Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan

Francesca Di Marco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317384281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Japan's suicide phenomenon has fascinated both the media and academics, although many questions and paradoxes embedded in the debate on suicide have remained unaddressed in the existing literature, including the assumption that Japan is a "Suicide Nation". This tendency causes common misconceptions about the suicide phenomenon and its features.

Aiming to redress the situation, this book explores how the idea of suicide in Japan was shaped, reinterpreted and reinvented from the 1900s to the 1980s. Providing a timely contribution to the underexplored history of suicide, it also adds to the current heated debates on the contemporary way we organize our thoughts on life and death, health and wealth, on the value of the individual, and on gender. The book explores the genealogy and development of modern suicide in Japan by examining the ways in which beliefs about the nation's character, historical views of suicide, and the cultural legitimation of voluntary death acted to influence even the scientific conceptualization of suicide in Japan. It thus unveils the way in which the language on suicide was transformed throughout the century according to the fluctuating relationship between suicide and the discourse on national identity, and pathological and cultural narratives. In doing so, it proposes a new path to understanding the norms and mechanisms of the process of the conceptualization of suicide itself.

Filling in a critical gap in three particular fields of historical study: the history of suicide, the history of death, and the cultural history of twentieth century Japan, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Japanese History.

Part I

1
Biologizing the meaning of suicide (1880s–1930s)

A theoretical approach to suicide in the West

As Japan’s encounter with Western medicine deepened and accelerated in the nineteenth century, the country’s attitude was an enthusiastic embrace of the newly arriving scientific knowledge, with the ultimate ideological justification of strengthening the foundations of its own imperial rule. In the government’s eyes, improving the health of its citizens would help Japan survive in the face of vigorous imperial competition and resist the Europeans’ desire to ‘civilize the barbarian nations.’ To this end, the country’s priority was to learn from Western teachers how to improve national efficiency so as to modernize while at the same time avoiding Western colonization. Between 1868 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, imperial programs were developed to support a public policy of hygiene [eisei] that would ensure physically and spiritually healthy civilians and soldiers, and in a climate of ‘biological optimism’ [seibutsugakuteki rakkanron] resulting from the extensive medical knowledge arriving from the West, Japan witnessed the establishment of a professional medical community. This new medical profession defined itself by the desire to scientifically quantify its techniques and prove them correct, and through the promise of a safe society, one that would eliminate dangers arising from the threat of physical and mental disturbance. Suicide was identified as one of these threats.

Influences from the West’s evolving conceptions of suicide were brought to bear on Japan during this period, and are essential to understanding the discourse that subsequently developed. In the West, research on suicide has not been confined to one field: on the contrary, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and theologians have all studied the phenomenon. Since Socrates, suicide has been viewed by many as a ‘moral’ problem. Theologians have devoted attention to suicide and morality as a question of religious doctrine, while philosophers have dedicated attention to suicide and morality as a question of ethics. In the early Christian tradition, suicide was defined as a crime against life and God, a process that culminated with Thomas Aquinas’ conceptualization of suicide as “a clear sin against God.” However, as early as the publication of Biathanatos by John Donne in 1609, and again with Essay on Suicide by David Hume in 1783, this strict definition of suicide as a sin was challenged by philosophers. The existential writings of David Hume, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus have all argued that suicide can be an expression of freedom and responsibility and, as such, may represent an existential choice.

The problem of determinism versus free will was taken up to some extent by the philosophical and theological approaches to suicide, but the issue was considered secondary to the problem of the morality of suicide until the nineteenth century. The change in concerns that occurred at this point was due in general to the triumph of rationalism and specifically to the development of the empirical approach to the study of suicide, which included psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and various forms of official statistics.

From the seventeenth century on, secular laws were developed to prohibit suicide, and scholars such as J. B. Merian in 1763 and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol attempted to define it as an illness. In 1812, Esquirol, pioneer of the intensive study of insanity and of clinical nosology in psychiatry, defined the act of suicide as indicative of mental illness, and blamed social stress for alterations to the brain that purportedly predisposed individuals to the act. Observing socially maladaptive personality types in clinical settings, Esquirol claimed with unshakable conviction: “I think I have proved that no man takes his own life unless he is in delirium, and that all suicides are deranged.” ¹

Epidemics of youth suicide allegedly caused by the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther prompted the Vienna Psychoanalysis Society to hold the world’s first conference on youth suicide prevention in Vienna in 1910. Sigmund Freud organized the conference. In his opening and closing remarks, the psychologist – drawing from Goethe’s story in which the hero shoots himself over an unrequited love – argued that the main risk factor for adolescent suicide was love conflicts. This initial hypothesis was followed by years of intermittent research on suicide by Freud, which culminated in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), the classic text for psychoanalytic discussion of suicide. The book located the etiology of suicide in intrapsychic conflicts, portrayed the phenomenon in terms of moral crisis, and acknowledged it as an extension of melancholic behavior. Freud conceptualized suicide as the murder of one’s self resulting from the internalization of aggressive forces. He also believed that suicide was more likely in advanced civilizations, because they required greater repression of sexual and aggressive energies.

At the same time, the German psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin (1921) and Ernst Kretschmer (1925) observed suicide symptoms mainly in connection with “manic-depressive illness” (a term coined by Kraepelin, which originally referred to all kinds of mood disorders). Kraepelin and Kretschmer offered alternative explanations that diverged from the cultural narrative. They interpreted suicide not as a symptom of mental disease but of individual character type, and defined character types as biogenetically related variants of paranoid and affective psychoses. Kraepelin drew a distinction between single-episode depressions such as melancholia and recurrent depressive disorders, which he labeled “maniacal-depression.” The maniac-depressive was in great danger of committing suicide “because he displays great fluctuations in emotional equilibrium, […] falls into outbursts of boundless fury, […] sheds tears without a cause, gives expression to thoughts of suicide, and brings forward hypochondriacal complaints.” ² Kraepelin ascribed these symptoms to metabolic anomaly; they all thus had a biological foundation. In believing that organic disturbances underlay depressive disorders, Kraepelin totally rejected psychological and sociological interpretations of external pressures. Twenty-one years later, in 1925, Kraepelin commented on certain differences in the incidence and presentation of psychopathological phenomena that he considered to be caused by ethnic-cultural characteristics or social conditions. These observations on the pathogenic effects of cultural and social factors demonstrated the emergence of a reciprocal exchange among disciplines, which would influence the development of social and transcultural psychiatry in the following decades. ³ Kretschmer contributed to the process of suicide pathologization by developing the concept of “personality disorder.” He defined “personality” as the subjective aspects of the self, while “personality disorder” meant an alteration of consciousness, or loss of coherence between the cognitive and emotional functions. Kretschmer’s theory initially considered suicide to be the result of the individual’s personality, and thus a form of attenuated insanity.

Meanwhile physiological and biological theories had been emerging which viewed personality as forming primarily on the basis of physical factors; interest in suicide had gradually taken a statistical bent, and statistics became increasingly considered to be the ‘proper’ data to be used in studying suicide. Through these data (known as ‘moral statistics’), it emerged that the ‘morality’ of suicide varied from society to society and from one historical period to another. ⁴ This variation attracted the attention of sociologists, who explored social – rather than medical – explanations for the act. The differing approaches of psychiatry and sociology were framed by their responses to the two general questions that they tackled: What characteristics distinguish individuals who commit suicide from those who do not? And secondly: Why does the suicide rate vary from one population to the next?

Although sociology and psychiatry became engaged in a long-standing controversy, the two disciplines also greatly influenced each other. The debate, which began in the mid-nineteenth century with André Michel Guerry, Pierre Égiste Lisle, Alfred Legoyt, Thomas Masaryk, and Enrico Morselli, peaked during the interwar period following Durkheim’s contribution to the sociology of suicide. Durkheim insisted on seeing suicidal actions as the result of social factors, explaining suicide by studying variations in the suicide rate between different groups and within different contexts. ⁵ He attempted to demonstrate that social factors such as norms, institutions, and the division of labor have a decisive influence on the acts of individuals. Society is a system of rules, external to the individual, that constrain and regulate the individual’s behavior. The explanation of suicide rates, according to Durkheim, thus lies in the nature of society, not in an individual’s psychological or biological attributes. Durkheim saw social integration and regulation as variables that could explain variations in suicide rates. Too little integration leads to egoistic suicide and too much integration to altruistic suicide. Too little regulation produces anomic suicide; too much regulation, fatalistic suicide.

Indeed, for several decades Durkheim’s account dominated the field of suicide studies. His ideas, however, opened a breach between social and psychiatric analyses of suicide. Leading psychiatrists who researched suicide remarked that Durkheim had dismissed mental illness too quickly and had taken for granted that constituent features of the suicidogenic current – that is, egoism, altruism, anomie, and fatalism – were societally determined. Durkheim had insisted that the nature and the intensity of the suicidogenic current were factors independent of psychological conditions. In other words, he defied any psychological theory that identified the individual as the source of social phenomena; Durkheim determined only the rate at which the population was affected, not the identity of those to be affected. Rifts between sociological and psychiatric approaches became universal and persistent. Little was done to integrate psychiatrists’ observations and findings with sociological studies until the 1970s, by which point specific contributions came primarily from works by psychiatrists who studied suicidal actions as social phenomena. ⁶

In sum, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the consensus on the causes of suicide was in flux as biological psychiatry and the rise of social sciences jointly called into question specific causes and explanations of the phenomenon. Freud, Kraepelin, Kretschmer, and Durkheim were no closer to finding a satisfactory answer as to why certain individuals committed suicide and others did not. The major impediment to resolving such a dilemma was, reiterating Howard Kushner’s argument, the very professionalization and specialization of the knowledge that grew from the theories offered by these emerging disciplines. ⁷ Not until the 1950s did more complex research on suicide come into bloom, research that gradually moved away from an orthodox, field-related approach to the phenomenon and slowly but continuously incorporated the notion that suicide varies both culturally and historically.

This specialization within disciplinary boundaries in the West was mirrored in Japan. Although a relatively sustained philosophical dialogue among disciplines did occur, the members of the emerging Japanese medical community showed more eagerness to firmly establish their disciplines than to communicate across these disciplines’ borders. They too began to narrate suicide along the lines of their European teachers: that is, according to specific, fragmented subject areas.

A disease: Western-style psychiatry in Japanese academia

Japanese historians and academic psychiatrists have rightly described the history of psychiatry in early-twentieth-century Japan mainly as a succession of highly influential specialists who, due to their personal charisma, intelligence, acumen, or political skill, utilized their power in such a way that they had decisive historical impact. They have also described the history of psychiatry in Japan as a process of mimicry resulting in the adoption of Western practices, essentially gauging the progress of the Japanese discipline against the allegedly advanced Western model. ⁸ However, evidence proves that the indigenous medical community had already set in motion a process of ‘modernization’ – even if it was somewhat disorganized – of the nosology, diagnosis, and treatment of suicide before encountering Western science. When in the late nineteenth century Western-style psychiatry established itself in Japanese academia, the newly trained Japanese psychiatrists grad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusions
• Index