Every time the National Police Agency comes out with new suicide statistics, media reports tend to focus on the fact that the annual suicide count has reached a new high or has topped the psychologically significant 30,000 threshold for yet another year. (The latest figure available was 32,249 in 2008.)
But each of the 30,000-plus who commit suicides in Japan every year has a face. They also have life stories and a complex set of reasons that drove them into killing themselves. The announcements reveal very little about the backgrounds of these people — except from their age, occupation and the known "reason" for the suicide, provided only as "health" or "economic and financial problems."
But what is actually going on? Do people really kill themselves because they are ill or simply because the economy is bad? Yasuyuki Shimizu has asked himself this question, and investigated further.