November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Scholars of self-destruction classify such acts as “institutional” or “ritual” suicides—deaths that are all but demanded by cultural tradition—as if they were embarrassing anachronisms that had nothing in common with suicides in the “civilized” world. They are thus dismissed as the acts of primitives. Yet in Japan for thousands of years suicide has been an acceptable, often honorable, way out of intolerable situations. “The Japanese calendar of saints,” wrote one nineteenth-century Western historian, “is not filled with reformers, alms-givers and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is overcrowded with canonized suicides and committers of hara-kiri. Even today, no man more . . . surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the suicide, though he may have committed a crime.”

  The Japanese attitude toward suicide is, in large part, based on a Buddhist tradition that places less value on life in this world than on life in the next. Existence on earth is ephemeral, the body is merely a temporary lodging of the soul, and biological life is not only meaningless but filled with suffering. Death is the point at which a person makes contact with the eternal world. If a person acquits himself well at the moment of death, offenses committed during his earthly life are forgiven. In some cases suicide can be the most exquisite death of all.

  Historically, suicide in Japan has enjoyed not only religious tolerance but state approval. The romantic aura that surrounds suicide grew out of the development of seppuku, a traditional form of suicide better known outside Japan as hara-kiri, or “belly-cutting.” It was practiced by the samurai, or military class, who followed an ethical code known as Bushido—“the way of the knights.” At the heart of Bushido was the creed of loyalty to one’s lord or to any matter of principle. When a bushi, or knight, was forced to choose between two courses of action, one of which involved the sacrifice of principle and the other the sacrifice of life, he unhesitatingly chose the latter. At the same time a man raised in the samurai tradition was taught from an early age that a samurai’s most important trait was to suppress outward displays of emotion, be it pleasure or pain. The supreme test of a samurai’s self-discipline and devotion to principle was the act of seppuku.

  Seppuku originated about a thousand years ago during the beginning of Japanese feudalism as an honorable way for a soldier to avoid the humiliation of capture. By the seventeenth century it was widely used as a death penalty for the samurai. While common criminals were hung in the town square, a member of the military class condemned to death might be allowed to expiate his crime by his own hand. Thus, obligatory seppuku was a privilege granted by the feudal lord, saving the samurai the shame of being handed over to the public executioner. Members of the military class were trained to prepare for the possibility of voluntary death by self-disembowelment, and warriors frequently rehearsed the seppuku ceremony, in which every step was prescribed by custom.

  A noble suspected of misconduct or of disloyalty would receive a letter from the emperor politely hinting that he must die. The letter was often accompanied by a jeweled dagger. On the appointed day, clothed in ceremonial dress, the doomed man knelt on a red mat on a small platform built for the occasion in his baronial hall or in the temple. Friends and officials formed a silent semicircle around him. After prayer the emperor’s envoy handed the dagger to the noble, who publicly confessed his wrongs. The noble stripped down to the traditional loincloth, plunged the dagger into the left side of his abdomen, drew it across to the right, then turned the blade and cut upward. As he fell forward, the kaishaku, a friend of the noble, severed the noble’s head with a long sword. The bloodstained dagger was taken back to the lord as proof of his noble’s fealty.

  Often, a disloyal noble anticipated the wishes of his lord and committed seppuku without prompting. There was incentive for this: if death had been demanded by the lord, only half the samurai’s property was forfeited to the state; if voluntary, his dishonor was erased and his family inherited his full fortune. Over the years voluntary seppuku became common in a variety of circumstances: to follow one’s dead lord into the next world; to avoid beheading by the enemy in a lost battle; to restore injured honor in a situation where revenge was impossible; to protest the conduct of a superior; to admit an error; to keep a secret; to turn one’s lord from a course of action that might injure his reputation. Whatever the motive, seppuku ensured the samurai a traditional burial and a respected memory.

  Seppuku eventually extended beyond the military class and became the national form of honorable suicide. It is believed that during the feudal ages some fifteen hundred cases of seppuku occurred each year, more than half of them voluntary. “The Japanese are an obstinate, capricious, resolute and whimsical people,” observed Montesquieu. “They have a natural contempt of death, and rip open their bellies for the least fancy.” In 1868, twenty samurai involved in the murder of a French officer were condemned to commit seppuku before the French ambassador. The latter found it difficult to appreciate this gesture, and after eleven of the soldiers had proved their remorse, he reprieved the remaining knights. While the practice appalled foreigners, it remained sacred to the Japanese; the following year a member of the Japanese parliament proclaimed seppuku “the very shrine of the Japanese national spirit and the embodiment in practice of devotion to principle.”

  Although obligatory suicide was prohibited by law in 1873 and the frequency of voluntary seppuku declined, it continued to be practiced—and acclaimed—as a noble death. In 1891, protesting the failure of the government to take action against Russian encroachments on Japan’s northern border, Lieutenant Ohara Takeyoshi became a national hero by disemboweling himself in front of the graves of his ancestors in Tokyo. After the Japanese-Chinese War, when Japan allowed Port Arthur to be occupied by the Russians, more than forty Japanese army officers committed seppuku in protest. But seppuku has often been chosen under less ostensibly heroic circumstances. In 1929, for instance, the almost 250 recorded cases of seppuku included rebels making political protests, railway watchmen atoning for accidents resulting from their negligence, and teenagers reprimanding their drunken fathers. That same year a Japanese naval captain at the Moscow embassy, taunted by his Russian teacher about his unflinching loyalty to the emperor, lost his temper and threw a chair at the woman, striking her on the hand. The mortified captain saw only one way to redeem his honor. He gave three thousand rubles to the teacher, wrote his will, and, kneeling in front of a photograph of the emperor, committed seppuku.

  Seppuku is, of course, only one of many methods of suicide used in Japan. It is not the method that distinguishes Japanese suicide, however, so much as its central role in the national tradition. There exists, in fact, a special vocabulary to describe various social genres of suicide. The naval captain who killed himself following the quarrel with his teacher was committing kashitsushi—suicide to admit failure or to atone for a mistake. Such suicides are a frequent occurrence in a country that places a premium on competition. In one recent year, for example, 275 company directors killed themselves after business disappointments or corruption scandals. Studies have attributed the high rate of Japanese adolescent suicide to fierce competition in schools. Failure to pass the exam for entrance to a university—or failure to be admitted to a prestigious university—brings shame to both student and family and is often an occasion for kashitsu-shi. The boys who committed seppuku to protest their father’s drunkenness were committing kangen-shi—a way of criticizing a superior in a society where few modes of criticism are available. A well-known example of gisei-shi—sacrificial suicide—was practiced by the kamikaze pilots of World War II, about twenty-two hundred of whom plunged to their deaths shouting, “Tenno heika banzai”—“Long live the emperor!” And though the compulsory suicide of wife, retainers, and slaves following a lord’s death was outlawed in AD 59, junshi—suicide following a master’s death—persisted. In 1912, all of Japan was inspired when sixty-three-year-old General Kiten Nogi, beloved hero of the 1904–5 war with Russia, and his wife committed seppuku fol
lowing the death of Emperor Mutsuhito. “He mingles with the gods on high, my mighty sovereign lord,” wrote Nogi, “and, with intensely yearning heart, I follow heavenward.”

  Suicide committed by more than one person is called shinju (literally “inside the heart”). Jyoshi shinju—love-pact suicide—became widespread toward the end of the seventeenth century, when increasingly rigid class stratification and strict codes of behavior forbade love between unmarried people. Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet) drama is full of love-pact suicide, usually involving a commoner and a geisha. Their union forbidden in this world, they kill themselves, often by tying themselves together with a rope and drowning, to ensure their union in the next. With arranged marriages the rule until recently, jyoshi shinju continued to flourish. In 1954 there were almost one thousand cases, and a few years later, in a poll asking teenagers what to do about a love that parents opposed, 45 percent answered that the “most beautiful” solution was double suicide. In 1985, when their marriage plans were forbidden by their families because they were said to be too old, a seventy-year-old man and a sixty-nine-year-old woman, both widowed more than twenty-five years, committed jyoshi shinju by hanging themselves in a hotel room.

  Oyako shinju—parent-child suicide—is still common. Plagued by poverty, unable to pay back loans, or humiliated by spouses, some parents kill their children and then kill themselves. In Japan, being an orphan has traditionally been considered a fate worse than death, and oyako shinju is often portrayed as an act of devotion. The majority of cases involve the mother, often under threat of impending divorce. In Japan, where women are trained to show obedience, divorcées often have difficulty finding respectable jobs, and in some instances, even their own families will not take them in. Some four hundred examples of oyako shinju are believed to occur each year. In several recent cases a mother, despondent because her sixteen-year-old son was depressed about his forthcoming school entrance exams, murdered her son and attempted to gas herself; an unemployed man and a woman who suffered from heart disease strangled their eighteen-year-old daughter and then gassed themselves; a woman suffering from stomach trouble strangled her two daughters, aged eight and ten, who had light cases of asthma, then attempted to gas herself. “My daughters and myself are so weak physically that we have caused you so much trouble,” she wrote her husband. “Please allow us to go ahead of you.”

  Although it still occupies a central role in the Japanese cultural imagination, since World War II, suicide, like many other Japanese institutions, has become “westernized.” In retrospect, the turning point may have occurred in 1970 with the suicide of Yukio Mishima.

  One of Japan’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, Mishima was born into an aristocratic samurai family. Mishima deplored what he saw as the materialistic decadence and moral decay of Japan’s postwar westernization, and in both his writing and his life he urged a return to the purer values of imperial Japan and the samurai tradition. Mishima took up bodybuilding at thirty and became an expert in karate and kendo, the ancient sword-fighting art practiced by samurai warriors. He organized the Shield Society, a private, eighty-five-man army dedicated to restoring the samurai spirit. All his life he was infatuated with suicide. “If you want your beauty to endure,” he wrote at age thirty-four, “you must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.” In one of his most famous short stories, a young army officer and his wife commit seppuku after a night of passionate lovemaking. Mishima subsequently made the story into a film in which he played the lieutenant.

  On November 25, 1970, at the age of forty-five, after sending his publisher the final portion of The Sea of Fertility, a quartet of novels he had been working on for many years, Mishima and four members of the Shield Society raided the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. From a balcony overlooking the courtyard, Mishima harangued a crowd of twelve hundred servicemen, accusing the Self-Defense Forces of impotence, denouncing Japan’s United States–imposed constitution, and urging them to restore the prewar Japanese state based on rule by the emperor. The soldiers hooted and called Mishima a fool. Realizing the futility of continuing, Mishima walked inside, shouting, “Tenno heika banzai,” then performed the ancient ritual of seppuku. His chief lieutenant served as kaishaku, severing Mishima’s head with a sword before committing seppuku himself and being beheaded in turn.

  Although a few right-wing groups called Mishima a hero, for the most part, both in Japan and abroad, his death was seen as an example more of histrionic posturing than of protest, a pathetic gesture rather than a noble act. (The Japanese prime minister suggested Mishima was mad.) The three young disciples who survived the raid were sentenced to four years in prison on charges that included “murder by request”—the first time in Japanese history that the venerable custom of beheading a friend as he committed seppuku was made the basis for criminal charges. In articles appraising Mishima’s life and death, Japanese and Western writers alike focused on his domineering grandmother, his homosexuality, his narcissism, his obsession with death. A book reviewer for the New York Times described Mishima as “a sadomasochistic homosexual for whom death was the ultimate act of exhibitionism and self-gratification. It would not be too much to see Mr. Mishima’s suicide as a fatal form of masturbation.”

  Mishima’s suicide may have stemmed as much from his sexual psychoses as from his loyalty to the samurai principle; more accurately, the two were inextricably linked. But in the rush to psychoanalyze Mishima, we may have lost sight of his death as being his own, as having meaning beyond the aberrant motives others assigned to it. As after any suicide, Mishima’s entire life was reinterpreted in light of his death. Even his literary output was reevaluated; reviewers found weaknesses they had apparently not noticed before, the psychosexual elements were highlighted with knowing remarks, and his stock as a writer dipped. The postmortem seemed an ironic illustration of what Mishima’s suicide was ostensibly protesting. The suicide of a man who had killed himself to protest Japan’s westernization was viewed from a distinctly Western perspective. Today, most Japanese regard Mishima with embarrassment.

  Because of suicide’s honored place in Japanese culture, it has often been assumed that the Japanese suicide rate dwarfs that of Western countries. Yet despite Durkheim’s contention that “the readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known,” for many years suicide in Japan was no more prevalent than in the West, its rate of about 19 per 100,000 higher than that of the United States but lower than that of many northern or eastern European countries. In the last decade, however, the rate has risen precipitously. In 1998, Japan’s rate of 26.1, more than twice that of the United States, was among the highest in the world. The rising rate has been blamed primarily on Japan’s decade-long recession, which has spawned widespread layoffs, bankruptcy, and homelessness. A great many of the suicides are those of middle-aged businessmen who have been let go by the companies for which they’ve worked for decades.

  The rising rate, perhaps not coincidentally, comes at a time when the traditional Japanese conception of suicide has been changing. Seppuku, of course, has all but disappeared; Japanese suicides now choose pills, gas, or hanging. Press accounts of suicides are followed by familiar-sounding discussions of economic strain, psychological crisis, and the breakdown of the nuclear family. The Japanese, it is said, now kill themselves for the same reasons people kill themselves in the West. The military official who takes his life in shame over a security leak and the man who takes his life to protest a political action are now likely to be discussed as psychological misfits. Although the National Police Agency continues to sort suicides by traditional causes (health, financial worries, and so forth), Japanese psychiatrists invariably cite depression as the underlying culprit.

  The rising rate has met with an increasingly Western response. The country’s first suicide prevention hotline, formed a year after Mishima’s death, now has fifty branch offices. A Japanese Association for the Prevention of Parent-Child Suicide
has been formed. In 2001, the Japanese government allocated money to suicide prevention for the first time, funding suicide awareness programs, publishing a booklet listing the warning signs of suicide, and advising companies to offer counseling to troubled employees. Three years later, the Japanese Medical Association distributed a “Suicide Prevention Manual” to physicians and medical students, instructing them how to detect and treat depression and urging them to get troubled patients into psychiatric care, where they are more and more likely to be treated with antidepressant medication.

  These developments reflect a conceptual change in how depression is viewed. Acceptance of suffering is at the center of traditional Buddhist thought; for centuries, Japanese saw sadness as an inevitable human condition, not a medical problem. Only in the most extreme cases was depression considered to be abnormal, and treatable in institutions; the notion of mild depression was unknown. Then, in 1999, in a rather dramatic illustration of the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, a Japanese pharmaceutical company decided to introduce SSRIs to Japan and came up with the phrase kokoro no kaze—a soul that has caught a cold—to describe mild depression and suggest the need for its alleviation. The American pharmaceutical giants quickly followed. “People didn’t know they were suffering from a disease,” a Japanese product manager for Paxil said. “We felt it was important to reach out to them.” Between 1998 and 2003, sales of antidepressants in Japan quintupled. Whether the Japanese are happier is not yet clear. Perhaps not surprisingly, an increasing number of Japanese are found to suffer from kokoro no kaze. In 2004, in a public admission that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, the imperial family acknowledged that Crown Princess Masako was on antidepressants and in counseling for depression and an “adjustment disorder.”

  Despite these symptoms of westernization, suicide in Japan remains in transition—a blend of traditional and contemporary attitudes that have tragically been entwined over the past few years in a rash of “Internet suicides,” in which strangers browse the Web in search of a date not for love but for death. In Japan, the Internet is chockablock with suicide-related Web sites, chat rooms, and bulletin boards on which lonely young people can read about suicide in history, debate the pros and cons of various methods, and advertise for suicide partners. One such site offers a slide show of “proper” places to kill oneself—forested spots with views of Mount Fuji are particularly popular—and rates ten suicide methods for such considerations as “pain,” “chance of success,” and “annoyance to other people.” In 2003, thirty-four Internet suicides were reported. The following year, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two advertised for suicide partners on the Net and within days recruited six young volunteers: four men and two women, all strangers to each other, who traveled from as many as six hundred miles away. When they met for the first time, they drove a rented van to a mountainside parking lot west of Tokyo, sealed the van from the inside with tape, took sleeping pills, lit charcoal stoves, and tied themselves to each other. Next to the mother of two, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, the police found a note: “Mother is going to die, but I was happy to give birth to you.” Japanese clinicians suggest that these Internet suicides are carried out by aimless, despairing, emotionally crippled people who seek in death something they are unable to find in life. And yet these suicides represent a sort of hightech gloss on the venerable tradition of jyoshi shinju—love-pact suicide. “One single suicide seems quite awful and wrong,” Yukio Saito, a Methodist minister who founded the country’s first suicide prevention hotline, told a reporter. “But a double suicide has, in a sense, affection and peace, solace.”