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Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan

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Abstract

Most striking in the recent rise of suicide in Japan are the increase in suicide among young Japanese and the emergence of Internet suicide pacts. An ethnography of suicide-related Web sites reveals a distinctive kind of existential suffering among visitors that is not reducible to categories of mental illness and raises questions regarding the meaning of an individual “choice” to die, when this occurs in the context of an intersubjective decision by a group of strangers, each of whom is too afraid to die alone. Anthropology’s recent turn to subjectivity enables analyses of individual suffering in society that provide a more nuanced approach to the apparent dichotomy between agency and structure and that connect the phenomenon of suicide in Japan to Japanese conceptions of selfhood and the afterlife. The absence of ikigai [the worth of living] among suicide Web site visitors and their view of suicide as a way of healing show, furthermore, that analyses of social suffering must be expanded to include questions of meaning and loss of meaning and, also, draw attention to Japanese conceptions of self in which relationality in all things, including the choice to die, is of utmost importance.

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Notes

  1. The fact that the data from this report compare suicide statistics from different years is likely due to variances in the collection of suicide data in different countries, which means that the most recent official suicide rate for a given country may be a few years earlier or later than that for another country.

  2. In some studies, individuals acting because of autonomous reasons have reported greater subjective well-being than those acting because of controlled or externally regulated reasons (Deci and Ryan 2000; Sheldon 2002; Sheldon et al. 2005, p. 99), and one cross-cultural study has argued that older individuals feel greater autonomy in performing social duties (rather than seeing them as externally imposed injunctions) (Sheldon et al. 2005).

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Chikako Ozawa-de Silva

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Ozawa-de Silva, C. Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan. Cult Med Psychiatry 32, 516–551 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-008-9108-0

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