Some time ago I posted a review of the movie Suicide Club. It was a very disturbing film, but one that I thought might be interesting to our readers in so far as it said a lot about contemporary Japanese society and by implication, modern civilization as a whole. I had no idea at the time that certain events in Japan are almost as disturbing, and in many ways more disturbing, than those in the movie.
Suicide Club begins with a group of Japanese teenagers, all of them young women, holding hands and jumping in front of a train. We learn shortly that this is one of a series of group suicides that are somehow arranged by a mysterious series of dots on a web site. It will turn out that the suicide cult has no real leadership, other than the youth of Japan collectively.
It turns out that the suicide cult is real. It is documented in the Atlantic Monthly (May 2007) by David Samuels. The link may be protected by a subscription wall, but I highly recommend the article.
On March 10, 2006, a car was discovered in a lightly wooded area of Saitama, a suburban prefecture near Tokyo. The windows had been taped shut. What the investigating officers who were called to the scene found was all too familiar: a plastic bag containing traces of crushed sleeping pills, and a row of charcoal burners that had sucked the oxygen from the car, asphyxiating the five young men and one woman inside. . . . During my first two weeks in Japan, five cars filled with dead bodies were discovered in the woods around Tokyo. It is a sign of how familiar these macabre cases have become that none merited more than a passing mention in the local newspapers.
Japan is experience an epidemic of anonymous, group suicide. People who have never met before find one another on the Internet, and gradually plan their exit. This is an example of a self-organizing system: coordinated activity initiated and guided from the players at the lowest level. But if the suicide cult has no cult leader, it nonetheless has a guru.
To the extent that the popular revival of suicide culture can be traced to any single event, this would be the publication, in 1993, of The Perfect Suicide Manual, a book by Wataru Tsurumi, a Tokyo University graduate and publishing-industry dropout. Tsurumi is an obsessive who professes a Nabokovian indifference to the consequences of publishing his work. In a culture where conformity is expected and geeks have a surprising amount of cultural power, he is a charismatic figure who has attained the kind of celebrity status usually reserved in Japan for pop stars or cartoon characters.
To date, The Perfect Suicide Manual has provided more than 2 million despairing or simply curious Japanese souls with technically explicit instructions on how to take their lives by 10 methods including hanging, electrocution, drug overdose, asphyxiation, and self- immolation. Tsurumi’s book contains tips about the best places to commit suicide, accounts of famous celebrity suicides, and assorted cartoons, whose effect is to suggest that suicide is easy and painless, a common, socially acceptable activity. Tsurumi sold his book to a movie studio, spawning a successful splatter film, which was followed by a sequel. He is now a highly paid celebrity speaker and a fixture on the international youth-culture circuit. As he told one inquiring reporter, “There’s nothing bad about suicide. We have no religion or laws here in Japan telling us otherwise. As for group suicides, before the Internet, people would write letters, or make phone calls … it’s always been part of our culture.”
The "splatter film," I am sure, is Suicide Club. So what is it about modern Japan, a remarkably successful nation by any rational, economic standards, that encourages this sort of horror? Samuels considers and rejects economic causation. Japan suffered from a long recession, to be sure; but the suicides have become more frequent as the nation's economy recovered. It is no doubt important that suicide was often considered an honorable act in samurai culture.
Whereas in the West, suicide is generally seen as the needless act of desperate souls, or of the terminally ill, in Japan it is understood as a more or less rational decision that can be taken by perfectly sane individuals as well as by groups. Japan has a long history of families committing suicide together, as well as suicides by cults and militaristic groups, including kamikaze pilots, or samurai warriors who suffered dishonor and hoped to wipe the slate clean. What is shocking about the new suicide epidemic is not so much that it is a group activity as that people are choosing to kill themselves together with total strangers. The Perfect Suicide Manual has become the essential text of a decentralized death cult that takes orders from no one, and whose members meet on Web sites designed solely to support and strengthen their common intention to die.
In the Japanese past, individual and group suicide was in the service of group loyalties: national greatness of family honor. What seems to have happened to the Japanese is that all those loyalties have collapsed. For more than a few twenty-somethings in Japan, the escape of death is the only principle that can bring them into contact with other people.
To end with a discomforting thought: it may be that Japan is the most modern of all modern nations. We in the West have struggled to liberate ourselves from the obligations of group loyalty. It may be that we have no suicide cults only because we have been less successful at this than the Japanese.
Recent Comments