Abstract
The deregulation of employment conditions in Japan in the 1990s has caused instability in the labor market, forcing certain people to choose between overwork and poverty. Both overwork and poverty can drive fragile people to commit suicide, and thus over 30,000 people have killed themselves annually since 1998. For a number of years, the Japanese government has not focused seriously on issues such as poverty and suicide. However, the historic transfer of power in 2009 from the Liberal Democratic Party to the Democratic Party of Japan has changed the situation, and these issues are now well placed on the political agenda. Furthermore, Japan experienced a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami and a subsequent devastation of the Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant in 2011 which will more than likely exert enormous influence on the Japanese society and economy in the coming years. Given these situations, it is expected that religious people and organizations in Japan will be at the forefront of responses to the social crises and especially to the issue of suicide. This chapter reviews the economic and social backdrop to the issue of suicide in Japan and the challenges that Japanese religious face in response to same.
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- 1.
In Japan, this is referred to as the “Great Eastern Japan Earthquake.”
- 2.
As of June 2012, the police report 15,861 dead and 2,939 missing.
- 3.
Basic data about Japanese suicide can be obtained in the White Paper on the Measures Against Suicide published annually since 2007 by the Cabinet Office of the Japanese Government (Naikakufu 2010). The following description is based on the data therein.
- 4.
For reference, the number of homicides (including attempted homicides) has gradually decreased in recent years from 1,530 in 2003 to 1,067 in 2010.
- 5.
These missing people are not the objects of searches by the police under request by the family members of someone missing. According to the police statistics, there are currently around 80,000–90,000 requests to the police to search for someone missing in Japan. Most of those missing are found, whether alive or dead, but several thousand people have remained missing every year.
- 6.
The first legal advice provided by lawyers in relation to death from overwork was done by telephone in 1988 (Kumazawa 2010: 16).
- 7.
In nine cases where documents show the working hours of those who committed suicide, 11–16 h work per day for over 3 months before the suicide was recorded.
- 8.
Under current Japanese law, committing suicide is not an issue dealt in the penal code system. However, inducing or assisting another person to commit suicide is prescribed as illegal.
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Okuyama, M. (2013). The Suicide Problem in Contemporary Japanese Society: Its Economic and Social Backdrop and Religious Reactions. In: Andreosso-O'Callaghan, B., Royall, F. (eds) Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4653-4_14
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