Japan has a lot of suicides. Almost as many as Russia. Around 18.5 per 100,000 people a year. Given the population, that’s quite a lot in absolute numbers. Only India, China, and the US have more. Russia and Japan come after them, in fourth and fifth place.
But only Japan developed its own unique culture of ritual suicide. We all know the words harakiri and seppuku. I first came across seppuku, by the way, back when I worked at Mail.ru. It was an especially fashionable word among the programmers and sysadmins. The greater the responsibility, the more often I’d hear about seppuku.
The difference between harakiri and seppuku is simple: seppuku is ritual suicide done fully by the book, for real samurai. Harakiri is for the commoners. Any fool can do that, even with a kitchen knife.
There’s also the concept of “jigai.” That’s the suicide of a female samurai. Women didn’t cut open their bellies; they bravely cut their own throats instead. From an anatomical standpoint that’s considerably easier and less painful.
The first powerful seppuku dates to 1156. It was performed by a certain Minamoto no Tametomo, to avoid disgrace after a military defeat. And from then on it caught on. Right up to the middle of the 19th century, it was normal to cut open your belly over any reason at all — reasons that would strike a European as utterly trivial. But if you’ve read my other notes on Japan, you already understand that the gap in mentalities is enormous.
In the 20th century the culture began to change, and the samurai became legends of the past, so ritual suicides grew far less common. Although the notions of honor survived.
Here’s one case, for example. During the Russo-Japanese War, General Nogi Maresuke spent a long time unable to take Port Arthur and lost somewhere north of 50,000 soldiers. He desperately wanted to perform seppuku over it. But the emperor said something along the lines of “Over my dead body. Your country still needs you.” Nogi held out for 7 years. In 1912 the emperor died. Nogi exhaled and finally performed his long-awaited seppuku. Together with his wife.
And today?
Today nobody performs seppuku. Although at a flea market or in souvenir shops you can buy the necessary “harakiri at home” kit. The special short sword and all the rest of it, I mean.
The modern, fashionable method of suicide is to jump in front of a train. A friend of mine who lives in Tokyo described it like this.
“I’m on my way to work. Rush hour, 8:30 in the morning. And then the train stops. I ask what happened — and they explain that someone jumped onto the tracks. I went pale. This is a horrible tragedy. The train I was riding just ended someone’s life. And the Japanese standing around me are merely annoyed. They’re late for work. The next day the same thing happened again. And when it happened a third time in one week, I was snorting with irritation right along with the rest of the late-for-work Japanese. Fine, you want to off yourself, but why does it have to be my train?! Do it at home in the bathtub, be a man about it! Or, for heaven’s sake, there’s the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Fuji. All the normal people do it there.”
In short, none of it is simple. Among young people, suicide is actually the single most common cause of death. Didn’t get into university — onto the tracks. Didn’t get hired by your dream company — onto the tracks. No money — well, you get the idea. Why live in disgrace, when you can die with honor, like the heroes of old?
By the way, since 2006 Japan has had a “Basic Act on Suicide Prevention.” So it goes.