Japan's education ministry says its latest annual survey shows the number of schoolchildren who killed themselves topped 400 for the first time. Also, a record high of over 190,000 students of elementary and junior high schools stopped attending.
The ministry conducts an annual survey of elementary, junior and senior high schools, and schools for special needs education across the country. It covers bullying, truancy and suicides among students.
On Wednesday, the ministry published the results of its survey conducted for the 2020 school year.
The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year.
Seven of the students were in elementary school, 103 in junior high and 305 in senior high.
The number of elementary and junior high school students who were absent for 30 days or more was 196,127. That's up nearly 15,000 from the previous year and a record high.
The rate of children who were absent has also been on the rise. The rate for elementary children increased threefold over the past ten years, to one out of 100. The rate for junior high was one out of 24, up 50 percent.
The survey also looked into the number of children who stopped attending school due to concerns over coronavirus infection.
It shows the total of 30,287 elementary, junior high and senior high school students were absent for 30 days or more due to such concerns.
Eguchi Arichika, student affairs division chief at the ministry, says the results show that changes in school and household environments due to the pandemic have had a huge impact on children's behavior, and that the increase in the number of suicides is very regrettable.
The official adds that the ministry will work to encourage children to seek help, and to ensure learning opportunities for children who cannot attend school.
The Poisson distribution was first described discussing the incidence of suicide in children in Prussia, if I recall correctly.
On the main matter: Societies need to cater more and better for the interest of children. All too often all other concerns come first (and children are an after thought to the interest of parents, which also aren't entirely high up in the priority list).
Makes you think that COVID "helped" expose a lot of what was already wrong with our society (globally) over the past 2 years.
In this case (underage suicide) specifically, some factors would be depression and domestic violence due to mandated isolation.
Forcing abusive parents to spend time with their children, and having children who are depressed or were on the verge of depression, enter a state of desperation that could lead to suicide rates spiking.
A depressive topic in itself.
PS: Should note that these are just two of the most likely reasons for the increase in children suicide, but not the only.
This just seems like a euphemistic way of saying that lockdowns made a lot of bad problems worse. When they were implemented there were plenty of voices warning at the time that they would cause children to suffer more abuse, depression, and suicide.
Depression, suicide, drug abuse, supply shortages, inflation, people not returning to the workforce. A year ago you would have been cancelled for daring to voice negative consequences to lockdowns
Yep, the prevailing narrative was “all these negative effects are bad, but at least they’re not death!” which totally ignores the probabilistic nature of the set of outcomes. An x% chance of something bad happening to you might indeed be worse than a y% chance of death, depending on the values of x and y — but this sort of analysis was (and still is) totally missing from mainstream acceptable discussion of our response to Covid.
My very firm belief is that many "official experts" have at least 4 big problems/weaknesses when it comes to making decisions and communicating with the public.
* They're trying to optimize for 2 (sometimes) contradictory problems: getting the right answer AND maintaining their job/power. A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer: any other considerations like fielding off hungry young political competitors or maintaining corporate stock prices so you stay in their good graces aren't factors in the slightest to a random well-intentioned smart guy on the Internet.
* They are very smart at their field of expertise, but they're specialists and not generalists. They are very bad at considering second-order effects outside of their narrow field of expertise. Something like a lockdown in some city might indeed immediately save 1,000 extra people from a Covid death. Any risk-benefit analysis and deeper consideration of that lockdown on other problems such as drug/alcohol abuse and overdose deaths, suicides and hopelessness and depression, obesity increases leading to many health problems and deaths later on, deaths caused by missed cancer screenings and other medical problems, loss of freedom, or its economic impact and long-term impact on society isn't even a consideration by officialdom. Maybe 1,000 people are saved to kill 2,000 and cause even further societal problems. Yet those 1,000 deaths saved would be characterized as a win and proof that lockdowns work because no other factors can be considered. I'd strongly argue that a smart engineer or CEO (professions who are trained to considering multiple factors and tradeoffs in complex decision-making) would be better suited to make these kinds of complex societal decisions than a scientist focused on a narrow field.
* They're frighteningly bad at normal risk-management calculations. One could make a very reasonable argument that a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them: and many people are reasonably making that risk-management calculation. Yet many experts are rushing into advocating vaccines even for children despite no long-term test data. The risk management calculation for a vaccine in this circumstance is completely different for the old and young, yet no consideration of this is allowed.
* Even when they sometimes get things right, most of what what even well-informed members of the public hear from the experts is filtered through the media. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of decent journalists who are reasonably smart and understand nuance (and who are mostly shunned from mainstream outlets) there is no collection of stupider people on the planet to try and analyze complex subjects or ask scientists real questions.
> a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them:
Covid is not low risk for 35-40 year olds. Someone age 25 with both vaccination doses is at higher risk of death than an unvaccinated 12 year old. How you've managed to extrapolate from this to "low risk to people up to age 40" is baffling, especially when you spend the rest of your post talking about how bad people are at understanding data.
This comment is not to argue with your interpretation of the data. We've both made up our minds, fair enough. The purpose here is point out the risk-management calculation involved.
Science qua science can give humans all kinds of (nearly) objective information about viruses and vaccines.
A risk-management calculation is not science: that kind of decision comes down to factors such as one's own risk tolerance and projection of the risks involved and many other subjective factors, including trust. For a reasonably well-informed Covid vaccine decision, you have to weigh factors such as your personal risk from Covid and compare that to somewhat known short term potential vaccine injuries/side-effects, and unknown long-term vaccine issues.
Whether you or I personally think a vaccine is a good or bad thing for a healthy ~40 year old to take is irrelevant. If you feel safer with it, you are certainly free to take it. The point I'd like to make is that many 40 year olds can reasonably look at Covid death rates for their age group, and compare it to the known short term problems, as well as weigh the likelihood of long-term issues, and come to a sane and reasonable decision to not want to rush and take it.
For me, my big issue with the vaccines is fertility. We found out after a few years that Thalidomide caused birth-defects, as just one example in the history of medicine. Personally speaking, I think rushing to mass-inject all children with this (as some people want) is the worst risk-management decision in the history of humanity.
> A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer
Most random folks on the internet seem to be optimizing for dopamine hits, not correct answers. Anyone with an audience is optimizing for subscription uptake, which seems to reliably lead in the opposite direction from correct answers.
> Stuff about "mainstream [media] outlets" shunning all "decent journalists"
This kind of silliness does nothing but weaken the rest of your arguments, IMO.
Your comment about most people online optimizing for something like a hit of dopamine is correct. However, just FYI, I clarified later in that same section that my comment was referring to "well-intentioned" people. Obviously that's a bit subjective and harder to delineate, but makes an important distinction.
And just FYI, I never said "all" journalists, I was only referring to most, a not altogether uncommon opinion.
I don't think I have seen many mainstream acceptable discussions about the Covid response -- most were nothing but emotive monologues from this or that person, and two or three simultaneous monologues do not make an acceptable discussion.
Also, I don't think it would have been useful to talk about Covid response policy using figures like "X% chance of death!", since it sounds like a weather forecast and we can't even get those right one day in advance, let alone when determining policy for the entire year. And you can't conclude from absence of public discussion that these figures or expectations weren't discussed privately.
Yes, it would have been better for the policymakers to voice their reservations and motivations in public, but I'm not willing to blame the politicians for not doing that. In order to have a nuanced political discussion, all parties need to play ball. It is counterproductive for a politician to take a well-argued public position when the media only wants ten-second soundbites and actively looks ways to embarrass and undermine said politician, and when the public isn't remotely interested in a nuanced position because the tribe has already spoken.
To me, the Covid response in the West highlights a failure of democracy. That is not the same as a failure of politics, trying to pin all blame for the failure of democracy on the current politicians is just another symptom of the underlying problem. Instead, it is a failure of society at large. It seems we are no longer willing and/or capable to have an honest and open debate about matters of public policy, and that is a sad situation. I'm not even going to try and hint at the wide array of causes and consequences that led us to this point, just expressing dismay that I don't see the situation improving for the better any time soon.
the worst thing these kids are much more likely to die from suicide than from COVID, yet you see whole COVID theatre to protect them, but nothing to stop suicides
Yet I'm still seeing schools strap masks on elementary students and all other sorts of abusive trends that will harm their development. The worst thing is that people warned about the dangers of isolating these kids from school, their friends, and berating them with sensationalist media causing their anxiety levels to go off the charts.
This is 100% a case of the pandemic response being worse than the disease. Risks from COVID for kids is minimal. What really bothers me is that people who warned of this were berated for not following "the science", censored and labeled as someone who didn't care about COVID deaths. Imo schools should have never closed.
Unfortunately, I think there will be a lot of fallout from the poor response in years to come.
Children need to see people's faces to develop properly. Just because they got "used" to them doesn't mean it's appropriate to put them on their faces. Additionally, if you actually pay attention almost none of them wear the masks correctly or sanitize them like they should. It's a farce with very real negative consequences and essentially no positives.
It is not just a face mask when you stick it on small child. You realize that children need to see mouth movements and faces to develop properly right?
Helped? If you isolate kid from its friends for 18 months and imprison it in small room, it will become suicidal. There is no need for abusive parents. Lockdowns themselfs are evil!
It’s probably worth noting that Japan hasn’t had that kind of lockdown. Schools, after school activities, etc for most part have continued throughout the pandemic.
There was a period of extended school holidays last year due to the pandemic. Also some schools did suspend after school care and extracurricular activities during the states of emergency. The details probably vary widely across the country and no doubt people have been impacted, but remote schooling hasn’t really been a thing (as far as I know).
Thank you for the reply and clarification. I think I understand what is being said. Initially, I parsed the statement to mean that only a small fraction of schools closed.
The real crime? Lockdowns didn't change a darned thing - I wish I could say I'm amazed the press doesn't talk about Sweden at all; sadly at this point I expect them to be biased and interested at protecting the current political narrative more than actually doing their jobs.
A while ago I read a french news article that talked about bullying in japan and what was mentioned in it was way beyond what counts as bullying here (except for the most severe cases).
Bullying is always really bad and even just "mild" verbal or physical abuse can scar a child for life. But what apparently counts as "regular" bullying in Japan truly gave me the chills. Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things.
The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying.
Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?
Watching anime (yeah yeah I know) I used to laugh at the absurdity of the bullying and how sexual it all was. I had no idea that bullying is really that bad in Japan. That's extremely sad.
The frequency of how much of what appears to be outlandish bullying gets portrayed in Japanese shows could be an indicator of how normalized it has become there. I have watched some anime too, and I cringed every time they showed those cartoonishly evil bullying scenes. They appeared so unrealistic to me, but reading this discussion it seems it might have actually been a quite relatable theme for Japanese audiences.
This reminded me of experiences I wish I could forget for when I was bullied from 2nd grade to 8th. What made it worse was by puberty, I realized I was gay, which made me feel the bullying was justified because of how reprehensible my sexual orientation was.
While I don't believe this anymore, I do feel those experiences have left a deep scare that won't simply go away.
I'm sorry this happened to you. I actually find it terrible how bullying in general is seen as "part of growing up" and other nonsense or sometimes even heavily played down with lies or fabrications like "the bully himself is actually suffering/has a bad life thats why he does it" (which is in no way generally true).
I was a bully during my teenage years. Honestly, did it for the attention from peers, and especially the girls. It's sad to say, but girls definitely favor that mentality at that age range.
Similar experiences here. If you haven't, really can't emphasize the value of a good therapist, and gay men's group therapy if you can find it.
That said, I think the deep scar analogy is apt. While therapy has helped me immensely in dealing with some of my issues, those issues will always be there, so it's hard not to feel an immense amount of regret and "if only" thoughts wishing I had never been bullied in the first place.
> The article also mentioned that this went on just as a bad online with encouragements for suicide being a frequent part of the cyber bullying.
That doesn't surprise me at all. Back in the day 2ch, which was the forerunner of 4chan in Japan, was extremely popular, but basically just as toxic and awful as 4chan. I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.
I find that interesting, especially for countries like Korea or Japan. The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed.
I'm sure there's something there, but I'm not a social scientist. Anyone with experience in sociology/psychology have an idea what that's about?
Hmm, I always thought conformity-culture was the cause of social accountability of outliers. My go to example for this is the highly individual valuing, yet Patagonia vest wearing finance bros. Conformity without collectivism. It's a thing and it's much more insidious than the collectivism-conformity script we got growing up.
I always thought that the more you repress aggression and competition, specially in human males, the more it will end up being expressed anyway, but in bursts or in passive-aggressive ways.
Of course, this is just a personal hypothesis.
This is self-evident, especially in the West. Girls are getting further and further ahead in education because they are obedient, and not unruly and full of energy like boys. And no one gives a shit. It's instead touted as some victory for feminism or something.
Unfortunately that bites them with a lack of confidence and taking risks in the future. However that is mainly due to patriarchy and internalised misogyny in my experience.
It may also be elevated self-doubt when doing something logically sound but overall risky over an extended period without social validation, and not patriarchy or misogyny.
Problem is that the "feminist" label is so simplistic as to miss all nuance ala: all that is "good for women" is "feminist".
Is being successful in school good? yes. Is being successful in later life good? yes.
So you cannot consider the "successful school dropout". "risk taking" is the missed nuance, or "it has to get worse before it gets better"/"break a bone to set the leg" etc. Instead you have the only "feminist" path as (cherry-picked populations of) girls doing well in school and successes later in life, even if those don't necessarily/naturally correlate.
If you really wanted to capture that nuance, you need the kind of discussions Jordan Peterson has wrt personality/behavioural traits and their impacts on differences in outcomes; but you can clearly see how much hostility (in the name of feminism) he receives for that.
The funny thing is how he's accused of (sex/gender) essentialism, even if backed by stats/data, despite the advocated feminist alternatives being also full of essentialism (and just-so narratives), just ones seen as more culturally palatable.
>The stereotype of those cultures is sort of passive, and accepting of the status quo. And yet, when anonymous, the fangs come out, if not even more pointed.
I think because can be a better replacement for yet in this sentence. Repression very often leads to higher intensity.
Yes I have, and there is much more of a culture to be taken care of and get emotional support there than I've seen in other countries. Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft
Don't get in a verbal pissing contest. Bring up a concrete example. Then they can do the same. Anecdata battle until trends can be established. Or if data trends can be shown, link those.
This is a conversation not a pissing context or a peer reviewed study. It's very hard to quantify one's experience. I was once active on both the UK and American sphere of twitter and I feel the American side of it is much worse. It's fine to not go further and just acknowledge different people have different experiences.
We don't have to go fetch studies that take ages to read fully and to critically examine just to justify every opinion we have, especially when there's probably just as many studies pointing to the opposite.
Not every discussion between people needs to have the caliber of evidence required by a scientific study or dissertation. Besides, arguments like that tend to just end up being tennis matches where commenters lob citations back and forth at each other without reading them.
Also, I think people should feel free to share whatever life experience / observations / anecdotes they have because it's not like what we write here is going to get cited in some journal.
This was a case of "my dad can beat up your dad." Just stated as "I see worse than you are seeing." Nothing of substance. If we want to compare who's stream is worse, provide some examples, don't just say you've dealt with worse than what you assume the other person has.
Anyway, looks like I replied to the wrong post originally. And I botched my delivery. It was a poor attempt at encouraging more substantive discussion. I, for one, would have been interested in seeing an example that points out how much more ruthless a different country was, and I would have hoped that someone would show a counter example, and then a n interesting discussion pop up.
This is the iceberg of "face" culture. Appear happy content and whatever society demands in public and let out the true opinion, feelings and yes, often hatred in anonymity or inner family.
Good thing we wouldn't introduce such a thing in the west.
This is probably something that varies a lot by area but based on my observations of elementary school students (who I’ve seen the most of) and others. The situations you describe sound like pretty strong outliers.
I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.
Yeah it is always hard to get a proper picture of something like actual school life based on one (or a few) articles when in reality often not even parents of the children themselves know what is really going on.
I don't have any particular insight on bullying in Japan specifically, but having lived there for a big chunk of my childhood I can say for sure that you have to be very, very skeptical of the "Look how weird Japan is" trope which is super common in Western media.
Those stories always follow the same pattern - pick out the most extreme example of something that you can find, then spin some superficially insightful theory around it relating it to some essential difference between Japanese culture and other cultures.
There is no such thing as essential differences. And if all that reaches your attention about a faraway place is the extremes, you are bound to come to some weird conclusions.
It's just too easy to apply this recipe to anything you don't understand well. Just imagine the stories you could tell about European student culture if you started from the Belgian Reuzegom hazing story [0], and generalized from there.
You are right, even asking people from a country directly can give a really false impression due to the pattern you describe.
As someone who has lived both in the US as well as two european countries for equal parts of my life I know very well how easily views can become distorted by listening to single cases that are not representative.
Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.
In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide.
Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.
>In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide.
Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?
I don't think suicide as an honorable death is any more of a real thing in Japan nowadays than ninjas are.
>Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death?
Considering how common a form of retribution gun violence is in the US nowadays, yes, I'd say yes.
Could there be a case to be made in comparing American school shooters and Japanese student suicides? Maybe we'd find they had similar school experiences prior to their final moments.
>Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?
Yes, I would. Such societal norms don't just die, they remain in the "ether" so to speak.
For example, americans might not be as religious, or sticking with the church. They might not even be born in the US, or just be first or second generation. But the culture, and this includes immigrants as they integrate, contains all kinds of protestant ideas.
And it's easier for something like a suicide norm to survice that a practice of the duel (which takes two to survice, plus has the law against it, even if you come out alive).
Suicide was also an honorable way to go out in the Roman empire, but I'm not sure it's a societal norm in Italy nowadays. Definitely in the ether though, I think suicide after disgrace is something everyone can relate to.
The ether of American "death by duel" is part of the more general protestant idea that suicide is an act against god, but there's no rule against finding someone/something to kill yourself with. Drink yourself to death, get yourself killed by a cop, join the army and find a place to sacrifice yourself: all are related to why duels to the death were part of our culture. To what extent that ether still effects the way we act I couldn't say, but it's definitely still around.
The relics of European honour culture, which includes duelling etc., being preserved in parts of the USA, particularly in the West and South, due to the delayed roleout of the centralised state, is a real argument made about why men from those parts can be so quick on the draw (perhaps literally) at the slightest interpersonal offence. Dunno if it's true but it doesn't seem preposterous.
The 'suicide for preserving honor' theory has been long abandoned & mostly outlawed, even. No one in the modern generation thinks that way. The causes for suicide are mostly due to economic imbalance & high credit/ loans/ failed businesses (sadly). Children have easy access to credit cards from family, and rack up huge debts by indulging in things as part of peer pressure. I saw several case studies highlighting this when I was part of influencer marketing business.
Ritual suicide was done by seppuku - slashing out your guts, as a final act of bravery. No one does anything remotely similar.
I have to assume that WWII history is still being taught. I'm not sure if they are censoring kamikaze tactics in Japan, but they are still well documented in US WWII media.
Funnily enough, WW2 is taught in a very sanitized way. Its more along the lines of "we had disagreement, we had a war, we were all somewhat wrong. let's move on and be peaceful". People take offense if you prod along the topic further. They don't want to talk about it anymore.
You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history. The point is not that people commit suicide today for the same reasons or in the same way that they did 500 years ago, but that it is more likely to be accepted as a way out than in a culture that e.g. considers suicide to be a one-way ticket to the spiritual inferno.
> You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history.
Not sure where you get this idea, but this is grossly inaccurate.
Japanese culture is strongly revisionist. People don't talk about the war, much less teach about it. The 'old ways' and 'samurai heroism' was faulted for the mess in '40s. People make a sigh whenever such touchy topics come up. New Japan is a different beast.
As a consequence, we are seeing a generation which is severely confused on why WW2 happened. American pop culture is embraced with open arms, but they can't explain why Hiroshima happened at the hands of US. It's all faulted to grave mistakes on the 'old thinking' which is best left behind. Japan adopted modernism & became America's best buddies, ignoring the blemishes over 3 decades of Imperial japanese horrors. Older generation, who used to teach from experience of pre-war and neo-modern Japan, are dying off due to age. A significant chapter of history is being ignored by looking the other way. Look up the editorials of any Japanese weekly, and on any random week you will find some discussion on how they bemoan the growing dissonance between the post-war values of peace & the cultural change alongside the pseudo-aggression of some political parties, which eventually aims to remilitarize Japan at some point. (That's a story for another time or another thread)
The "Japan is no different from any other country" trope is just as inaccurate as the "wacky Japan" trope and in my experience has actually overtaken the original in online discussions (though news articles clearly still focus on the original).
Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.
No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.
Yeah having moved to China from France, I was expecting to meet aliens honestly, and ended up concluding like you there are no essential differences between cultures.
Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.
My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D
It took me about 10 years to really understand the enormous differences between my native culture and my current culture. And those differences are staggering. And they are both western.
You're assuming you can "see" the cultural differences.
Sometimes you can easily see it, but often it's really hard to figure out, because they are going to express themselves in edge cases that you have to run into, which takes time and then it takes time to run into enough of them to be able to see a pattern.
Interestingly I experienced persistent bullying that included physical assault and mental abuse (it was always successfully passed off as a joke when they did something to me) in the French system.
It was so bad that I still relive it daily every single day now, many many years later.
There was a recent scandal in Japan where a musician named Cornelius was chosen to preform at the Paralympics and had an old interview resurface where he bragged about this type of bullying: stripping naked, force feeding someone their own feces… sadly it sounds like this was done to a handicapped person.
He was forced to resign and ultimately put a lot of pressure on prime minister Suga because he was his pick. Suga had to also step down after this and other similar incidents.
My two daughters went through Japanese public schools in Tokyo and Yokohama, and I now teach and do research about education-related topics at a university in Tokyo. My research focus is not student behavior, but I sometimes visit schools and I hear a lot of anecdotes about elementary and secondary schools from teachers and college students.
My impression is that, overall, the bullying is probably not significantly worse than in other countries, but that perhaps more media attention is focused on the issue than elsewhere. There was a major moral panic in the mid-1980s about school bullying, and the media continue to report regularly on statistical trends and extreme incidents.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of variation among schools. More than one public school teacher has confided to me about how different the kids are in different neighborhoods. Japan may seem homogeneous, but there’s a lot of local variation by social class. In the tougher schools, there can be fighting, stealing, and bullying, while in other schools that might be practically unknown. Private schools can be very different from public, too, and there are a lot of single-gender schools, which have their own dynamics. Certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as age-based hierarchies, may be stronger or weaker or play out differently in different types of schools as well.
This isn’t very unique to Japan. Or at least I’ve seen schools in the US 5 min apart that had the same class discrepancy. Brawls every day and learning is for nerds in one, constant tutoring and homework in the other.
You’re right. Something I meant to say but didn’t in my comment above is that Japanese schools are more diverse than they seem to many people, including Japanese.
In the U.S., people tend to be keenly aware of school differences, because public schools have a lot of local autonomy and are typically locally funded. In Japan, because the curriculum and many other education-related matters are determined by the Ministry of Education, there is a large degree of apparent nationwide uniformity, especially between grades one and nine. For example, in every elementary and junior-high-school classroom I have been into in Japan, and in almost all that I’ve seen in photographs, all of the desks face the front of the room and the outside windows are on the students’ left-hand side [1]. There doesn’t seem to be any similar uniformity at least in California [2], where I went to elementary school more than fifty years ago.
This apparent uniformity can give people who have experienced Japanese schools only as students the impression that whatever they happened to experience in school—a lot of bullying, say, or none at all—must be typical of the entire country.
Of course, people in other countries might overgeneralize their individual educational experiences, too.
[1] Google image search for 小学校 教室 [elementary-school classroom]
Probably it is overblown, but I wouldn't be surprised if this actually happened somewhere (certainly not regular though).
That said, I'll say that bullying in Japan is different in that it is orchestrated. Peer pressure is enormous in Japan. When someone is being bullied, very few of us can raise an objection because doing so would make you the next target. So everyone is becoming an enabler. (Actually, this is not just kids' matter. It's pretty much how the whole society functions here. No wonder adults can't stop kids bullying - they're just imitating adults!)
I lived in Japan for 8 years (not in Tokyo), and this sort of stuff was very rare and often newsworthy.
I imagine it does happen, but more often than not at urban school, at schools that are less academically oriented (e.g., construction high schools), and overall in lower socio-economic areas. The abusers are probably from abusive families.
If you’re in the burbs or the provincial parts of Japan, bullying at this extreme level is very unlikely to happen. The more common type of bullying is verbal abuse — still bad, but not like the examples you gave.
All that said, there is a form of hazing that is common in Japan that would probably be considered abusive, and that’s with high school baseball clubs. The new players on the team sometimes get boot camp-like treatment, and some folks (and sometimes coaches) take it too far. It’s theoretically all in fun and/or character building, and there are often checks and balances in place by the senior players, but I’ve heard some stories. That said, I don’t think that there are many baseball players who would not do it again.
> Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?
I sincerely believe these instances were cherry picked. If such things happened regularly, it would have made an awful amount of noise in an otherwise law abiding society. Mixed raced (hafu) children do get more bullying from anecdotal evidence, but that is more of name calling or poking some fun at visual attribute. My knowledge about the situation is limited to Tokyo & Osaka, but that is pretty much where most of the foreigners/ mixed race families are to be found.
> Mentioned were things like stripping others naked, throwing away their clothes, burning their stuff, hitting them with sticks, spitting among other horrible things.
All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.
I've seen a few pop-documentaries about children in japan (and korea and china), where they show kids leaving their home at early hours, then doing a lot of work in school, then afterschool scholwork, aditional lectures, and then they come home at late night hours, sleep, and repeat.
I'm not sure how much of this is true and/or a stereotype, but even elsewhere, i've seen parents overcrowding their kids (school)work schedules (+extracurricular activities) to absurd amounts, where the kids can't handle it anymore.
This is in comparison to my childhood, where pretty much everyone had school from 8-until somewhere between noon and 2pm (depending on the year), and after that we pretty much just "went out" and did "stupid kid stuff" (mostly hanging out)
My kids are Anglo-Chinese, they went to school there for literally a few days so I don't have personal experience, but a friend's son went to school in China until he was about 10 I think and is now in school here in the UK.
His son thinks school in the UK is ridiculously easy. His teachers think he's amazing because he always hands in work early, it's always very neat and well done, he started off well ahead of kids his own age in maths and the sciences that are in common with Chinese schooling. The work ethic he learned there is working very well for him.
Having said that, my friend particularly wanted his son to come here for secondary education. The system over there is excessively regimented and oppressive. Education here is much broader with more scope for creativity and extra-curricular activities. They're very different systems.
Anecdote from my visit to Beijing. We stayed in a guesthouse type place with a courtyard in the middle. A child around 7-8 was doing homework with her mum until 9/10pm while we played cards and drank beer.
As a kid I would have been playing games or watching TV at that time.
What I don't understand is that if you look at the performance of Chinese academics it isn't particularly exceptional compared to those who had lazy upbringings in the west. Surely they should be basically superhuman in their academic achievements? I am extremely lazy, and had a very crappy lazy school experience, even at British university, and yet I was not significantly worse than my Chinese clearly-a-genius PhD supervisor. In fact I do not see any particular difference in research quality or output when comparing people who had intense school careers to those who had easy and laid back ones. Somehow the intense academic training in those countries does not seem to translate into actual research output.
The point of all the studying is to ace the entrance exams, not learn anything about research or original thinking. At least in Japan, once you're actually in the university, you can pretty much slack off for the next four year until you graduate and face the next grueling phase of your life, becoming a junior salaryman.
Compulsory education is all about the median student, not the outliers. I suspect that performance at the top end of the curve, i.e. people who tend to get PhDs and become professors, is influenced much more by personality and graduate-level educational experiences.
Different fields always have different nationalities dominating though. You could easily say "look how Italians dominate astrophysics" but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
For all it's apparent advantages, the Chinese education system also has some pretty deep flaws. A family friend in China is the head of the Computer Science department at a local university. This was a few years ago, but he told me none of their graduates ever, as part of their studies, actually compile and run any code. They are taught java, algorithms and theory but no practical exercises, it's all on paper. That's not necessarily true of every institution, I've met some great coders from China, but they're mostly self taught.
Also even if you had the best students, they are constrained by the institutions they are in and the experience of their professors. It takes generations to develop deep institutional experience and culture. They know this, and expend a lot of effort trying to get experienced Chinese academics that have studied abroad in western institutions to come back to China.
We see this among students who come to American universities from certain parts of Asia: serious knowledge of syntax, but not able to navigate the OS, use the IDE, or compile the code. I've heard this same scenario of learning programming on paper from multiple countries.
And, also, if you know the syntax of a few languages cold, but you have no creative practice at problem-solving, are lacking foundational computer science concepts and practice, then by the time you are in college or grad school, another language may have come along, while you may have to struggle to apply existing knowledge and creativity to new tools (which is the point of a CS degree).
Some students have no mental toolkit to rely on other than brute force memorizing the syntax of a new language. The difference is highly noticeable, even at a low level of college work.
One popular explanation is usually the scarcity of educational resources in China. In China, you work really hard so that you can out-exam the other students so that you can get into some decent college. The gist is that China has limited higher-educational resource (so graduates on average do not come out that well) and a large population base (so people really need to work hard to fight for the little resource).
For younger kids (6, 7, 8yo), there was "afternoon care" in school where they did their homework and then went outside to the school playgound and played with stuff. For older ones, they went home after school, and stay there, or go out, and parents usually came home at 3, 4 in the afternoon. For even older ones (13 14, 15,..), they usually stay at home until the parents come home, and then go out again.
Then it was yugoslavia, and then slovenia (i didn't move, the country fell apart)... late 80s, and the whole 90s.
So large apartment buildings in large neighbourhoods with a lot of kids of same age there (due to the way apartments were distributed), and after school, if you were bored at home, you just went out, because someone was always outside.
Parents usually worked from 6am-2pm (factory workers) or 8am-4pm (administration), so they would come home after the kids, but this was seen as normal here. The elementary schools (6/7yo - 14/15yo here) were usually a walking distance from home in the cities, so we'd be by ourselves... High school usually ended somewhere between 1pm-3pm, and you'd take a bus ride home, and depending on where your parents worked, you might still be home before them.
We did have extra-curricular activities, but usually you did one thing (eg. had football practice twice per week for 2 hours if you werent a "pro" in your age group), but it was unusal to have your day totally filled up.
I don't have kids, but a lot of my friends do, and a half of them do it in a way as we did, but about half of them sign their kids up for every activity possible, so after school it's horseriding lessons, and then tennis practice, and then music school, so they drive them around for that.... I'm not sure how a busy schedule like that would work on me in that age, but i'm pretty sure i prefered the laid-back method, and I still had no issues, from elementary school to my engineering degree.
Satan worship is in jest, but it’s interesting the root word for Satan, the devil, diablos (διάβολος) describes the ‘spirit of division’ in human societies.
Worshiping conflict would aptly describe social media in many areas, so the ancients were on to something :)
Not everything is puritanical pearl clutching. Some things are actually measurably bad for you. Comparing any old criticism of something as unhealthy to the satanic panic and conservative anti video game pushes isn't helpful at all, and doesn't really make much of an argument.
You are being voted down, but I can think of little as harmful as the open sewer that is unfiltered social media, especially to younger people that haven't yet learned not to take it all personally.
I grew up in the era of dialup, BBS's and USENET - and it did warp my perceptions a little. I can't imagine how being exposed to social media as an adolescent - or younger - could have seriously screwed up my perceptions of society.
Elsewhere someone sarcastically asked about video games - if 1/10th the concern that was shown in the 80's and 90's over video games towards social media I think we all would be having a much different conversation.
I dunno why up until recently social media has been pretty much getting a pass. It's nice to see at least some discussion of it, especially in relation to kids, showing up in more places. I'm always amazed and somewhat appalled by how many of my peers I see just hand over phones or tablets to their kids to occupy them. At least in the past when parents parked kids in front of the TV it was one way and limited to fairly "safe" content.
Ha - after having typed that it sure makes the concerns voiced over TV in the past feel very, very quaint in comparison. Something I really hadn't considered before now.
This is the kind of stuff that should be possible and valuable to study but requires TikTok, Facebook, etc to run the study since the data is all on their servers.
I expect that the analysis has been done internally and just not released since it’s bad (ie, social media use is higher among suicides). Maybe a whistleblower will leak this stuff.
I think an analysis is possible by building off their typical drop off analysis. I think that because I expect all drop offs are likely analyzed to restart and avoid future drop offs. So I expect they have a way to classify people who died vs left the platform.
In the US we release a “death master file” that has names, dob, ssn a few years after death. If Japan has something similar it can be run against account holder data to see who actually died. I don’t know privacy law in Japan, but in the US cause of death is confidential. So we just know that a kid died and would need
to predict cause of death from social media activity.
With this low number, they could be investigated manually to see how many children had accounts and what patterns exist in common.
You'd be surprised how many horror stories I have encountered about teenage girls commiting suicides due to peer pressure, credit card loans & inability to keep up with fashion trends.
It can also be an artifact of a foreign language. The french interrogatory form can be the same as the declarative. It seems likely in this case, their use of "therefore" is equivalent to the fench "alors" which is often employed to "interrogate a declaration"
It's the written equivalent of uptalk[0], I wouldn't say it is uncommon at all. It would only really be confusing the first time you come across it -- like most things.
Generally speaking, this situation does not seem confusing for many native speakers. The question mark indicates uncertainty about the statement instead of asking “<Statement>. Can anyone refute this or provide insight to the original significance?”. In this case, the author drew a conclusion about other data which seems to make the original article seem less important or less significant, but instead of declaring it as a fact outright, the author is choosing to mark it with uncertainty instead which will invite a discussion if they are wrong on some aspect of it.
You did not offend me(with the first post) and I did not downvote you. I just explained, why you received negative feedback - basically missunderstanding. But talking about missunderstanding: I understand your last comment as snarky, unwarranted sarcasm. This I would downvote.
It seems to be a rather recent phenomenon here on HN (broadly speaking) and for me it falls pretty much in the same category as other overly familiar and rude language patterns such as 'AF' (short for 'as fuck') or 'tho', 'cuz', or 'w/' instead of 'though', 'because', or 'with'.
There is a rudeness in making it one of these faux-questions filled with implications instead of clearly stating what it is you want to say.
This practice (adding a ? to a declarative sentence) is very informal, and so you wouldn't see it used in published English language media, so I'm not surprised that you may never have encountered it. It's used as a shorthand method of inviting clarification when the author is unsure of the veracity of the claim.
This sub-thread reminds me that there are many informal rules in languages that are rarely taught, and which can trip up non-native speakers. Informal shorthands, idioms, slang, etc.
Everything about this exchange seems fine to me. You asked a clarifying question about an “advanced” usage of the question mark, and you were answered with a neutral description of what’s going on.
I'm a native English speaker and this trend confuses me pretty often. It's not always clear whether the person:
1. is sincerely asking a question
2. accidentally hit they question mark key instead of the period
3. is mimicking the valley girl inflection
It's not that much of a problem here, but it's much more pronounced in places where people rarely use complete sentences to begin with. Such as chat rooms, etc.
:-) I was thinking this but couldn't find the right phrase.
It could also be expressing uncertainty. You want to make an assertion but not 100% sure you are right. A question mark at the end expresses some self doubt and leaves it open to correction. I use '?' that way quite often.
Both of your comments can be construed as linguistic pedantry. Particularly, saying "it's confusing" rather than e.g. "I find it confusing" is pretty prescriptive - and it just sounds like you're doubling down on your first comment.
If you want to ask a question about a feature of language, it helps to add the context that you're unfamiliar with the language itself. Otherwise, most readers will assume that you're attempting to correct the user you're replying to. Commenting on people's use of language is considered quite rude in most internet communities - not least because of the number of ESL users.
I used this process, and came up with the numbers, 140 and 250, and they are kind of close in my opinion, though I'm not 100% sure. What do you think?
shortened, becomes:
I used this process, and came up with these numbers, 140 and 250, and they are kind of close?
Why you got in trouble: people thought you were criticizing the original comment for hiding a statement to look like a question. (A common underhanded tactic to do and a common criticism - "was that a question?".)
In spoken English, this would be expressed by ending the sentence with an exaggerated pitch change for the question and a pause; it’s a way to indicate uncertainty and give someone else an opportunity to affirm or provide a contrary opinion without conflict.
Rendering it in written English is not correct per formal rules, you’d probably never see this in an English textbook, but it’s a semi-common colloquialism in forums like these.
Maybe a total coincidence that I read this morbid news on South Korea while I've started watching Squid Game, but watching a show that's effectively an allegory of capitalist decline in South Korea makes this news not surprising.
>capitalist decline in South Korea makes this news not surprising.
South Korea is on a capitalist upswing, not decline. People forget that South Korea was worse off than most of Africa after the Korean War. Capitalism and democracy is what saved them.
Look at their brother to the North if you want to see a real decline.
Perhaps, though you would be wrong about the state of things - Korea had a fairly big manufacturing base when taken over by Japan, so in a way they had more infrastructure already built that just needed to be repaired or upgraded.
“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work, where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption - and indeed Korea has massive megacorps owned by just a few families that are de facto governments in themselves.
>Perhaps, though you would be wrong about the state of things - Korea had a fairly big manufacturing base when taken over by Japan,
Ugh... I see you overlooked the small fact that the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula happened before the Korean War...
"After all, the South was by all standards a failed state after the Korean war (1950-53). GDP per capita in South Korea in early 1960’s was below $100. Lower than Haiti, Ethiopia or Yemen, making South Korea one of the poorest countries in the world. Infrastructure built during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) was destroyed during the war. All of Korea’s natural resources remained in the North, as well as its industrial facilities. The first years of independence, under the presidency of Rhee Syng-man, brought no economic development and kept South Korea afloat only due to foreign aid." [0]
>“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work
There may be something strong and special about Koreans, but one half went capitalist, the other half went Communist/Socialist. The proof is in the pudding.
>where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption
> There may be something strong and special about Koreans, but one half went capitalist, the other half went Communist/Socialist
I guess explain China vs Taiwan, which are both doing well, although that is certainly glossing over some horrible decades with the cultural revolution.
There are a few other differences between those two polities. I'd say it would be difficult to find a single factor which could convincingly explain their differences.
There is a big cultural meme in Korea about how life is extremely competitive & hard compared to what it should be. I definitely saw what was being referred to about Korea in squid game.
Elite Overproduction is in full swing in South Korea. The costs of entering the upper class are increasing and the consequences of failing to enter it are getting worse. People are having almost no children because the costs are so high and the experience of being a child is so brutal (16+ hours of schooling a day is common).
I believe it was Malcom Kyeyune who joked that if North Korea nuked Seoul, it would be the best thing to ever happen to young people in South Korea.
The birth rate in South Korea is like 1/4th the birth rate of North Korea.
No. Upper class in Korea is more in reach than many other countries in the world. The elites control a lot of money, but it's not as bad as other countries either, and there are more of them.
People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children, by society, by politics, by wealth/industry.
Having a kid doesn't cost a lot in South Korea. In fact it's usually beneficial. The problem is that having a kid basically means your main source of income is vulnerable and your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
> Upper class in Korea is more in reach than many other countries in the world
This is how elite overproduction tends to happen. I suggest you read some of the writing on the causes and effects of EO. The Good Ol Boyz podcast has some episodes on EO in Korea that are pretty good.
If you can get into a relatively high status position by doing better than your peers in a school test, and you’re out of luck otherwise, of course many people are going to spend 16 hours a day studying for those tests.
> People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children
Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
> Having a kid… it's usually beneficial… your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
Oh yeah. There is an overproduction of elites in Korea. If what you mean by "they all want to be upper professions of society" etc.
Being a labourer is often highly regarded in lots of low population or first world countries. Not in Korea. Not even without significant immigration. They are just all sardines trying to squeeze into the upper jobs. No one wants to be left out and certainly doesn't consider it a career path.
>Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
Their workforce and/or lack off work stability, almost entirely.
>This seems contradictory.
If you take it out of context..... yes. But I just said that it'd be financially beneficial to have a kid. But then also introduces instability that might pull the rug underneath when your financially beneficial decision removes your larger chunk of income.
i.e. babies are very affordable, and you get benefits that aren't bad. But also this coincides with losing your job due to having a baby. It's not contradictory as they're both alternate directions. Your job is stable whilst having a baby AND you have a baby? You're benefiting. You have a baby and it ruins your income stream? Those extra savings from having a baby are cancelled out.
Last time I looked into it, Japan’s suicide numbers were not as high as I’d been primed to expect. Japans suicide rate is less than America’s (14.5 vs 12.2 per 100k), and roughly equivalent to Sweden 12.4) and Norway (11.8). Still relatively elevated for OECD countries, but Japan’s reputation as an extremely high suicide rate country appears to be unearned. Countries like South Korea (21.2), Russia (21.6), Lithuania (20.2), and Ukraine (17.7) should generally get more attention on this matter than Japan does.
This could be the difference between suicidality and completion of suicide. Firearms are linked to an increase of completed suicides but not attempts, which could explain the US's higher rate.
Also, Japan has a much larger aging population, so their cultural threshold for what's an "acceptable" suicide rate among the young could be much lower.
Access to firearms has certainly been shown to affect suicide rates, especially among men, given how surprisingly impulsive suicides are. But it's not sufficient, given that there are other countries with higher suicide rates and fewer firearms.
Also, while America has a lot of guns, there's also a lot of variance. The stats are a bit hard to compute, but there appear to be some states in the US that have fewer firearms per capita than some other countries, notably Switzerland, Canada, and Finland.
It's also worth pointing out that suicide by firearm is largely a male thing. In the United States women attempt suicide at 3x the rate that men do, but they tend to die because of that at a much lower rate (22.4 for men, 6.8 for women). The rate of completed female suicides is currently rising faster for women than men, worryingly.
It's complicated, basically.
And as always discussing suicide creates a contagion risk. If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts, please know that help is available at the national suicide prevention hotline, 800-273-8255.
> Access to firearms has certainly been shown to affect suicide rates, especially among men, given how surprisingly impulsive suicides are. But it's not sufficient, given that there are other countries with higher suicide rates and fewer firearms.
For reference, nine of the top ten nations for suicide of banned civilian gun ownership. All of the top 40 nations make it difficult. USA is usually around #50 or so.
It is complicated, and even statements like ”access to firearms has been shown to affect suicide rates” are could be misleading because you could be putting the cart before the horse, if someone has chosen to kill themselves, it reasons they will chose a fast/painless, and effective tool.
Less painful in my opinion would be a helium tank from a childrens party store and a gas mask from a hardware store. Syncope -> Mortality. Probably closer to Kevorkian's assisted method but more involved.
Ah yes, it appears that has fallen in favor of nitrogen. [1] I never would have imagined nitrogen would do the same thing. Apparently there are a variety of inert gasses that have the same effect. [2]
The autonomic system responds not to lack of oxygen, but to a rise in carbon dioxide levels. (More specifically I think it has something to do with pH, which decreases as carbon dioxide increases.) So as long as you can expire carbon dioxide, you'll pass out without any sensation of asphyxiation or struggle. You still need to inhale to exhale, though, and the inhaled air needs to have a sufficiently low partial pressure of carbon dioxide.
> It is complicated, and even statements like ”access to firearms has been shown to affect suicide rates” are could be misleading because you could be putting the cart before the horse, if someone has chosen to kill themselves, it reasons they will chose a fast/painless, and effective tool.
But choice of method does affect rate of death, so it's correct to say that increased access to any method that's commonly used affects the rate of death. Decreasing access to that method is valid if its one of the measures taken to reduce suicide rates.
The unique thing about guns is that they're generally more effective at suicide than the other chosen methods. It's less about the speed of access people are mentioning, but more that when someone uses a gun to commit suicide it's more likely to work than other methods.
So it's less that guns increase the rate of suicide, and more that they increase the suicide rate to suicide attempt ratio due to their efficacy. Which, similar to the point you're making, means America probably has less suicide attempts to begin with than its suicide rate would indicate relative to other countries.
Do you have a reason to imply most suicides are impulsive? I don’t think the media implies that (and my experience in New Zealand is they are not impulsive - usually following a long period of depression and maybe stated intent or attempts).
A long history of depression and some level of intent doesn't mean an attempt wasn't impulsive. That's why the question of whether someone has a specific plan is used to assess risk: there's a huge difference between passive suicidal thoughts and active suicide plans.
This page contains a few studies on how long people think about it before making an attempt - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/durat...
OK, I did a quick Google (uggh, I wonder what adverts I will targeted by now!)
There is scientific disagreement over impulsivity, and the distinction between impulsive and planning is so blurry as to be not that useful to a non-specialist. Also my quick skim of the topic was somewhat confusing because there is a different topic about whether impulsive personalities are more likely to suicide (probably not). And my case personally I am middle aged, and my peer group appears more likely to plan, which affects my anecdotal experience.
I think my problem is that the word “impulsive” is odd. Someone who has been thinking of committing suicide for months, and then one day “suddenly” decides to go through with it, seems to be considered by the literature to have made an impulsive decision. That definition doesn’t fit my usual meaning of the word impulsive (e.g. I don’t think it makes sense to say: I have been looking at cars to buy for two months and then I impulsively bought one).
It might make more sense to you to compare it to midlife crisis actions? E.g that guy has been looking at that car for years and today he impulsively bought it.
Like everything, including the supposed "virginity crisis," it's primed by the media that reaches western eyes that somehow people here think Japan is all an edgy anime.
Japan has been framed as weird and backwards since the 80s and 90s when the US took issue with their rising economy and encroachment on western industries
Even beyond attending school during Covid-19, which by itself has been disruptive and challenging, I've heard from a number of friends who emigrated from Japan that the Japanese school experience can be pretty dismal.
I also think some people are too quick to disregard the degree to which young people pick up on the quality of life and lifestyle of their parents and adults. The salaryman/woman lifestyle, the extremely long working hours, and the culture of extreme deference to work hierarchies, can be soul destroying, even for your children.
This is alarming; Japan is already on the verge of a population shortage as it's quite difficult for them to have children. Even with the help of the Government's benefits, it doesn't suffice. They should address this issue right away.
Suicide and depression are incredibly difficult things for anyone to address because they stem from unquantifiable things. When people feel like life is not worth living, despite having so many material goods and most of their basic needs taken care of, what is a government to do? Suicide and depression are high in developed, stable countries. Many people there have everything but feel there is no point to life. Our cultures of extreme nihilism which deemphasize the worth of human life are not something a government can fix even if desired.
I wonder how these correlate to parental success status. It seems the culture wants children to be successful. Children sometimes compare themselves with or view it as a competition with parents. Ones with high successful parents sometime lose hope of being better/successful (see a bunch of boys of successful male actors of the past).
Could have sworn I read an article a few months ago that suicide rates amongst Gen Z was increasing because of Covid lockdowns and social media causing depression/loneliness.
I’m not Gen Z nor are my friends, but they sometimes make me feel like they fall into this bucket of “should I check on them more often?” for the two items I laid out above.
Deep down I’m blaming social media for the increase in suicide amongst younger kids. It’s a pony show to them and they all want to outdo each other.
I went to a pumpkin patch over the weekend and two late teen girls spent an hour or so trying to get the best photos holding sunflowers. The place I was at let you pick your own sunflowers. These two girls were dressed up and proceeded to set up a camera stand for one of their cell phones that had a ring light around it. They spent that time trying to get the best photo to post to their IG pages and TikTok.
I get it that maybe they want to work on photography, but they spent way more effort and time than they should have when they were debating what to post to IG and TikTok.
To be fair to them, taking a great picture at a pumpkin patch is an American tradition. They often go on the Christmas Card. I was out there attaching a tripod to a fence and trying to get a good family portrait for my daughter’s first year walking.
If they spent the majority of the day outside, I feel like they have a leg up on many kids who never leave the house.
I was trying to do similar things on MySpace when I was their age; Or spending similar amounts of time chained to my desk chatting with girls on AIM; Or more frequently losing 8 hours at a clip to playing an FPS.
I had one staying in my house this weekend. They’re not as bad as we think they are. Most of my concern sits with the way the parents behave.
First thing's first, what I've typed below is all based on first-hand experience, which might be not representative of the general population, but probably not that far from how these kids who kill themselves feel.
First thing being that's being done wrong by parents is not treating their children like adults. The culmination of such treatment comes when the child gets separated from their parents, for example by going to college, and starts doing stuff like drinking/smoking/doing drugs/what else not because there are no parents present to punish him for it. Problem is that the child's subconscious thinks that the bad thing happening to him because of, for example, smoking, is not lung cancer and what not, but the punishment from his parents, so when they are not there to do the punishment, there is nothing wrong with doing all that stuff. In general, not letting children to make decisions and then deal with the consequences on their own leads to a population of people who are unable to think for themselves and who, while they have been told what's good or bad, haven't internalized that knowledge, as there is no opportunity to do so. You know, brain is kind of like a muscle, you have to train it when it's not really needed for it to be capable when it is. Actually Lois Rossman has quite a bit of parental advice that seems decent to me.
There is also a great emotional disconnect between the parents and their children. At least the message I've got from my parents is that I shouldn't even bother talking to them as there is a lack of even basic effort to try to understand what I'm trying to tell them. Not trying to blame anyone here, feeling exhausted after a workday is a thing but maybe considering not having children if you're unable to treat them properly is also a thing.
Honestly, I think dropping fertility is a good thing, as being more conscious about raising children is at least partially the reason, and that's a good thing.
Then school inevitably comes. You honestly can't expect an underpaid overworked teacher to manage 30 children in a class, there is just too much stuff going on. But, because teachers are underpaid and overworked, it is a low prestige profession so if things don't change, the problem isn't going to solve itself. Then there is the learning process. Problem is, in school people don't learn, they are being schooled, and then there is some learning happening as a secondary on the side. Problem with learning while being schooled usually is that the pace is way different and there is a ton of unnecessary extras. Here are couple of examples:
My English teacher would accept essays and other stuff that are typed, not written by hand, so what I would do is type them first, then just write down what I've typed. Why the extra step? Could be beneficial to go through the material another time and what not, but that could be done without spending the time and effort on writing it all down. At least in the professional environment, everything is being done digitally these days, so an all-digital workflow clearly works.
Maths homework was probably worst of them all because of how much of it accomplished so little. It is very much repetition based, so a lot of the time the task you're given a set of 10 identical problems, just with different inputs in them. That way by the fifth one, it takes a second to solve it and a minute to write down the solution, and there are 5 more like this ahead. That way, there is just muscle memory being built for solving that one problem, and exactly nothing is happening to the understanding of the subject, broader understanding of mathematics, creative thinking and problem solving, arguably very much needed skills in real life situations. In general, there are very little 'reality checks' that might indicate a problem a person has but himself is unaware of.
Yeah, you better remember things by writing them down and all that, there are way better ways to do al...
“ Also, a record high of over 190,000 students of elementary and junior high schools stopped attending. “
I feel like we are entering an era where different communities are experiencing a feast or famine in regards to how they are flourishing in the ‘modern’ world. At the zoomed out earth-scale, it seems to be a darwinian process of discovering which behaviors will exist in a century (because the only vote that matters for the future is how well your children are doing, birth rates, etc.).
There's certainly a darwinian process going on with COVID-19 right now in regards to the vaccinated and willfully unvaccinated. What's not darwinian is what went on during lockdowns where well-off parents could afford to let one stay at home to keep their kids from goofing off while attending online classes.
I am unhopeful that society at large will use that as a lesson learned about providing resources to the less fortunate so their children can get the (online) education they need (even if it's just an adult keeping watch over a handful of kids). If we have another pandemic with lockdowns like this I highly suspect it will go pretty much exactly the same.
To be fully prepared for pandemics of the future families will need the resources necessary to keep an adult at home to watch over the children going through online learning. Giving people remote work opportunities could be a great (societal) inoculation, as it were against such inequities.
The same pressure those kids are feeling to succeed is the same pressure American men in their 30's and 40's feel to succeed and are killing themselves in record numbers.
I can't say anything proactive about this situation.. but I can say things.
Do you find that the emotional juice of a situation is more primary than the logic of a situation? Like, people feel something and then rationalize the logic to justify their feeling.
I have found that using feelingswheel to get a firmer grasp on the specific emotional chords, connections and common "songs" I tend to play, etc, has increased my ability to identify and categorize emotions on a finer level.
Categorization is the least thing that must be done in order to process hurt. The brain will try to process a situation until it understands it, and it can require using emotional intuition to identify the exact feeling, as if it were a chord played on a piano, where some notes are hit more than others.
It's important to categorize granular feelings (like indignant is a form of anger whereby you're upset that something is unfair) (embarassment can be a sad hurt or a disapproving disgust) (some feelings lead to other feelings) (dismissive anger is repressed by default from feeling like anger)
Some people don't have true feelings, because they will automatically convert one feeling to another. Instead of feeling angry sometimes and happy other times, they feel the liminal angry/happy feeling that feels like a mecurial wire of an emotion. For instance: if they're happy, they become angry that they aren't happy more often; if they're angry about something, they're glad that they finally have something to be mad about.
Thank you for mentioning the Feelings Wheel. I never knew it existed and when I looked it up I could immediately see its use with my parenting as my son struggles to express his emotional state. I wonder if you've used it, or the Emotion Wheel, with children or for other use cases like conflict resolution in the workplace?
I've found benefit across all areas of life. When dealing with other people, I find it helpful to at least be cognizant of the main emotional category, but it's easier to feel the specificity in yourself than in others.
>people feel something and then rationalize the logic to justify their feeling
Kind of sounds like projection. Depending on who you ask, it's generally understood in psychology that children raised by cold/rejecting/invalidating/selfish/abusive parents develop it to cope with having age-appropriate emotions that offend their parents. It could be perceived as a way to manipulate/convince the cold/rejecting parents into giving them what the child needs (food, attention, etc.) without feeling bad for having their age-appropriate, healthy needs - a habit that outlasts its need and stays through adulthood to the detriment of everyone. A healthy response would be to not feel bad for having feelings and, due to successfully developing self-acceptance, integrate/communicate all their emotions and rationality in a healthy way.
It’s sad but I’m not surprised. Senior high school is widely viewed as the best years of ones life in Japan, and kids who started in 2020 have had to live with senior high school (minus the fun parts) for 1.5/3 years.
One things that's missing from this article is that the familial context is not there to support children in Japan. Before COVID, kids are expected to spend most of the waking life at school or in the school context (they even have activity clubs in the weekends, at school, and cram schools after school pretty much everyday).
The day COVID hit, children were suddenly brought back to stay at home in an environment where parents were never used to having them around.
It's so hard to not feel sentimental about this. Suffering to such a degree that you you take your own life is the most horrible way to go, and it's beyond heartbreaking that children are going through this. And the 415 kids are the ones who went through with it, who knows how many thousands go struggling for finding their will to live every day. Japan, and all other countries where this is an issue, need severe and disruptive interventions urgently.
I also remember reading that many murder cases are sometimes intentionally or mistakenly re-classified as a suicide to close it, because the Japanese police are under a lot of pressure to maintain their high rate of solving cases.
Suicides in Japan perhaps have an additional attraction in that insurance companies have to payout even if the cause of death is suicide.
Couple that with the asian cultural pressure of taking care of one's family, and the cultural factor that suicide on personal failure is linked to honour and glorified in Japanese history, it becomes somewhat understandable why some Japanese individuals may find suicide as a reasonable / attractive option while contemplating how to end their depressive existence.
someone should get funding to check links between antiperspirant use and depression/effects of dark thoughts.
Anecdata: My mood improved gradually after I stopped using retail antiperspirants. At some point (aka 12-18 months later) I got pissed of never being dry and went back to the stuff. It took 12h before the dark thoughts were back, took 3 showers as soon as I noticed, and it still took 3 days for the effect to stop being noticeable. Since this event I strongly think antiperspirants should be studied to confirm this is not just my mind playing tricks on me.
Per-country data on suicides should be treated skeptically because most cultures have a strong aversion to suicide and listing cause of death as suicide.
Many are classified as accidents and authorities are generally fine with this. Additionally, suicides are usually not reported by the media to prevent copycat suicides.
What I'm saying is that the "actual rate" of suicides is probably higher, maybe by a lot, in many countries than the official rate.
Absolutely. Just to add to your examples of why soluicide is systematically under-reported in certain countries, in many Eastern Orthodox countries (Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece), suicide is considered a mortal sin and victims of suicide are denied burial in religious cemeteries (and denied normal religious burial rights) by the church.
Not only that, but in Russia you may be slapped with the fine for the 'propaganda of suicide' (I shit you not it's the real law) if you even discuss suicide on more or less popular platform.
Strongly agree. Recently an important religious leader in my town died, and the police stated it was accident though they had clear evidence it was suicide because they knew it would distress the public less.
I’ve heard that Japan will classify murder-suicide deaths as suicide deaths, because their word for “suicide” actually has a slightly different denotation.
similarly how eskimos have a bunch of words for "snow", and new yorkers have a bunch of words for "pizza", japanese have a bunch of words for "suicide"
Do you have sources for this? Here in El Salvador we have highways without lamps, streets that drivers treat as highways, crosswalk where you cannot longer see the painting.
In much (most? all?) of the United States, life insurance contracts generally cover suicide, except that individual policies will typically have 2-3 year exclusion period.
My individual term life policy has a 2-year exclusion period, but otherwise covers suicide. I can't track down the precise reasons for this, whether its related to case law, state statutes, etc. Closest hit I found for California was Insurance Code § 11066(h), but that's for policies issued by fraternal societies. (It probably echoes some other statute or case law.) There are endless Google hits from law and insurance web sites stating this general fact.
That's completely false. Among many other factors, about 50% of single-car crashes involve passengers, which would imply a disturbingly high number of murder-suicides.
Even if the absolute number is wrong (which it isn't, necessarily), the relative trend is dramatically upward, and the biases you describe wouldn't appear to account for such a trend.
> The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year.
I believe this is mirrored in other countries. The pandemic really hasn't been great for a lot of middle/high school kids.
Also: please be mindful that generally if some "obvious fault" occurs to you, it probably occurs to the people for whom this is their professional area of expertise or even life's work, their work has likely been reviewed by a number of their peers, etc. Internet discussion forum commenters are highly unlikely to be the first person to think of some flaw in their work.
I'm not saying they always will do said correction, but that if you're going to be skeptical, check to see if the correction was made instead of just dismissing or discounting the data, and be especially careful about your personal biases.
Note that such corrections might only get a passing mention because corrections for under-reporting is so common in epidemology.
I'm always confused when "child" is used for teenagers. I always assume child means elementary school kids and it throws me when I realize they mean older kids.
People are really grasping for meaning and a sense of belonging nowadays in this phase of global capitalism. We could do so much better at helping people find a calling rather than hoping capitalist business owners provide them.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadThe ministry conducts an annual survey of elementary, junior and senior high schools, and schools for special needs education across the country. It covers bullying, truancy and suicides among students.
On Wednesday, the ministry published the results of its survey conducted for the 2020 school year.
The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year. Seven of the students were in elementary school, 103 in junior high and 305 in senior high.
The number of elementary and junior high school students who were absent for 30 days or more was 196,127. That's up nearly 15,000 from the previous year and a record high.
The rate of children who were absent has also been on the rise. The rate for elementary children increased threefold over the past ten years, to one out of 100. The rate for junior high was one out of 24, up 50 percent.
The survey also looked into the number of children who stopped attending school due to concerns over coronavirus infection.
It shows the total of 30,287 elementary, junior high and senior high school students were absent for 30 days or more due to such concerns.
Eguchi Arichika, student affairs division chief at the ministry, says the results show that changes in school and household environments due to the pandemic have had a huge impact on children's behavior, and that the increase in the number of suicides is very regrettable.
The official adds that the ministry will work to encourage children to seek help, and to ensure learning opportunities for children who cannot attend school.
On the main matter: Societies need to cater more and better for the interest of children. All too often all other concerns come first (and children are an after thought to the interest of parents, which also aren't entirely high up in the priority list).
In this case (underage suicide) specifically, some factors would be depression and domestic violence due to mandated isolation.
Forcing abusive parents to spend time with their children, and having children who are depressed or were on the verge of depression, enter a state of desperation that could lead to suicide rates spiking.
A depressive topic in itself.
PS: Should note that these are just two of the most likely reasons for the increase in children suicide, but not the only.
* They're trying to optimize for 2 (sometimes) contradictory problems: getting the right answer AND maintaining their job/power. A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer: any other considerations like fielding off hungry young political competitors or maintaining corporate stock prices so you stay in their good graces aren't factors in the slightest to a random well-intentioned smart guy on the Internet.
* They are very smart at their field of expertise, but they're specialists and not generalists. They are very bad at considering second-order effects outside of their narrow field of expertise. Something like a lockdown in some city might indeed immediately save 1,000 extra people from a Covid death. Any risk-benefit analysis and deeper consideration of that lockdown on other problems such as drug/alcohol abuse and overdose deaths, suicides and hopelessness and depression, obesity increases leading to many health problems and deaths later on, deaths caused by missed cancer screenings and other medical problems, loss of freedom, or its economic impact and long-term impact on society isn't even a consideration by officialdom. Maybe 1,000 people are saved to kill 2,000 and cause even further societal problems. Yet those 1,000 deaths saved would be characterized as a win and proof that lockdowns work because no other factors can be considered. I'd strongly argue that a smart engineer or CEO (professions who are trained to considering multiple factors and tradeoffs in complex decision-making) would be better suited to make these kinds of complex societal decisions than a scientist focused on a narrow field.
* They're frighteningly bad at normal risk-management calculations. One could make a very reasonable argument that a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them: and many people are reasonably making that risk-management calculation. Yet many experts are rushing into advocating vaccines even for children despite no long-term test data. The risk management calculation for a vaccine in this circumstance is completely different for the old and young, yet no consideration of this is allowed.
* Even when they sometimes get things right, most of what what even well-informed members of the public hear from the experts is filtered through the media. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of decent journalists who are reasonably smart and understand nuance (and who are mostly shunned from mainstream outlets) there is no collection of stupider people on the planet to try and analyze complex subjects or ask scientists real questions.
Covid is not low risk for 35-40 year olds. Someone age 25 with both vaccination doses is at higher risk of death than an unvaccinated 12 year old. How you've managed to extrapolate from this to "low risk to people up to age 40" is baffling, especially when you spend the rest of your post talking about how bad people are at understanding data.
What threshold are you using to define “low risk” ?
In my opinion, just about everyone is low risk but there is jump in numbers once the 35-40 age group is added
Science qua science can give humans all kinds of (nearly) objective information about viruses and vaccines.
A risk-management calculation is not science: that kind of decision comes down to factors such as one's own risk tolerance and projection of the risks involved and many other subjective factors, including trust. For a reasonably well-informed Covid vaccine decision, you have to weigh factors such as your personal risk from Covid and compare that to somewhat known short term potential vaccine injuries/side-effects, and unknown long-term vaccine issues.
Whether you or I personally think a vaccine is a good or bad thing for a healthy ~40 year old to take is irrelevant. If you feel safer with it, you are certainly free to take it. The point I'd like to make is that many 40 year olds can reasonably look at Covid death rates for their age group, and compare it to the known short term problems, as well as weigh the likelihood of long-term issues, and come to a sane and reasonable decision to not want to rush and take it.
For me, my big issue with the vaccines is fertility. We found out after a few years that Thalidomide caused birth-defects, as just one example in the history of medicine. Personally speaking, I think rushing to mass-inject all children with this (as some people want) is the worst risk-management decision in the history of humanity.
Most random folks on the internet seem to be optimizing for dopamine hits, not correct answers. Anyone with an audience is optimizing for subscription uptake, which seems to reliably lead in the opposite direction from correct answers.
> Stuff about "mainstream [media] outlets" shunning all "decent journalists"
This kind of silliness does nothing but weaken the rest of your arguments, IMO.
And just FYI, I never said "all" journalists, I was only referring to most, a not altogether uncommon opinion.
Also, I don't think it would have been useful to talk about Covid response policy using figures like "X% chance of death!", since it sounds like a weather forecast and we can't even get those right one day in advance, let alone when determining policy for the entire year. And you can't conclude from absence of public discussion that these figures or expectations weren't discussed privately.
Yes, it would have been better for the policymakers to voice their reservations and motivations in public, but I'm not willing to blame the politicians for not doing that. In order to have a nuanced political discussion, all parties need to play ball. It is counterproductive for a politician to take a well-argued public position when the media only wants ten-second soundbites and actively looks ways to embarrass and undermine said politician, and when the public isn't remotely interested in a nuanced position because the tribe has already spoken.
To me, the Covid response in the West highlights a failure of democracy. That is not the same as a failure of politics, trying to pin all blame for the failure of democracy on the current politicians is just another symptom of the underlying problem. Instead, it is a failure of society at large. It seems we are no longer willing and/or capable to have an honest and open debate about matters of public policy, and that is a sad situation. I'm not even going to try and hint at the wide array of causes and consequences that led us to this point, just expressing dismay that I don't see the situation improving for the better any time soon.
This is 100% a case of the pandemic response being worse than the disease. Risks from COVID for kids is minimal. What really bothers me is that people who warned of this were berated for not following "the science", censored and labeled as someone who didn't care about COVID deaths. Imo schools should have never closed.
Unfortunately, I think there will be a lot of fallout from the poor response in years to come.
Context: https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-top-infectious-disease-exp...
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
No reason to lock down at that point unless the vaccine is ineffective.
Does someone here have any experience with japanese school life? Is it really that bad? Or did they just pick a number of the worst cases?
Sharpen up.
Or even worse: blame is put on the victim.
That said, I think the deep scar analogy is apt. While therapy has helped me immensely in dealing with some of my issues, those issues will always be there, so it's hard not to feel an immense amount of regret and "if only" thoughts wishing I had never been bullied in the first place.
That doesn't surprise me at all. Back in the day 2ch, which was the forerunner of 4chan in Japan, was extremely popular, but basically just as toxic and awful as 4chan. I think in Asia generally there is a LOT of aggression online.
I'm sure there's something there, but I'm not a social scientist. Anyone with experience in sociology/psychology have an idea what that's about?
Is being successful in school good? yes. Is being successful in later life good? yes.
So you cannot consider the "successful school dropout". "risk taking" is the missed nuance, or "it has to get worse before it gets better"/"break a bone to set the leg" etc. Instead you have the only "feminist" path as (cherry-picked populations of) girls doing well in school and successes later in life, even if those don't necessarily/naturally correlate.
If you really wanted to capture that nuance, you need the kind of discussions Jordan Peterson has wrt personality/behavioural traits and their impacts on differences in outcomes; but you can clearly see how much hostility (in the name of feminism) he receives for that.
The funny thing is how he's accused of (sex/gender) essentialism, even if backed by stats/data, despite the advocated feminist alternatives being also full of essentialism (and just-so narratives), just ones seen as more culturally palatable.
I think because can be a better replacement for yet in this sentence. Repression very often leads to higher intensity.
In Asia? You haven't seen Twitter yet in the US.
Yes I have, and there is much more of a culture to be taken care of and get emotional support there than I've seen in other countries. Even British twitter is way harsher lol Americans are generally very kind and soft
You probably aren't exposed to the same kind of feed then.
Also, I think people should feel free to share whatever life experience / observations / anecdotes they have because it's not like what we write here is going to get cited in some journal.
Anyway, looks like I replied to the wrong post originally. And I botched my delivery. It was a poor attempt at encouraging more substantive discussion. I, for one, would have been interested in seeing an example that points out how much more ruthless a different country was, and I would have hoped that someone would show a counter example, and then a n interesting discussion pop up.
Good thing we wouldn't introduce such a thing in the west.
I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.
Those stories always follow the same pattern - pick out the most extreme example of something that you can find, then spin some superficially insightful theory around it relating it to some essential difference between Japanese culture and other cultures.
There is no such thing as essential differences. And if all that reaches your attention about a faraway place is the extremes, you are bound to come to some weird conclusions.
It's just too easy to apply this recipe to anything you don't understand well. Just imagine the stories you could tell about European student culture if you started from the Belgian Reuzegom hazing story [0], and generalized from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuzegom#Death_of_Sanda_Dia
Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.
Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.
Does it really? Do you feel the same way about western society and, say, duels to the death? The many old practices regarding marriage and the church all around?
I don't think suicide as an honorable death is any more of a real thing in Japan nowadays than ninjas are.
Considering how common a form of retribution gun violence is in the US nowadays, yes, I'd say yes.
Could there be a case to be made in comparing American school shooters and Japanese student suicides? Maybe we'd find they had similar school experiences prior to their final moments.
Yes, I would. Such societal norms don't just die, they remain in the "ether" so to speak.
For example, americans might not be as religious, or sticking with the church. They might not even be born in the US, or just be first or second generation. But the culture, and this includes immigrants as they integrate, contains all kinds of protestant ideas.
And it's easier for something like a suicide norm to survice that a practice of the duel (which takes two to survice, plus has the law against it, even if you come out alive).
Maybe not so nowadays, but you'd be surprised how often it was a solution to societal shame in Italy up to the 1950s or so...
The 'suicide for preserving honor' theory has been long abandoned & mostly outlawed, even. No one in the modern generation thinks that way. The causes for suicide are mostly due to economic imbalance & high credit/ loans/ failed businesses (sadly). Children have easy access to credit cards from family, and rack up huge debts by indulging in things as part of peer pressure. I saw several case studies highlighting this when I was part of influencer marketing business.
Ritual suicide was done by seppuku - slashing out your guts, as a final act of bravery. No one does anything remotely similar.
You can’t purge a cultural heritage—everyone in Japan learns Japanese history and ritual suicide is a notable part of that history. The point is not that people commit suicide today for the same reasons or in the same way that they did 500 years ago, but that it is more likely to be accepted as a way out than in a culture that e.g. considers suicide to be a one-way ticket to the spiritual inferno.
Not sure where you get this idea, but this is grossly inaccurate.
Japanese culture is strongly revisionist. People don't talk about the war, much less teach about it. The 'old ways' and 'samurai heroism' was faulted for the mess in '40s. People make a sigh whenever such touchy topics come up. New Japan is a different beast.
As a consequence, we are seeing a generation which is severely confused on why WW2 happened. American pop culture is embraced with open arms, but they can't explain why Hiroshima happened at the hands of US. It's all faulted to grave mistakes on the 'old thinking' which is best left behind. Japan adopted modernism & became America's best buddies, ignoring the blemishes over 3 decades of Imperial japanese horrors. Older generation, who used to teach from experience of pre-war and neo-modern Japan, are dying off due to age. A significant chapter of history is being ignored by looking the other way. Look up the editorials of any Japanese weekly, and on any random week you will find some discussion on how they bemoan the growing dissonance between the post-war values of peace & the cultural change alongside the pseudo-aggression of some political parties, which eventually aims to remilitarize Japan at some point. (That's a story for another time or another thread)
Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.
No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.
Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.
My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D
You're assuming you can "see" the cultural differences.
Sometimes you can easily see it, but often it's really hard to figure out, because they are going to express themselves in edge cases that you have to run into, which takes time and then it takes time to run into enough of them to be able to see a pattern.
Interestingly I experienced persistent bullying that included physical assault and mental abuse (it was always successfully passed off as a joke when they did something to me) in the French system.
It was so bad that I still relive it daily every single day now, many many years later.
No direct experience but heard stories of bullying of children of friends/colleagues living in Japan and that was scary enough.
He was forced to resign and ultimately put a lot of pressure on prime minister Suga because he was his pick. Suga had to also step down after this and other similar incidents.
https://aramajapan.com/news/cornelius-apologizes-after-bully...
My impression is that, overall, the bullying is probably not significantly worse than in other countries, but that perhaps more media attention is focused on the issue than elsewhere. There was a major moral panic in the mid-1980s about school bullying, and the media continue to report regularly on statistical trends and extreme incidents.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of variation among schools. More than one public school teacher has confided to me about how different the kids are in different neighborhoods. Japan may seem homogeneous, but there’s a lot of local variation by social class. In the tougher schools, there can be fighting, stealing, and bullying, while in other schools that might be practically unknown. Private schools can be very different from public, too, and there are a lot of single-gender schools, which have their own dynamics. Certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as age-based hierarchies, may be stronger or weaker or play out differently in different types of schools as well.
In the U.S., people tend to be keenly aware of school differences, because public schools have a lot of local autonomy and are typically locally funded. In Japan, because the curriculum and many other education-related matters are determined by the Ministry of Education, there is a large degree of apparent nationwide uniformity, especially between grades one and nine. For example, in every elementary and junior-high-school classroom I have been into in Japan, and in almost all that I’ve seen in photographs, all of the desks face the front of the room and the outside windows are on the students’ left-hand side [1]. There doesn’t seem to be any similar uniformity at least in California [2], where I went to elementary school more than fifty years ago.
This apparent uniformity can give people who have experienced Japanese schools only as students the impression that whatever they happened to experience in school—a lot of bullying, say, or none at all—must be typical of the entire country.
Of course, people in other countries might overgeneralize their individual educational experiences, too.
[1] Google image search for 小学校 教室 [elementary-school classroom]
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A...
[2] Google image search for elementary-school classroom California
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=elementary-school+classroo...
That said, I'll say that bullying in Japan is different in that it is orchestrated. Peer pressure is enormous in Japan. When someone is being bullied, very few of us can raise an objection because doing so would make you the next target. So everyone is becoming an enabler. (Actually, this is not just kids' matter. It's pretty much how the whole society functions here. No wonder adults can't stop kids bullying - they're just imitating adults!)
I imagine it does happen, but more often than not at urban school, at schools that are less academically oriented (e.g., construction high schools), and overall in lower socio-economic areas. The abusers are probably from abusive families.
If you’re in the burbs or the provincial parts of Japan, bullying at this extreme level is very unlikely to happen. The more common type of bullying is verbal abuse — still bad, but not like the examples you gave.
All that said, there is a form of hazing that is common in Japan that would probably be considered abusive, and that’s with high school baseball clubs. The new players on the team sometimes get boot camp-like treatment, and some folks (and sometimes coaches) take it too far. It’s theoretically all in fun and/or character building, and there are often checks and balances in place by the senior players, but I’ve heard some stories. That said, I don’t think that there are many baseball players who would not do it again.
I sincerely believe these instances were cherry picked. If such things happened regularly, it would have made an awful amount of noise in an otherwise law abiding society. Mixed raced (hafu) children do get more bullying from anecdotal evidence, but that is more of name calling or poking some fun at visual attribute. My knowledge about the situation is limited to Tokyo & Osaka, but that is pretty much where most of the foreigners/ mixed race families are to be found.
All of these things happened to at least one person I know growing up in the US.
I'm not sure how much of this is true and/or a stereotype, but even elsewhere, i've seen parents overcrowding their kids (school)work schedules (+extracurricular activities) to absurd amounts, where the kids can't handle it anymore.
This is in comparison to my childhood, where pretty much everyone had school from 8-until somewhere between noon and 2pm (depending on the year), and after that we pretty much just "went out" and did "stupid kid stuff" (mostly hanging out)
His son thinks school in the UK is ridiculously easy. His teachers think he's amazing because he always hands in work early, it's always very neat and well done, he started off well ahead of kids his own age in maths and the sciences that are in common with Chinese schooling. The work ethic he learned there is working very well for him.
Having said that, my friend particularly wanted his son to come here for secondary education. The system over there is excessively regimented and oppressive. Education here is much broader with more scope for creativity and extra-curricular activities. They're very different systems.
As a kid I would have been playing games or watching TV at that time.
Also even if you had the best students, they are constrained by the institutions they are in and the experience of their professors. It takes generations to develop deep institutional experience and culture. They know this, and expend a lot of effort trying to get experienced Chinese academics that have studied abroad in western institutions to come back to China.
And, also, if you know the syntax of a few languages cold, but you have no creative practice at problem-solving, are lacking foundational computer science concepts and practice, then by the time you are in college or grad school, another language may have come along, while you may have to struggle to apply existing knowledge and creativity to new tools (which is the point of a CS degree).
Some students have no mental toolkit to rely on other than brute force memorizing the syntax of a new language. The difference is highly noticeable, even at a low level of college work.
My American Midwestern childhood was largely similar in the late 90’s, but I still had one parent at home full time.
So large apartment buildings in large neighbourhoods with a lot of kids of same age there (due to the way apartments were distributed), and after school, if you were bored at home, you just went out, because someone was always outside.
Parents usually worked from 6am-2pm (factory workers) or 8am-4pm (administration), so they would come home after the kids, but this was seen as normal here. The elementary schools (6/7yo - 14/15yo here) were usually a walking distance from home in the cities, so we'd be by ourselves... High school usually ended somewhere between 1pm-3pm, and you'd take a bus ride home, and depending on where your parents worked, you might still be home before them.
We did have extra-curricular activities, but usually you did one thing (eg. had football practice twice per week for 2 hours if you werent a "pro" in your age group), but it was unusal to have your day totally filled up.
I don't have kids, but a lot of my friends do, and a half of them do it in a way as we did, but about half of them sign their kids up for every activity possible, so after school it's horseriding lessons, and then tennis practice, and then music school, so they drive them around for that.... I'm not sure how a busy schedule like that would work on me in that age, but i'm pretty sure i prefered the laid-back method, and I still had no issues, from elementary school to my engineering degree.
Worshiping conflict would aptly describe social media in many areas, so the ancients were on to something :)
Elsewhere someone sarcastically asked about video games - if 1/10th the concern that was shown in the 80's and 90's over video games towards social media I think we all would be having a much different conversation.
I dunno why up until recently social media has been pretty much getting a pass. It's nice to see at least some discussion of it, especially in relation to kids, showing up in more places. I'm always amazed and somewhat appalled by how many of my peers I see just hand over phones or tablets to their kids to occupy them. At least in the past when parents parked kids in front of the TV it was one way and limited to fairly "safe" content.
Ha - after having typed that it sure makes the concerns voiced over TV in the past feel very, very quaint in comparison. Something I really hadn't considered before now.
I expect that the analysis has been done internally and just not released since it’s bad (ie, social media use is higher among suicides). Maybe a whistleblower will leak this stuff.
I think an analysis is possible by building off their typical drop off analysis. I think that because I expect all drop offs are likely analyzed to restart and avoid future drop offs. So I expect they have a way to classify people who died vs left the platform.
In the US we release a “death master file” that has names, dob, ssn a few years after death. If Japan has something similar it can be run against account holder data to see who actually died. I don’t know privacy law in Japan, but in the US cause of death is confidential. So we just know that a kid died and would need to predict cause of death from social media activity.
With this low number, they could be investigated manually to see how many children had accounts and what patterns exist in common.
You'd be surprised how many horror stories I have encountered about teenage girls commiting suicides due to peer pressure, credit card loans & inability to keep up with fashion trends.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
Which looks like 5 per 100000 for 10 to 14 year olds?
The Japanese population in this age range is ~5M:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
So at the US rate we’d except ~250 suicides in Japan if the rate was the same as the US.
Over the 12 to 15 range in Japan the article states there were 103 suicides.
The rates seem roughly comparable therefore?
It terrible that this is increasing, but it would be interesting to understand if this is unique to Japan or not.
Is this asking a question?
Edit: Today I learned the best course for a non native speaker is to not ask questions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
English was not my first language, and this peculiar phrasing confused me. Asking for clarity seems like a natural thing to do in this situation.
And as mentioned elsewhere, the entire thread seems like a good natured discussion: perhaps it felt different without the original "edit".
There is a rudeness in making it one of these faux-questions filled with implications instead of clearly stating what it is you want to say.
This sub-thread reminds me that there are many informal rules in languages that are rarely taught, and which can trip up non-native speakers. Informal shorthands, idioms, slang, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
1. is sincerely asking a question
2. accidentally hit they question mark key instead of the period
3. is mimicking the valley girl inflection
It's not that much of a problem here, but it's much more pronounced in places where people rarely use complete sentences to begin with. Such as chat rooms, etc.
:-) I was thinking this but couldn't find the right phrase.
It could also be expressing uncertainty. You want to make an assertion but not 100% sure you are right. A question mark at the end expresses some self doubt and leaves it open to correction. I use '?' that way quite often.
Both of your comments can be construed as linguistic pedantry. Particularly, saying "it's confusing" rather than e.g. "I find it confusing" is pretty prescriptive - and it just sounds like you're doubling down on your first comment.
If you want to ask a question about a feature of language, it helps to add the context that you're unfamiliar with the language itself. Otherwise, most readers will assume that you're attempting to correct the user you're replying to. Commenting on people's use of language is considered quite rude in most internet communities - not least because of the number of ESL users.
shortened, becomes:
I used this process, and came up with these numbers, 140 and 250, and they are kind of close?
Why you got in trouble: people thought you were criticizing the original comment for hiding a statement to look like a question. (A common underhanded tactic to do and a common criticism - "was that a question?".)
Eg:
I think I left the phone in my car.
Vs
I think I left the phone in my car?
While technically incorrect in written English, this is very common in casual speaking and has found its way into casual writing.
Rendering it in written English is not correct per formal rules, you’d probably never see this in an English textbook, but it’s a semi-common colloquialism in forums like these.
Unfortunately not. The suicide capital of the world (including teenagers) is currently South Korea:
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216
which has the highest suicide rate among countries with a population of more than 5mln:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...
South Korea is on a capitalist upswing, not decline. People forget that South Korea was worse off than most of Africa after the Korean War. Capitalism and democracy is what saved them.
Look at their brother to the North if you want to see a real decline.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule
“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work, where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption - and indeed Korea has massive megacorps owned by just a few families that are de facto governments in themselves.
Ugh... I see you overlooked the small fact that the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula happened before the Korean War...
"After all, the South was by all standards a failed state after the Korean war (1950-53). GDP per capita in South Korea in early 1960’s was below $100. Lower than Haiti, Ethiopia or Yemen, making South Korea one of the poorest countries in the world. Infrastructure built during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) was destroyed during the war. All of Korea’s natural resources remained in the North, as well as its industrial facilities. The first years of independence, under the presidency of Rhee Syng-man, brought no economic development and kept South Korea afloat only due to foreign aid." [0]
>“Capitalism” being called as a reason for success sort of also implies that there is something strong and special about Koreans in that they can make it work
There may be something strong and special about Koreans, but one half went capitalist, the other half went Communist/Socialist. The proof is in the pudding.
>where there are countless other examples of capitalistic societies leading to massive corruption
Being capitalist is immaterial to being corrupt.
[0] https://www.forbeswoman.ge/en/post/southkorea
I guess explain China vs Taiwan, which are both doing well, although that is certainly glossing over some horrible decades with the cultural revolution.
Yes, that's exactly what PP posits as the cause of these suicides.
I believe it was Malcom Kyeyune who joked that if North Korea nuked Seoul, it would be the best thing to ever happen to young people in South Korea.
The birth rate in South Korea is like 1/4th the birth rate of North Korea.
People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children, by society, by politics, by wealth/industry.
Having a kid doesn't cost a lot in South Korea. In fact it's usually beneficial. The problem is that having a kid basically means your main source of income is vulnerable and your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
This is how elite overproduction tends to happen. I suggest you read some of the writing on the causes and effects of EO. The Good Ol Boyz podcast has some episodes on EO in Korea that are pretty good.
If you can get into a relatively high status position by doing better than your peers in a school test, and you’re out of luck otherwise, of course many people are going to spend 16 hours a day studying for those tests.
> People are having less children because there is constant downwards pressure to have less children
Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
> Having a kid… it's usually beneficial… your situation will more than likely be negatively affected.
This seems contradictory.
Being a labourer is often highly regarded in lots of low population or first world countries. Not in Korea. Not even without significant immigration. They are just all sardines trying to squeeze into the upper jobs. No one wants to be left out and certainly doesn't consider it a career path.
>Where would you say this pressure comes from and is communicated?
Their workforce and/or lack off work stability, almost entirely.
>This seems contradictory.
If you take it out of context..... yes. But I just said that it'd be financially beneficial to have a kid. But then also introduces instability that might pull the rug underneath when your financially beneficial decision removes your larger chunk of income.
i.e. babies are very affordable, and you get benefits that aren't bad. But also this coincides with losing your job due to having a baby. It's not contradictory as they're both alternate directions. Your job is stable whilst having a baby AND you have a baby? You're benefiting. You have a baby and it ruins your income stream? Those extra savings from having a baby are cancelled out.
Also, while America has a lot of guns, there's also a lot of variance. The stats are a bit hard to compute, but there appear to be some states in the US that have fewer firearms per capita than some other countries, notably Switzerland, Canada, and Finland.
It's also worth pointing out that suicide by firearm is largely a male thing. In the United States women attempt suicide at 3x the rate that men do, but they tend to die because of that at a much lower rate (22.4 for men, 6.8 for women). The rate of completed female suicides is currently rising faster for women than men, worryingly.
It's complicated, basically.
And as always discussing suicide creates a contagion risk. If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts, please know that help is available at the national suicide prevention hotline, 800-273-8255.
For reference, nine of the top ten nations for suicide of banned civilian gun ownership. All of the top 40 nations make it difficult. USA is usually around #50 or so.
It is complicated, and even statements like ”access to firearms has been shown to affect suicide rates” are could be misleading because you could be putting the cart before the horse, if someone has chosen to kill themselves, it reasons they will chose a fast/painless, and effective tool.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29684846/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Suicide
On the shittiest days I see the lines of nitrogen tanks we use at work for Gas Detector calibration and remember my old buddy.
But choice of method does affect rate of death, so it's correct to say that increased access to any method that's commonly used affects the rate of death. Decreasing access to that method is valid if its one of the measures taken to reduce suicide rates.
So it's less that guns increase the rate of suicide, and more that they increase the suicide rate to suicide attempt ratio due to their efficacy. Which, similar to the point you're making, means America probably has less suicide attempts to begin with than its suicide rate would indicate relative to other countries.
Do you have a reason to imply most suicides are impulsive? I don’t think the media implies that (and my experience in New Zealand is they are not impulsive - usually following a long period of depression and maybe stated intent or attempts).
There is scientific disagreement over impulsivity, and the distinction between impulsive and planning is so blurry as to be not that useful to a non-specialist. Also my quick skim of the topic was somewhat confusing because there is a different topic about whether impulsive personalities are more likely to suicide (probably not). And my case personally I am middle aged, and my peer group appears more likely to plan, which affects my anecdotal experience.
I think my problem is that the word “impulsive” is odd. Someone who has been thinking of committing suicide for months, and then one day “suddenly” decides to go through with it, seems to be considered by the literature to have made an impulsive decision. That definition doesn’t fit my usual meaning of the word impulsive (e.g. I don’t think it makes sense to say: I have been looking at cars to buy for two months and then I impulsively bought one).
I also think some people are too quick to disregard the degree to which young people pick up on the quality of life and lifestyle of their parents and adults. The salaryman/woman lifestyle, the extremely long working hours, and the culture of extreme deference to work hierarchies, can be soul destroying, even for your children.
and yet Japan has a high suicide rate compared to many other high multi cultural developed countries.
I’m not Gen Z nor are my friends, but they sometimes make me feel like they fall into this bucket of “should I check on them more often?” for the two items I laid out above.
Deep down I’m blaming social media for the increase in suicide amongst younger kids. It’s a pony show to them and they all want to outdo each other.
I went to a pumpkin patch over the weekend and two late teen girls spent an hour or so trying to get the best photos holding sunflowers. The place I was at let you pick your own sunflowers. These two girls were dressed up and proceeded to set up a camera stand for one of their cell phones that had a ring light around it. They spent that time trying to get the best photo to post to their IG pages and TikTok.
I get it that maybe they want to work on photography, but they spent way more effort and time than they should have when they were debating what to post to IG and TikTok.
::shrug::
If they spent the majority of the day outside, I feel like they have a leg up on many kids who never leave the house.
I was trying to do similar things on MySpace when I was their age; Or spending similar amounts of time chained to my desk chatting with girls on AIM; Or more frequently losing 8 hours at a clip to playing an FPS.
I had one staying in my house this weekend. They’re not as bad as we think they are. Most of my concern sits with the way the parents behave.
And yet they still persist in many parts of the world.
First thing being that's being done wrong by parents is not treating their children like adults. The culmination of such treatment comes when the child gets separated from their parents, for example by going to college, and starts doing stuff like drinking/smoking/doing drugs/what else not because there are no parents present to punish him for it. Problem is that the child's subconscious thinks that the bad thing happening to him because of, for example, smoking, is not lung cancer and what not, but the punishment from his parents, so when they are not there to do the punishment, there is nothing wrong with doing all that stuff. In general, not letting children to make decisions and then deal with the consequences on their own leads to a population of people who are unable to think for themselves and who, while they have been told what's good or bad, haven't internalized that knowledge, as there is no opportunity to do so. You know, brain is kind of like a muscle, you have to train it when it's not really needed for it to be capable when it is. Actually Lois Rossman has quite a bit of parental advice that seems decent to me. There is also a great emotional disconnect between the parents and their children. At least the message I've got from my parents is that I shouldn't even bother talking to them as there is a lack of even basic effort to try to understand what I'm trying to tell them. Not trying to blame anyone here, feeling exhausted after a workday is a thing but maybe considering not having children if you're unable to treat them properly is also a thing. Honestly, I think dropping fertility is a good thing, as being more conscious about raising children is at least partially the reason, and that's a good thing.
Then school inevitably comes. You honestly can't expect an underpaid overworked teacher to manage 30 children in a class, there is just too much stuff going on. But, because teachers are underpaid and overworked, it is a low prestige profession so if things don't change, the problem isn't going to solve itself. Then there is the learning process. Problem is, in school people don't learn, they are being schooled, and then there is some learning happening as a secondary on the side. Problem with learning while being schooled usually is that the pace is way different and there is a ton of unnecessary extras. Here are couple of examples:
My English teacher would accept essays and other stuff that are typed, not written by hand, so what I would do is type them first, then just write down what I've typed. Why the extra step? Could be beneficial to go through the material another time and what not, but that could be done without spending the time and effort on writing it all down. At least in the professional environment, everything is being done digitally these days, so an all-digital workflow clearly works.
Maths homework was probably worst of them all because of how much of it accomplished so little. It is very much repetition based, so a lot of the time the task you're given a set of 10 identical problems, just with different inputs in them. That way by the fifth one, it takes a second to solve it and a minute to write down the solution, and there are 5 more like this ahead. That way, there is just muscle memory being built for solving that one problem, and exactly nothing is happening to the understanding of the subject, broader understanding of mathematics, creative thinking and problem solving, arguably very much needed skills in real life situations. In general, there are very little 'reality checks' that might indicate a problem a person has but himself is unaware of.
Yeah, you better remember things by writing them down and all that, there are way better ways to do al...
Given that I only really use this and Discord, there might be a correlation there?
I feel like we are entering an era where different communities are experiencing a feast or famine in regards to how they are flourishing in the ‘modern’ world. At the zoomed out earth-scale, it seems to be a darwinian process of discovering which behaviors will exist in a century (because the only vote that matters for the future is how well your children are doing, birth rates, etc.).
There's certainly a darwinian process going on with COVID-19 right now in regards to the vaccinated and willfully unvaccinated. What's not darwinian is what went on during lockdowns where well-off parents could afford to let one stay at home to keep their kids from goofing off while attending online classes.
I am unhopeful that society at large will use that as a lesson learned about providing resources to the less fortunate so their children can get the (online) education they need (even if it's just an adult keeping watch over a handful of kids). If we have another pandemic with lockdowns like this I highly suspect it will go pretty much exactly the same.
To be fully prepared for pandemics of the future families will need the resources necessary to keep an adult at home to watch over the children going through online learning. Giving people remote work opportunities could be a great (societal) inoculation, as it were against such inequities.
Kind of sounds like projection. Depending on who you ask, it's generally understood in psychology that children raised by cold/rejecting/invalidating/selfish/abusive parents develop it to cope with having age-appropriate emotions that offend their parents. It could be perceived as a way to manipulate/convince the cold/rejecting parents into giving them what the child needs (food, attention, etc.) without feeling bad for having their age-appropriate, healthy needs - a habit that outlasts its need and stays through adulthood to the detriment of everyone. A healthy response would be to not feel bad for having feelings and, due to successfully developing self-acceptance, integrate/communicate all their emotions and rationality in a healthy way.
The day COVID hit, children were suddenly brought back to stay at home in an environment where parents were never used to having them around.
Suicides in Japan perhaps have an additional attraction in that insurance companies have to payout even if the cause of death is suicide.
Couple that with the asian cultural pressure of taking care of one's family, and the cultural factor that suicide on personal failure is linked to honour and glorified in Japanese history, it becomes somewhat understandable why some Japanese individuals may find suicide as a reasonable / attractive option while contemplating how to end their depressive existence.
Japan's suicide statistics don't tell the real story - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/02/03/national/media-...
Anecdata: My mood improved gradually after I stopped using retail antiperspirants. At some point (aka 12-18 months later) I got pissed of never being dry and went back to the stuff. It took 12h before the dark thoughts were back, took 3 showers as soon as I noticed, and it still took 3 days for the effect to stop being noticeable. Since this event I strongly think antiperspirants should be studied to confirm this is not just my mind playing tricks on me.
Many are classified as accidents and authorities are generally fine with this. Additionally, suicides are usually not reported by the media to prevent copycat suicides.
What I'm saying is that the "actual rate" of suicides is probably higher, maybe by a lot, in many countries than the official rate.
Same for Catholics and most of Christians, hence no suicide attacks.
I guess you're referring to the U.S., right?
My individual term life policy has a 2-year exclusion period, but otherwise covers suicide. I can't track down the precise reasons for this, whether its related to case law, state statutes, etc. Closest hit I found for California was Insurance Code § 11066(h), but that's for policies issued by fraternal societies. (It probably echoes some other statute or case law.) There are endless Google hits from law and insurance web sites stating this general fact.
> The results show a record-high 415 children killed themselves in the year through March. That's up nearly 100 from the previous school year.
I believe this is mirrored in other countries. The pandemic really hasn't been great for a lot of middle/high school kids.
Also: please be mindful that generally if some "obvious fault" occurs to you, it probably occurs to the people for whom this is their professional area of expertise or even life's work, their work has likely been reviewed by a number of their peers, etc. Internet discussion forum commenters are highly unlikely to be the first person to think of some flaw in their work.
I'm not saying they always will do said correction, but that if you're going to be skeptical, check to see if the correction was made instead of just dismissing or discounting the data, and be especially careful about your personal biases.
Note that such corrections might only get a passing mention because corrections for under-reporting is so common in epidemology.