. Though his English was sparse, the meaning of his words was not. He paused, longer than was necessary, as if grappling with meaning if not with language, and replied: ‘Just another suicide.'
I hadn't seen a thing in the throng of waiting passengers. You're hard pressed to see much when the crush inundates the platforms during peak hour. I couldn't be sure that the suicide had taken place at the station. For all I knew it could have happened further down the track. I had no solid facts. I had no corporeal connection to this individual who, I presumed, had lived in a country that was only beginning to open to me. From that January morning, I remember scattered rays from the winter sun locked in elusive embrace with those eager passengers who, following the day's mishap, seemed all too ready to resume their lives, go about their business as usual.
Which is what I did, only fully realising afterwards how much the attendant's revelation had affected me. What unsettled me, most deeply I think, had something to do with his choice of words, his locution and tone. Communicated by three words, completely unremarkable in and of themselves, was an equivoque – an undertone or subtext that resisted easy interpretation. Perhaps it was just the language barrier or a cultural misunderstanding, at the very least the deafening hum of an agitated crowd left me with this impression. I can't say for sure. Whatever it was, though, it left its mark – which has echoed since in a question I sometimes find myself asking: was this just another suicide?
YES. 'DESPITE ITS ASTONISHING PUNCTUALITY,' says one Japan Times editorial, ‘Tokyo's railway web has been chronically plagued by suicides that occur on a daily basis.' Thirty-year-old Yukari Omoto, a resident of Kunitachi City, on Tokyo's outskirts, corroborates this claim. ‘There seem to be suicides,' at the railroad crossing, ‘all the time,' she says. Living right beside the tracks she has almost become accustomed to the dreaded sound of halting locomotives, followed swiftly by the cold thud of human flesh making its fatal impact, followed by the commotion and distress of onlookers and officials in the aftermath. Once, she saw an entire incident take place from her apartment window.
Because the problem is so serious and occurs so frequently, many now see suicide as an almost conventional norm in Japanese society. When it occurs, it's as if people expect it. They understand, even if they don't always condone it. But suicide in Japan goes much deeper. Leaping in front of trains has received so much publicity only because it inconveniences the public so greatly.
Each year a large number of Japanese end their lives by jumping in front of trains or off tall buildings, overdosing on drugs or hanging. Some even commit suicide in pacts or with the help of suicide websites. In 2003, for example, there were 34,427 suicides in Japan, an average of ninety-four suicides a day – twenty-seven suicides per hundred thousand Japanese: the ninth-highest rate in the world and the highest among developed countries.
Men are particularly at risk, especially men over sixty. With the onset of the global financial crisis, the problem will worsen. In an ‘uncomfortable and restrictive society where', as the Japanese social commentator Professor Kiyohiko Ikeda says, even ‘trivial matters are important', suicide has developed into an epidemic. Standing from the outside looking in, it's easy to see why Japan is commonly dubbed the ‘suicide nation'. And it's easy to see why a suicide that caused momentary havoc at Ikebukuro station might be seen as just another suicide.
But even from the outside, it's clear that there's something about suicide in Japan, beyond official statistics, that makes it uniquely Japanese. And it's these factors, very possibly buried within the attendant's words that day, which left me raw. Unsatisfied with the numbers I kept on looking, hoping that by doing so I'd find a fuller answer to my question: was this just another suicide?