The Japanese have a term for it—kodokushi, or lonely death. This refers to, in the context of Japanese culture, people dying alone, with the body not discovered for a considerable period of time. The phenomenon has another name, koritsushi, which means “isolation death”.
The said phenomenon had a significant airing from CNN by multi-awarded journalist, Blake Essig, in a news feature, “Inside Japan’s growing ‘lonely death’ clean-up service”.
The video shows a team of cleaners arriving in an apartment where a body was discovered days back. The job of these cleaners is to pack up all the things left by, in this case, an old man of 70 who passed on without anyone inquiring about his situation for a long time. The fact that cleaners from a company called Memories Co. are there only imply that the deceased do not have a kin to even clear or claim what the man has left behind.
From the interviews in the feature news, we learn more about loneliness, the type that kills. Essig talks next with Michiko Ueda of Waseda University. The political scientist, who authored a book, Economic Analysis of Suicide Prevention, begins to speak about loneliness and suicide. In her study, she shares a finding indicating how 40 percent of the Japanese people express loneliness. When the investigation and analysis focused on respondents whose ages were below 40, the percentage increased to 50 percent.
When economic crisis hits a country, middle-aged men are affected, Ueda says. In Japan, however, more and more young people are expressing loneliness and, from this number, arises figures correlated to suicide.
Similarly, in BBC News, another writer, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, has reported from Tokyo about the relationship between Covid and suicide, posing the question about whether the rise in the number of deaths from suicide is a warning to the world.
Why Japan? In the CNN news, the anchor was circumspect in saying how deaths by suicide have increased also in other countries. But following the BBC article, something is underscored, a factor unique to Japan, which is that the authorities report suicide faster and “more accurately than anywhere else in the world.”
In many reports it is thus stated how in 2020, in 11 years, the incidence of suicide has gone up.
For all the difficulties posed by the practice and science of correlation, it is safe at this point to mark the pandemic as a factor common among the many deaths by suicide in Japan and in other countries as well. What is extraordinary though—and interesting for social scientists —is the element of loneliness and isolation.
Pardon the detachment, but Japan has always been a significant fieldsite for the study of aloneness, depression and suicide. A society that has thrived on what those from outside sense as a rigid moral order, to complain about emotional disturbance has remained stigmatized. It is a culture that upholds the value of the gaman, which is translated as “persistence” or “tolerance.” The English equivalent does not quite capture it especially when the word, gaman is combined with tsuyoi or strong. In gamanzuyoi, we can locate endurance with stoicism.
In our country, suicide has always been whispered about. We hide it, if we are able to. Families do not talk about it; the person who commits it, or fails to die by suicide is subjected to a judgment harsher even than the loss or damage that occurs after the act. In the grim scenario, we own the guilt but one, to reverse Kafka’s words, that we, ineluctably, doubt.
In the ’70s, two celebrated suicides took place in Japan: those of Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata. Mishima committed seppuku or ritual disembowelment, observing the Bushido, or the way of the Warrior. During the funeral ceremony for Mishima, Kawabata presided the event and was quoted saying: “Quiet praying, apart from discussing wrong or right upon Mishima’s death, is a traditional emotion of the Japanese people.”
In 1972, Kawabata committed suicide. No suicide note was left. But Japanologists—and the many who admire the writer—can always go back to the speech Kawabata delivered when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. In that speech, Kawabata mentions an essay he wrote, “Eyes in their Last Extremity.” That title, according to the Nobel laureate, comes from the suicide note of the writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). Part of the note states: “I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice… I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.”
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927; he was 35.
Kawabata in the said essay would comment on the life of Akutagawa, considered to be the father of the Japanese short story: “However alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment.”
In October 2020, noting the dramatic surge in suicide cases, the Japanese government appointed its first Minister of Loneliness.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
2 comments
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