Too lonely to die alone: internet suicide pacts and existential suffering in Japan.
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.
Ozawa-de Silva
Chikako
C
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. cozawad@emory.edu
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001293:Attitude to Death; D003469:Culture; D005086:Existentialism; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*
Psychol Rep. 2006 Feb;98(1):121-2
16673962
J Health Soc Behav. 2003 Sep;44(3):275-91
14582308
Inj Prev. 2003 Sep;9(3):284
12966023
Suicide Life Threat Behav. 1997 Spring;27(1):137-45
9112731
Aging Ment Health. 2006 Sep;10(5):467-75
16938682
J Health Soc Behav. 2002 Jun;43(2):207-22
12096700
Scand J Caring Sci. 2006 Mar;20(1):93-101
16489965
Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi. 2006 Jul;53(7):480-92
16944832
Cult Med Psychiatry. 2002 Dec;26(4):399-417
12572767
Nurs Res. 2006 Sep-Oct;55(5):308-15
16980831
Cult Med Psychiatry. 2004 Dec;28(4):493-531
15847052
Nurs Sci Q. 2005 Jan;18(1):7-12; discussion 6
15574689
Am J Psychother. 2005;59(2):137-47
16170918
Soc Sci Med. 1986;23(2):99-112
3749977
Psychol Sci. 2005 Oct;16(10):798-804
16181443