In May, 24-year-old TV personality Miyu Uehara was pronounced dead shortly after a friend found her hanging from a door in her Tokyo apartment. Uehara's death was called an "apparent suicide" by the media, and while the terminology was cautious the reporting itself took for granted the belief that Uehara led a troubled life and was probably driven to her end by boyfriend troubles. The youngest of ten children and reportedly born in the parking lot of a pachinko parlor, Uehara was dubbed the "poverty idol" because she turned an impoverished upbringing into talk fodder for variety shows. Whether or not "poverty" defined Uehara, who started out as a "gravure idol," meaning a model who posed nude or nearly nude for photo books, it was what she represented on television, which insists on identities that can be easily marketed and quickly digested.
It's irresponsible to attribute Uehara's suicide to any feelings she might have had about her public image, but the media did exactly that. Despite the sympathetic tone of the coverage, the gist of it was that she remained a tragic figure who couldn't transcend her background. The morning after her death, the Fuji TV news show "Toku Da Ne" described her situation in sobering detail. They even brought in a fellow idol who weeped during the entire segment. Paradoxical is hardly the word to describe how this all came across. The report strongly implied that Uehara was the victim of her own binbō (poor) image without admitting that it was the media that created this image in the first place.
Predictably, the incidence of suicide spiked briefly following Uehara's death. According to Life Link, a nonprofit organization involved in suicide prevention and counseling, the suicide rate rose to 50 percent higher than normal afterwards, with almost all the victims being young women. Life Link saw a direct connection between this increase and the coverage of Uehara. Regardless of the tenor of that coverage, the very fact that someone's suicide is talked about in the media acts as a trigger for individuals whose hold on life is tenuous. Life Link has asked the government to devise guidelines for the media when covering suicide.