One of the great things about Google is that it lets you know quickly when the work has already been done by someone else. Trouble is, this is almost always the case: no matter how arcane or perverse the topic may seem to be, it's odds-on that someone will have got there first. They may or may not have made a better job of things than you would, but there is very little under the sun (or anywhere else) that someone has not published an article about. And so I suppose it is unsurprising that a topic as close to life as suicide in Japan should have been well researched and reported.
I've now been in Japan for over a month, which was previously my longest period of stay, and recently my thoughts have been turning increasingly to suicide [PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED BY THIS! I am not thinking personally, but more abstractly]. This is a country in which almost everyone has a level of material security, well-being, and personal convenience considerably in advance of anything in the UK or US, let alone in such awful places as DR Congo (which just happens to be in the news today). It could change of course, but at present Japan's average citizen — and there are a lot more of these people in Japan than in England (where median rather than mean income is the more informative measure, and where there is more like a bi-modal distribution) enjoys a very good life in material terms. It is a safe, secure, and comfortable place. And yet the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world. This might seem strange until you think about it more deeply, when it starts to make some sense. For it is only in a society where every material need is met that the conditions are right to face the devastating emptiness of most human existence. By contrast, suicide rates are comparatively low in developing countries where people face a daily struggle for physical survival, also in wartime in developed countries, where again, such effete metaphysical concerns tend not to rank as highly as finding food and safe drinking water for oneself and one's children, and staying away from bombs and bullets, or machete-wielding neighbours. [The exception is where conditions are truly atrocious: I've just finished reading Antony Beevor's Berlin: 1945 The Downfall about the Soviet capture of Berlin at the end of the Second World War, where many Germans, especially women, killed themselves in advance of what they believed was a fate worse than death. But even here, or in Nazi death camps or the Soviet Gulag, most people seem to have clung on to life past hope, past worth]. Paradoxically, then, a half-life may be better than a full one, not because hopes are unfulfilled but because people have no time to appreciate the emptiness beyond material well-being.
That said, the UK is not that much less comfortable, nor less developed than Japan, and yet the suicide rate is considerably lower: 7.05 (UK) vs. 24.20 (Japan) per 100,000 people (according to World Health Organization figures). Which got me to wondering what Japanese citizen has or doesn't have compared to their British counterparts. My hunch is that it's religion ... but before you think I've been born again, read on. So in preparing this pronouncement, I checked the Internet. And Lo! (:-)), I found a report, which both confirms and—on closer reading, see below—contradicts my not-so-original intuition. This Gallup poll compared suicide rates in 67 countries with an index of religiosity in each of those countries, and found a reliable negative correlation between the two: r (65) = -.64, p<.001: in other words, the less religious the country, the higher the suicide rate.
Before reflecting on this, it is important to understand how religiosity was defined:
Gallup Polls asked respondents whether religion was an important part of their daily lives, if they had attended a place of worship in the week prior to polling, and whether they had confidence in religious organizations in their countries. The Gallup Religiosity Index reflects the percentage of positive responses to these three items. A nation's index score speaks to that nation's overall level of religiosity.
There are several points to note here, the first of course being that correlation does not necessarily imply any causal relationship. (There a clear negative correlation between wealth and obesity in the UK, but that doesn't mean being poor makes you fat, much less that being slim makes you rich). It is nonetheless interesting to discover from the report that though there is also a positive correlation between wealth and suicide rate—proportionately more people kill themselves in richer countries than in poorer ones—the correlation with GDP was much weaker than that with religiosity). So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a causal relation. Why should it be that being religious keeps the suicide rate down. The editors of the Gallup poll offer three possible interpretations:
...It is thus possible that religion serves as an antidote to the lack of purpose that can make a desperate act such as suicide seem appealing. Believing in something bigger than oneself may allow some people to hold onto life in a world where people without such a belief sometimes give up all hope. Another possibility is that some religious people may believe that committing suicide jeopardizes their security in an afterlife. Alternately, the human connections that people typically forge in religious groups may serve as a buffer against suicide.
Perhaps because of my cultural background, it is the second of these interpretations I find most plausible. Whenever I give time to such thoughts, I am so nearly suffocated by dread of Death and the Hell that will follow—at least according to bogey figures of fundamentalist Protestantism—that I want to cling to this side of the abyss for every second left to me). Without such sanctions, and in the absence of the distraction of baser material needs, and crucially feelings of love and moral responsibility for others, suicide would seem to be an entirely rational and reasonable option. In a sense, the wonder is that the rate isn't even higher, among young adults with no dependents. I suspect that it will only increase in Japan, as young people become more like Westerners, devoid of a sense of obligation to their parents and grandparents.
More anon (especially, on how the correlation, though it works overall, may not in fact explain much about Japan vs. UK, whose religiosity indices are quite comparable).
PS. I should stress, for anyone who reads this but doesn't know me, that it was not my parents who inculcated this Old Testament dread of the afterlife, but the surrounding culture. Wherever it comes from, it's damned hard to shake (forgive the pun!)
PPS. I also want to say that this should not be construed as an anti-Japanese comment. This is truly a wonderful place to live, as I'll talk about in another post. But that's just the (puritanical) point, I suppose...
