And So It Goes

Actual Reader Feedback:

Have you come to understand the current Japanese philosophy as regards suicide? Is it still considered an honorable act?
- Steve, 10/11/02

Oh good, my first question. I love to warm up with easy questions like this.

Okay, I lied.

No disrespect, Steve, but I don't feel equipped to answer a question like this, because I lack both the deep cultural anthropology knowledge to weigh the question and the sheer chutzpah to think I could actually answer it. It's not as if the subject comes up in everyday conversation, except possibly in relation to the occasional inconvenience caused when someone commits suicide by flinging him/herself in front of a train on Japan Rail's Chuo Line at Kunitachi station and delays train service. Messy and expensive, apparently, because Japan Rail bills the suicide victim's family for the cost. (Thank God, not an everyday occurrence),

(Oddly, my first encounter with this phenomenon came from a mention in an in-flight movie I saw on a Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo, a Japanese comedy whose title was listed in the in-flight magazine as Fishing Nut 10 (or Tsuribaka Nisshi 10 in Japanese). As part of the plot, one of the characters, an elderly company president, walks away from his job in disgust and disappears (his chaffeur drives him off to the shore to spend the rest of the day fishing). His salaryman friend and fishing partner, hearing about the resignation at home that evening and not having heard from the man, is concerned, especially when the TV news announces another train suicide. "Omigosh," he tells his wife, distraught, "there've been a lot of suicides on the Chuo Line recently, especially near Mitaka! What if he killed himself! Oh no, my friend is dead!" He works himself into a lather, of course, until the moment his "dead" friend knocks on the door causing the salaryman to faint from the excitement. I found this scene odd because a) jokes about suicide? and b) my final destination was Mitaka, to visit my then-girlfriend.)

My difficulty in answering Steve's question doesn't even consider the problems with its wording. I mean, what does he mean by "honorable"? There's a whole lot of implications in that choice of word which I'm wary of unpacking.

I know my limitations: I am not a foreign correspondent, journalist, or professional commentator, and what I write about is what I know. And while Japan, its society, and its culture has its oddities and strange (to Americans) aspects, I'm trying not to report what I don't see: if I'm going to perpetuate misunderstandings, they'll be my personally-witnessed misunderstandings. I'll take responsibility for my own ignorance, not someone else's second-hand version (though I will feel free to pass along tHose with proper attribution).

Given my limited viewpoint, I'll try not to speak about "The Japanese" or even "Tokyoites." As Alan Booth writes in the preface to his (highly recommended) 1985 travelogue, The Roads To Sata:

I have tried to avoid generalizations, particularly "the Japanese." "The Japanese" are 120,000,000 people ranging in age from 0 to 119, in geographic location across 21 degrees of latitude and 23 of longitude, and in profession from emperor to urban guerilla.

My geographic location is 35 degrees North and 139 East (Tokyo), and my profession is monolingual American English Instructor. My observations of Japan (and Tokyo) will be, therefore, severely limited by circumstance and knowledge. Alan Booth I'm not.