Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:391-408

DOI 10.1007/s11013-012-9261-3

ORIGINAL PAPER

Suicide and the Afterlife: Popular Religion

and the Standardisation of Culture in Japan

Mary Picone

Published online: 2 May 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Abstract For an overwhelming majority of commentators, including many

anthropologists, Japanese culture is still associated with a positive view of suicide.
Western-language writings have contributed by feedback loop to perpetuate this
stereotype. Besides the local samurai ethic, Japanese Buddhism is also said not to
prohibit taking ones life. However, the most popular examples of heroic self-sac-
rifice, from the Edo period to WWII, are fraught with covert contradictions. From
ancient times to the present religious practitioners of all sorts have maintained that
suicide creates unhappy, resentful spirits who harm the living. This article discusses
many examples of a diverse series of narratives, from spirit mediums seances to
drama to contemporary films, in which the anguished spirits of suicides are allowed
to express themselves directly. After the figures rose alarmingly in the late 1990s
various religious organisations have attempted to fight the stigma suffered by
bereaved family members and have introduced new interpretations and new rituals.

Keywords Suicide
Japan
Religion
Popular religion
Ghosts

Media

Introduction

Emile Durkheims Le Suicide was the first of his books to be translated, in 1928, for
Japanese readers. In the chapter on altruistic suicides he briefly mentions the
country, where strange duels are fought based on who will be the most dextrous at
opening his own belly (1981, pp. 239240). These acts convey social advantage
where life is so little valued. His source is a history compiled by an early eighteenth
century missionary, Pierre F-X Charlevoix. A strong connection between Japan and

M. Picone (&)
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
e-mail: marypicone@hotmail.com

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the identification of self-destruction with virtue had already become a stereotype by

1897, the year Le Suicide was first published in France. As Durkheims book
gradually acquired quasi-canonical status, it contributed to a standardization of its
preconceptions. After its publication in 1946, Ruth Benedicts very successful
ethnography, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, became the most influential text
on the subject. In the book, Benedict attempts, among other things, to explain a
unique Japanese attitude towards death. Both Durkheim and Benedict, however,
limit Japanese culture to values held or supposed to be held by the warrior class:
about 6% of the population. Even within this group the sacrificial heroism of self-
inflicted death was associated primarily with men.
In the construction of these cultural stereotypes it should be stressed that there has
been a constant interplay between Japanese- and Western-language works. Even the
writer Mishima Yukios famous public seppuku (suicide by disembowelment) in
1976 was partly meant for Western eyes and justified as a protest against the
Westernisation of his country. In 1966, Mishima had also introduced the
seventeenth century treatise Hagakure (Hidden by Leaves) to an eager audience.
This work, a compilation of the sayings of an ageing samurai, starts with the sentence
The way of the warrior is death. The last really influential book in this genre written
by a Western academic is Voluntary Death in Japan, originally published in French
in 1984. Its author was Maurice Pinguet, a professor of French who had lived in
Japan for more than 20 years. Once again dying warriors, ideally young and
beautiful, are given the leading role. It must be said, however, that Pinguet includes a
moving chapter on the little known topic of the suicides of prostitutes in the pleasure
quarters. Almost all of the few contemporary anthropological articles in English,
including those by Japanese authors, cite Pinguet as the main or even the only
reference for traditional Japanese attitudes towards suicide.
Japan became more and more successful economically during the 1970s and
1980s. During this period suicide rates were only slightly higher than the European
average. Contemporary social conditions were a relatively unfashionable topic and
the academic works mentioned above appeared concurrently with popular novels and
television series featuring trans-historical themes. The actual economic prosperity
and longer life span achieved by a growing number of Japanese (but by no means by
all) was somehow accompanied by the identification of Japan with pre-modern
warriors. This process culminated with the best-selling novel (1975) and cult
television series Shogun (1980). Enthusiasm for this ethical ideal continues to this
day in association with Japanese martial arts and has achieved trans-cultural status,
for example in films such as the Hollywood movie Ghost Dog (1999). In postwar
Japan itself, for right-wing authors, a samurai culture based in part on heroic suicide
continues to be the preeminent representation of national history.

The Standardization of Culture

This article attempts, first, to question the universal acceptance of self-destruction as

honourable even during the Edo period (16001868) or WWII, and to discuss in
more detail how suicide relates to other aspects of Japanese culture, in particular

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popular religion. This question was strangely absent from all the Japanese
anthropological articles on suicide I have found, even if they are very good in all
other respects (see Ozawa-de Silva 2008; Kitanaka 2010). The neglect of religion
extends to the very many articles by psychiatrists who write the greater part of
material on the subject. All treat culture-based attitudes as monolithic.
Since 1998, when suicides started exceeding 30,000/year, the problem has
become a priority in ongoing public health debates. Notwithstanding major attempts
by the government, these rates have not decreased (White Paper on Suicide
Prevention 2010). Depression has been recently (re)discovered as an illness
applicable to the Japanese and antidepressants newly marketed (Kitanaka 2010).
Virtually all commentators claim that there is no religious prohibition of the act.
It is suggested that, in contrast to Christian attitudes that purportedly manage to
restrain self-destruction, Buddhist doctrines are one of the more important factors
contributing to the high rates found year after year. It is interesting to note that few
if any studies mention that South Korea (where the main religions are Christianity,
shamanism, and a variety of New Religions), a society currently undergoing some
of Japans problems, has even higher suicide rates (estimates vary between 24.1 and
30.0 for 2009, see Washington Post, April 2010). Perhaps this omission is due to the
still too common habit of comparing Japan primarily with the West.
Most of the articles in this volume attempt to allow suicides to speak, ideally to
allow people to explain their act in their own words. In Japan religious practices are still
thought, by some, to allow the dead to express themselves directly; that is, through
shamanic mediums or, with the help of literary conventions, through different types of
ritual dramatization ranging from retellings of deaths in temples to various forms of
theatre. As will be shown, this is particularly important in the case of violent deaths. I
have chosen examples of these forms of dramatization, including the most recent
media-directed versions, as ultimately derived from ritual dialogues. The practices of
the New Religions fall into an intermediary category in which a psychic will see and
explain the attitudes of these unhappy spirits and also diffuse seances and doctrines via
the latest technologies. The final section describing fictional films by mainstream
contemporary directors may seem rather unconventional as an ethnographic source but,
I would argue, people contemplating taking their lives are far more likely be influenced
by the media than to attempt to seek out one of the dwindling number of shamans.
Moreover, in most areas of Japanese studies up-to-the-moment media analysis is now
increasingly popular: all the more reason, therefore, to ground it, as I briefly attempt in
these pages, by connecting the latest productions with much earlier narrative forms.
As described in the last part of this article many schools of Buddhism started
changing their attitudes towards suicide in the 1990s, when efforts at religious
counselling and specific services for bereaved families were first proposed.
Unsurprisingly there has never been a single Buddhist or, for that matter, Shinto
(native Japanese religion) view. Attitudes have varied over time, or according to
region and individual temple practice.
During an earlier period of fieldwork (2007) on contemporary representations of
Hell, I briefly asked the abbots of several temples devoted to the cult of the Judge/King
of Hell for their views on suicide. Their temple affiliation, however, did not seem to
affect their answers. The various forms of afterlife described in rituals still performed

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today are increasingly associated with popular beliefs and, even more than in the past,
used as a means to bring those ignorant of true Buddhism to visit the temples and gain
real understanding. The doctrine of karma as explained in popular sermons has only
very gradually avoided connecting poverty and illness, the two main causes of suicide
in Japan, with retribution for acts committed in previous lives or in the present one. To
summarize, these Buddhist priests agreed that what counted was the attitude at the
moment of death. A mind still attached to this-worldly desires, for example filled with
hate or anger, would not obtain release from the chain of karma or negative rebirths. It
was not mentioned, but the ideal of detachment can still be said to include abandoning
worldly love for other people. One said that asking for euthanasia was also
unacceptable because of the illusory nature of the continuity of the body and of pain
itself. For some, a last minute leap of faith in the Buddha Amida or some sudden form
of enlightenment would permit salvation.

Suicide in Pre-modern Religion

From the earliest periods of Japanese history the spirits of those who had died bad or
unnatural deaths (higo no shi, literally deaths not in accord with karma), that is,
violently, or of polluting diseases, or when travelling far from home, or whose
corpses were not intact, or prematurelyparticularly if they left no descendants, and
who were not commemorated posthumously until they achieved the status of deified
ancestorswere thought to suffer in the afterlife and/or to be dangerous to the living.
In short the fear of ghosts was one of the strongest elements of pre-modern religions
and is still present in popular beliefs (Plutschow 1990; Miyata 1988). In this context
suicide may even now be considered one of the bad deaths, both because a persons
emotions will remain strongly attached to this world and also because the probability
of the correct rites being performed by family members would be lessened. For many
people even today it does not matter whether a person has been the victim of a murderer
or, for that matter has murdered, or has killed him or herself, often to escape a terrible
fate. In all these cases, a harmful spirit will remain close to this world and only
appropriate rituals will allow it to be saved (Miyata Noboru et al. 1988; Picone 1991).
In the case of canonical Buddhism there are in fact texts in which self-sacrifice
for the good of others is praised, as well as various historical, mainly medieval,
instances of monks and extremely devout laypeople discarding the body seen as
weak and corrupt in order to obtain rebirth in Paradises such as the Pure Land (Blum
2009). The latter also redefines Durkheims categories in the case of various forms
of specifically religious suicides and proposes others such as suicide as religious
offering, as resignation to ones fate or as an expression of lamentation.

Samurai Suicides: the Diffusion of Ethical Ideals Through Literature, Drama

and Film

It has often been claimed that the diffusion of samurai values to the whole of
Japanese society was rapidly and successfully undertaken from the start of the Meiji

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period modernization in 1868. Quite a number of anthropologists or historians of

religions would cast doubt on the universal success of this indoctrination but it
certainly became a part of the creation of an essentialist national identity based on
suicide as self-sacrifice.
The Sengakuji, a temple in central Tokyo, is visited daily by groups of
worshippers. They are almost all working-class men, some still in their thirties, but
the majority in late middle age. Most offer incense and bow in prayer before the
tombs of 47 masterless samurai (ronin). Known as righteous warriors, notwith-
standing governmental disapproval, this small band managed to avenge the forced
suicide of their lord, Asano no Takumi, by means of an elaborate and long-standing
plan. In 1703, their self-imposed mission was accomplished when they placed the
severed head of his enemy, Lord Kira, on Asanos gravestone in the temple
cemetery.
At the time many commentators criticized this flamboyant gesture saying that the
ronin were actually just trying to avoid poverty and find another job after the death
of their patron, or that the rules of honour demanded an attack immediately after the
offence even if this would have guaranteed failure. Although they are venerated as
the greatest exemplars of heroic self-sacrifice the 47 most probably hoped that they
would be pardoned and not, in their turn, to be forced to commit seppuku.
Smith has magisterially discussed the growth of the legend in a series of articles.
From the time of the Ako incident, as it is called, to the present day, popular
opinion has transformed the ronins vengeance into a sprawling epic of honour and
bloodshed now supposedly the epitome of Japanese traditional values. The various
versions and subplots include what appears to be a compendium of the situations in
which altruistic suicide could conceivably be called for. The incident is the
subject of the most famous of all kabuki plays and has been retold or filmed
thousands of times. Paradoxically, as Smith notes, the play itself does not include
the final suicide of the ronin. New programmes on the subject are broadcast every
year, often around the anniversary of the attack (Smith 2003).
I mention the story here for several reasons. First, because, as also shown by
other cases I will mention infra, heroic accounts of Japanese suicides often bear
little or no resemblance to historical reconstructions. The second reason the legend
of the 47 ronin is relevant for the purposes of this article is because it constitutes one
of many examples of the problem of reconciling Buddhism, even in its popular
forms, with suicide or killing in general. Most versions of the story do not give
much detail about the reasons for the 47 ronins act. However, the text of a 1744
retelling performed in a temple is quite explicit, reporting Lord Asanos last words
as follows:
Even after I die I will hold this grudge forever, however many times I may be
reborn and however many realms of existence I may pass through, until I see
the head of [the enemy lord] (Marcon and Smith 2003).
In short, Asano died in the worst possible emotional state and willed his spirit to
remain tied to this world until another evil act was performed at his command. The
chain of negative causality was set in motion. Although his retainers carried out his
last wish thinking to pacify his soul, in Buddhist terms the revenge will create more

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suffering, including the forced suicides of 47 other men. As in the medieval No

plays and warrior tales, the periodic re-enactment or the retelling of these violent
deaths is a ritual means to help the spirits of the protagonists attain salvation.
Warriors were thought suffer in the afterlife and monks duly appear in many of the
plays to perform this role. Plutschow, after analyzing earlier works (1990,
pp. 227229), claims that even kabuki plays still maintain in part the ancient
function of pacifying angry spirits by reenacting their sad tales.
Only serious historical work, almost none of which is available in English, could
attempt to show to what extent the precepts of self-sacrifice for the sake of feudal
loyalty and/or personal honour were actually put in practice. Seppuku was
sometimes carried out or threatened as a way of putting moral pressure on superiors:
for example to obtain a job or subsidies for surviving family members. (Many
contemporary suicides by middle-aged men in debt are committed to give insurance
money to wives and children, see West 2005.) Inferiors could also be manipulated
by this technique. In a truculent autobiography written in 1843 the low ranking
samurai, Katsu Kokichi, gleefully described how he managed to extort money from
the villagers of a friends fief. Claiming that their refusal to pay a loan shamed their
lord and that his own failure to obtain the necessary sum could only be atoned for by
death, he enacted a carefully planned bluff, starting publicly to prepare for seppuku
in the main household. Katsus tactic was a brilliant success and the weeping
villagers immediately paid up (Craig 1988, pp. 128141).
This article is mainly concerned with narratives. However, to return to my
starting point that suicide in Japan is rarely seen as unequivocally positive, a
discussion of the self-sacrifice of warriors should mention, if only very briefly, two
major ongoing debates: the deification of the spirits of soldiers who died for the
Emperor in WWII and the mass suicides which occurred in Okinawa just before
Japans surrender. Is the first case a reward for typically altruistic gesture in
Durkheimian terms or a continuation of the custom of pacifying those who died
prematurely by violence and often have no descendants to memorialise their spirits?
In the second case, besides memorialisation, debates concern the manner of death,
in particular the contention that soldiers forced hundreds of Okinawan civilians to
kill themselves (see Shintani 2006).

Other Pre-modern Suicide Narratives

The unrighteous, warriors and commoners alike, were also a popular subject in
fiction. A famous seventeenth century writer, Ihara Saikaku, wrote a series of
purportedly moral tales about the unfilial (Honcho niju fuko). Like other collections
of his ironic stories, it is an interesting source incorporating elements from urban
faits divers (sensational news reports). Moreover, Saikaku was born into the
merchant, not the warrior, class. I have used his unfilial case studies as a sample. It
includes a number of suicides which are generally, with one exception, committed
by people reduced to utter poverty. In several cases self-inflicted death is avoided by
donning the ink-hued robe; that is: becoming a Buddhist monk or nun.

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Many narratives of suicides may also be found in collections of ghost stories

although the emphasis here shifts to violent death, enduring resentment and
frightening apparitions. For example, in another of Saikakus collections (Saikaku
shokukubanashi), said to be based on tales from various parts of the country, the
author describes the dramatic self-inflicted death of a servant girl. After being
disfigured by her jealous mistress with a burning brand she throws herself into a
well. Her ghost is later seen flying through the air in a flaming chariot where she
triumphantly applies the brand to her dead mistress cheek (Picone 1991). The
reader who has seen contemporary Japanese horror films will probably identify
some of the recurring elements.

Suicide in Contemporary Popular Religion

The Buddhist cult of the dead as performed in temples is slowly weakening and
many Japanese declare themselves to be without religious affiliation. Yet when
misfortune is thought to strike too often or in other unhappy circumstances many
people may try to find a spiritual cause for their problems. In a 1993 survey of
college students about 60%, even of those without an affiliation to a specific
religion, claim to believe in kami (Japanese gods), spirits and the afterlife
(Nakamura 1999, p. 148).
There are circumstances in which this very negative view of suicide is also
expressed in practical terms. Apartments or houses where someone has killed
themselves are said to be almost impossible to resell. In one of the suicide notes he
composed in 1927, the famous writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke remarks on this fact
and adds: I feel envious of a bourgeois who can afford to own an extra house or a
villa in which to commit suicide (DeVos 1973, p. 522). Attitudes have not changed
in recent years. Real estate agents will often approach surviving family members
even in distant parts of the country and demand very large sums for loss of income
from rent: sometimes for all the other apartments in a building as well as for the
performance of purification ceremonies. One of the victims, Tanaka Sachiko, has
formed an association to fight against these practices (BBC News from Asia, 10 Feb
2010).
To avoid contaminating their homes and to leave society and family members
behind as many as one hundred people a year choose to kill themselves in famous
suicide sites such as the forest of Aokigahara. The latter has also become a spot for
suicide tourism in which some people gather to search for human remains or
souvenirs such as nooses used for hangings. A variant on this theme are nocturnal
expeditions complete with equipment for paranormal research or just ghost-spotting.
During many periods of fieldwork from the 80s to the present I have seen a large
number of diverse rituals connected to attitudes towards death and spoken with
many religious practitioners and their clients. Some of the former operate
independently in small institutes or temples, others are leaders of little groups
of disciples or have founded one of hundreds of New Religious Movements.
(Between 10 and 20% of Japanese are estimated to belong or to have belonged to
one or more of them [Baffelli et al. 2010, p. 11].)

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Traditional shamanic mediums used to operate in many areas but are now far
less common than psychic specialists (reibai). Falling into a trance and allowing
the spirit to speak directly to family members is increasingly rare. These days,
during a typical consultation the practitioner will say that he or she sees the
spirit(s) of the unhappy dead which are the cause of their client or followers
problems. Occasionally, the solutions to problems of supernatural origin can be
quite simple. Murai Atsuko, a religious practitioner in Osaka one of whose
consultations I attended in 1994, easily identified the origin of her clients quarrels.
The husband admitted he spent his evenings in hostess bars, which implied that he
spent far too much money and probably had affairs. Murai asked if their house was
humid and what there was in the northeastern corner. They said that it was, and that
their main wall faced northeast (an inauspicious direction known as the demon
gate). They were living, she said, in a house built over an old well. Falling into a
trance she looked into the past: 200 years ago, she muttered, the householder, a
minor samurai, had rape the maidservant (she added that the word did not exist at
that time). When the girl found that she was pregnant, in desperation she threw
herself into the well. Her spirit, the practitioner added, must be pacified with
offerings and she would persuade her in the course of a ritual to give up her
resentment (urami) and leave this world. In this case, the problem was thought to be
connected to a place. Even just moving house might have been enough to reconcile
the couple.
Other religious specialists provide more complicated explanations. The following
stories are taken, in abridged form, from handbooks of cases compiled by the
famous leaders of two very successful New Religious Movements founded in the
1980s: World Mate and Agonshu. These handbooks, like hundreds of others written
by many less famous spiritualists, are presented as transcripts of seances with
clients. Whether or not these conversations actually took place is immaterial
because they serve as models conveying themes future clients or adherents
recognise or consider relevant. Seances will then follow the pattern already printed.
The first story appears in Daijo rei, Great spirit purification, by Fukami Toshu,
the founder of World Mate. The book was first published by his Religious
Movement in 1993 and subsequently reprinted at least three times. Many of the
spiritual diagnoses in this book are based on the influence of the hundreds of spirits
harming a certain Mrs. Yamamoto (Fukami 1993, pp. 129173). She consulted
Fukami because, among other problems, she felt she had great trouble finding a
husband and was fast approaching the late age of 26. An ancestor of the
Yamamoto family had killed 319 men in a naval battle under the sixteenth century
warlord Oda Nobunaga. Their vengeful spirits, in the form of a 20-m-long snake,
had cursed Mrs. Yamamoto along with her whole family. They were causing her to
want to commit suicide even if the apparent cause was her unhappy love affair with
a married man. Moreover, the latter is spiritually afflicted by a similar band. The
two groups joined forces in the spirit world to carry out a vendetta.
Fukami sees with his psychic power that Mrs. Yamamoto and her lover are on the
verge of planning a double suicide (shinju). He gives examples of similar cases, in
which lovers swear to kill themselves together if one of them falls ill and cannot
recover.

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Fukami: They think it is fate but it is really assassination by the Murder

Incorporated formed in the other worldFor the shinju we hear so much
about in Japanese tradition, its because both of the people involved are cursed
with bad karmaYou will become ill and think about gassing yourself.
Mrs. Yamamoto: I want to go happily. I thought gas would be best.
Fukami: Gas has an evil smell, so you should first swallow a batch of
sleeping pills and then turn on the gas spigot, and then everything would be so
pleasurable you would just float off You would see the beautiful image
before you But the evil spirits are doing this to you.
Mrs. Yamamoto: Recently I have thought that theres nothing left for me but
to die. I seem so indifferent to lifeReally, I swear Im not exaggerating for
effectI just want to sleep so Fukami san, how can you know all this?
Fukami: These spirits arent fools, you know. They were generals when they
were alive (ibid: 170172).
The karmic ties revealed in this abridged passage are just a small part of a larger
net of connections: the fate of the 319 generals, for example, was the consequence
of sins committed in their past lives going back to the fourteenth century, when they
poisoned the enemies they had invited to a peace-making celebration. As for Mrs.
Yamamoto, she was also the distant descendant of a man who mistreated his five
concubines. Therefore, her relationships with men in this life would be a cause of
suffering. When she understandably asks why she should have to pacify all these
spirits Fukami answers that people are born into families with evil ancestors because
of their own actions in a past life. Karma is passed on through marriage, so that a
woman will be burdened with her husbands spiritual baggage unless she obtains a
divorce. Blood ties instead are binding and this karmic transfer is irrevocable once
she has had a child.
The founder of World Mate reveals the causes of another type of suicide, also
said to be typically Japanese by many commentators, the ikka jisatsu. In these tragic
cases a mother kills her children, or less frequently, a father kills all family
members, before doing away with themselves. There are families in which members
die naturally or by accident one after another, causing each of the survivors terrible
grief. Sometimes the death of all the children is the only way to avoid having the
descendants of the family face a karmic mountain of retribution. To summarise, he
explains that Heaven sees death as the best method of balancing the evil family
legacy. However, he resolutely denies that committing family suicide would be the
best way to help both ancestors and descendants. He admits that this act is an
expression of supreme effort and devotion. Nevertheless, it does nothing to
eliminate bad karma. People who have not developed their divinely given talents
and lived the span that Heaven decreed commit a sin against Heaven
(amatsutsumi). They fall into a specific hell where they remain in darkness and
perpetually re-experience the suffering felt at the moment of death (Fukami 1993,
pp. 194195).
In these accounts, the cause of misfortunes shifts between what we might call
individual acts or intentions, the continuing influence of a part of the person which
existed in a past life, and what we might see as external causes, that is the effect of

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malevolent or suffering spirits belonging to a spouses lineage. These chains of

causality also continue over the generations.
The Founder of Agonshu, Kiriyama Seiyu, also published his casebook in 1993.
An English version entitled, You Have been here Before: Reincarnation, appeared
in 2000. The book purports to prove that reincarnation is both a religious and a
scientific fact. Kiriyama has always attempted directly to deal also with an
international audience and some of the cases he cites consequently reach beyond
Japan. One of the longer case histories concerns the reincarnation of a suicide (ibid:
6579). A 15-year-old schoolgirl and gifted piano player called Masumi suddenly
started to say she wanted to die and attempted to kill herself several times. Her
family took her to a psychiatrist (this is a new trend, previously extremely rare and
stigmatising). The physician said there was nothing wrong with her. When Kiriyama
is consulted he immediately sees that the girls problem is spiritual interference
(reisho) due to acts committed in a previous existence.
Kiriyama explains that sometimes reincarnated people relive the same life and
fall victim to the same fate as in the past. Moreover, characteristics and
predetermined tendencies from a former personality enter in conflict with those
of the new person they inhabit. He reveals to Masumis mother that a series of signs
show that the girl was a Philippina in a previous life. Her troubles were set off by a
trip to Manila where memories buried deep in the unconscious come to the
surface. Kiriyamas questions discover that Masumis father have had previous
contact with Philippines. He had been sent over there for business and, incidentally
giving a very positive picture of the Marcos regime, remembered that he had
worked successfully in Manila for some time. The only problem the father had
encountered was the tendency of young managers, sent abroad without their
families, to fall in love with local girls. A particularly susceptible young married
man, K, had lost his heart to Maria: a girl belonging to a good family. When
suddenly ordered to return to home, K, with Maria in the passenger seat, drove his
car over a cliff into the sea. Kiriyama claims that Maria, as a Catholic, would never
have killed herself. Her longing to be with K again caused her to be reborn in
Japan. In her new life she is a sort of double of Masumi and does not intend to harm
her yet the traits persisting from her former life will drive her reincarnation to
suicide. Therefore, Marias deep attachment needs to be extinguished by a rite of
liberation (gedatsu). Afterwards she will become one of Masumis guardian angels.
The Leaders of other New Religions, such as Kofuku no Kagaku, include similar
themes in their broadcasts. For example, in a 1998 video, Okawa Ryuho claimed
that about one half of humanity is harmed by the unhappy spirits of those who could
not free themselves from earthly passions. He then started a suicide prevention
campaign.
My last example is taken from an article on anthropology and autobiography. The
author, Laurence Caillet (2010), is a Japan specialist who recorded the life story of a
successful businesswoman in her 80s. Yamazaki Ikue, the heroine of Caillets book,
was born in a village in a poor area of northeastern Japan. I hesitate to provide a
long extract, in summary form, from this very interesting text but there, at least, the
story is told in Ikues own words. Yamazaki Ikues narrative incorporated elements
from her husbands familys past as important constituents of their common present

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and future. In 1948 one of her husbands cousins, Tomie, was persuaded by her
lover, the very famous writer Dazai Osamu, to drown herself with him. Dazai was
older than Tomie and had already tried unsuccessfully to perform shinju five times,
twice with different women. On the thirteenth commemoration of Tomies death-
date, Ikue felt the presence of her soul, asking for more offerings to be presented to
monks and Buddhas. This would enable her to improve her lot in the afterlife.
Tomies spirit returned at other commemorations. On the day of twentieth
commemoration Ikues son was hurt in an automobile accident. A spirit medium
was called (Ikues native province was famous for its female shamans). She said
that Tomie and her lover were quarrelling. The young womans spirit claimed that
Dazai was too internally corrupt to have lived longer but that she had been young
and was still tormented by the desire to live.
It was only after the seance that Ikue read some of Dazais morbid novels. He
was an alcoholic, a drug addict and suffered from tuberculosis. She thought that
after his death, Dazai had fallen into the realm of the hungry ghosts feeding, as she
saw it, on the emotions of the living and that Tomie had been his victim. The
medium returned to hold rites for the liberation of both suffering spirits. Their fate
was entangled. What counted was their connection during their lifetimes (or that
established during previous lives) not individual guilt or innocence. And when both
were saved a mechanism of positive contagion would extend to Ikues hurt and
weak son. Thinking about the past of her husbands family, which she had joined at
her marriage, she discovered that early death or misfortune had struck ten of its
members before reaching the newest descendant: her own son (Caillet 2010,
pp. 181182).

Contemporary Films

The effect of films on behaviour is difficult to estimate but is clearly valued by

organisations if judged by the increasingly vast sums spent, for example, on
advertising clips. In the case of supernatural narratives I suggest that the effects are
indirect but penumbral. Moreover, there is a feedback loop since many films
include elements derived from current events or urban legends. Several belong to a
specific genre: collections of real stories. These were supposedly gathered all over
Japan, often during the 80s. Some of this material, which might be invented or
embellished, was then selected by filmmakers and appeared as a series of episodes,
either combined into a feature film or television series. At this time suicide rates had
not yet risen dramatically and consequently few episodes feature this kind of spirits.
Many of these stories lack an explanation: why does the spirit appear? We do
not even know whether it died a bad death or just happens to haunt the area.
Objective proof of its appearance is often recorded by the eye or the ear of
various machines. All the audience is shown is a short sequence leading up to the
apparition. One relatively detailed case is included in Honto ni atta kowai hanashi
(True scary tales) by Tsuruta Norio (1991). A schoolgirl from Hiroshima discovers
that one of her friends is haunted by a ghost repeating her suicide every night. Next
day the two girls waylay an eccentric Buddhist priest from a nearby temple who

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tells them that a woman threw herself off the roof of a nearby building, driven to
despair by the loss of her lover. The priest says that he had performed the funeral
and that he had not felt the presence of her spirit at the time; therefore she had not
obtained rebirth in paradise (ojo). He admonishes them with an eerie cackle: When
you die try not to regret anything.
Entirely fictional films reveal much about the directors aesthetic choices and/or
obsessions and are consequently a mediated version of a contemporary Japanese
imaginaire. In the sample I selected I have tried to identify the evolution of motifs
present in earlier narratives. Some films still include references to pre-modern
Japanese popular religion, although originally peaceful and poetic practices and
concepts have often been given an extremely dark twist. Except for the first, all of
the films listed below are quite recent. Jigoku (Hell, by Nakagawa Nobuo, 1960), a
modernised transcription of the Buddhist iconography of hell, includes a passage in
which an older couple whose daughter died accidentally become mad from grief and
throw themselves under a train. The Judge/king of Hell, discounting this mitigating
factor, tells them that their deaths are sinful. Shibito no koiwasurai (The Lovesick
Dead, 2001, directed by Shibuya Kazuyuki) is a far more typical example of
supernatural horror. This tangled story of school childrens first loves literally
centres around the ancient practice of cross-roads divination. A high-school girl
have had nightmares in childhood about a small shrine located at a cross-road,
which turns out to have been built by a man to memorialize the spirit of his
girlfriend after her gory suicide. Needless to say her ghost appears and the
schoolgirls kill themselves one after another on the haunted spot. In films of this
type a folklorist or local historian is often consulted to find the explanation or the
origin of the chain of misfortune.
Many others films have entirely discarded traditional trappings. As in the famous
Ring, machines perpetuate and transmit the malevolent spirits will from one victim
to another. One of many examples of this type is Shiryoha (Dead Spirit Waves
directed by Hayama Yoichiro, 2005). Jisatsu sarukuru (Suicide Circle, made by
Sion Sono in 2002) has been viewed by film critics as a comment on contemporary
attitudes towards adolescent group suicide. The film includes familiar motifs such as
a mysterious computer site and an evil television personality using subliminal
suggestion to force the children to die. Frequently plots combine the supernatural
with some aspects of detective investigation such as Akumu tantei 1 (Nightmare
Detective 1, 2006), and its prequel, Nightmare Detective 2 (2008) both directed by
Tsukamoto Shinya. The reclusive investigator, Kagenuma, having survived the sight
of his mother killing herself in front of him and barely able to avoid repeating her
gesture, uses his strange powers to enter other peoples dreams and discover the
cause of their supposed self-inflicted deaths. A high-school girl asks Kagenumas
help when she and two classmates are threatened by dreams of a girl they once
bullied. She appears to them and they die.
In most of these films suicide is associated with adolescents or at least young
women. Once again this is characteristic of many horror films, although the girls are
often just murdered and/or are particularly sensitive to psychic events. As the vast
production of erotic and pornographic material featuring schoolgirls in Japan makes
clear, this is partly due to a sexual fixation more freely indulged than elsewhere, in a

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country where the age of sexual consent is 13. However, as in other countries, there
is probably also a tendency to target a certain age group like the adolescents
featured in the American series Scream. The age of the protagonists also dictates
most of the reasons for suicide: bullying in schools, early love or, for older women,
being abandoned by their lovers. Mobile phones are omnipresent and these objects,
which in recent films include video cameras and record sound, are even more likely
than computers to connect the chain of suicides. It may be thought that the
succession of fatalities is necessary for the plot but, as in the real spirit world seen
by the religious practitioners, or in pre-modern legends, bad deaths have always
caused a series of terrible misfortunes often lasting for centuries.
The distinction between suicide and murder is often rather unclear. In several films
apparent self-destruction is later revealed to be a form of murder in which the victim is
forced to die against his or her will. Malevolent spirits capable of influencing or
misleading their victims, for example by causing hallucinations, are common in
stories dating back to the Middle Ages. The stories become ever more elaborate over
time and during the seventeenth century become part of the repertoire of the kabuki
theatre. A wronged ghost or other supernatural creature will not only appear but use
their powers to have the people who drove them to their deaths unwittingly destroy
themselves. For example, in the famous Yotsuya Ghost Story, an evil husband is
induced to kill his new wife because the ghost of the previous one, whom he had
poisoned, causes him to see her as a disfigured ghost. When a new version of this
story is filmed the cast and technicians still go to pray at the grave where the possibly
historical heroine is said to be buried. The most recent retelling (Ayakashi 2006) lists
the large number of people connected with dramatizing this tale who died because of
the ghosts curse. Modern films of the so-called J-horror have lost this power. Telling
the victims story no longer pacifies their spirits: instead seeing the shades or hearing
the voices of the unhappy dead is often mortally dangerous.
Starting in the late 80s, the term ikai, different or strange worlds, which
sometimes coexisted with our own, appeared frequently in the media. Kyoto, for
example, features in more and more guides to spots associated with evil spirits. The
dream world recreated in films by Tsukamoto and other directors, is consistent
with the gradual takeover of everyday life by illusion found both in recent decades
and in pre-modern stories. Although forms of popular entertainment, these
narratives once restated the Buddhist concept of the real world as a fleeting
illusion. Only those who realize this basic truth either in life or posthumously in the
spirit world will be able to escape suffering and obtain liberation or enlightenment.
Another element occasionally appears in this type of films: self-sacrifice and the
moral duty for women of somehow loving the unhappy dead. Their loneliness is a
continuation of their isolation in life. In one of the episodes of Tsurutas Real Scary
Tales, a schoolgirl tries unsuccessfully to help the ghost of a boy trapped forever in
his friendless state. Her attempt fails but she says a brief prayer adding I hope you
find friends in paradise [tengoku]. In Dark Water, (Nakata Hideo 2005), for
example, a mother is fetched away by the terrifying spirit of a little girl who drowned
and had earlier attacked her young daughter. It is implied that she accepts the horrible
fate of joining the little ghost/putrefied body underwater as a substitute mother so that
her own child may live. In the films where someone has been driven by bullies to take

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their life ghosts take revenge on the classmates involved. Perhaps, besides meting out
posthumous justice for a violence those around them refused to see, they also attempt
to restore the face or honour they lost during public humiliation.
Although the great majority of victims are women, some films, like Nightmare
Detective, also feature men or boys. In other narratives they also may be driven to
take their lives by bullying classmates orrarelysacrifice themselves for women
they love. A boy is also the protagonist of an animated film, Colourful (the original
title, by Hara Keiichi), which came out in 2010. It is based on a prize-winning
novel. The anonymous hero, who has lost his memory, finds himself in a way-
station complete with lifts, from where he can reincarnate into another life. This is
a modernisation of the Buddhist concept of an intermediary state known as chuu, the
time between rebirths, generally thought to last for 49 days. A spirit guide
appearing as a boy with grey hair, tells him that he has won a celestial lottery which
gave him the opportunity to remake his own life after the terrible mistake of suicide.
To accomplish this he must be reborn in the body of Makoto, 14 years old, who has
killed himself just a moment before. Although he is allowed only a limited time he
must discover both the reason for Makotos desperate act and rethink his own
suicide. From here on the film becomes a study of typical adolescent problems such
as school bullying, sibling hatred or a parents adultery.
Still another type of fiction was produced by the New Religion mentioned above,
Kofuku no Kagaku. Their animated film, ambitiously entitled The Rebirth of the
Buddha, starts with a long sequence dealing with the terrible sufferings in the
otherworld of the spirits of suicides, also seen as a proof of Japans current moral
disintegration. Almost all these films refer only to a relatively small number of the
suicides which actually occur each year. The number of young peoples deaths,
however, is disturbing and on the rise. Phenomena such as internet suicides carried
out by three or four persons who did not want to die alone, have also provoked
intense public concern (Ozawa-de Silva 2008; for more context on this problem see
Di Marco 2011). In these narratives of the afterlife the protagonists, unlike the
highest proportion of actual suicides, are almost never middle-aged men who have
lost their jobs and fallen deeply into debt, or those who choose to anticipate the
outcome of fatal diseases, or have problems with spouses and children or, least of all
older people in rural areas.
The number and frequent retelling over time of the suicide narratives I have
described raises a more general question. Have they provoked an ongoing Werther
effect in the form of emulation? (Stack, writing in 1996 on the basis of data
collected in the 1980s, claims that the effect is limited but attributes this to other
cultural factors such as stable marriages.) Conversely, by stressing the misery of
these souls in the afterlife, have these dramatizations prevented some unhappy
people from taking their lives?

New Roles for the Japanese Clergy

The majority of articles on suicide in Japan describe methods of prevention. Private

initiatives such as the Life Line (Inochi no denwa) telephone counselling service

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started in the 1970s. They survived on very little funding by donations and were not
encouraged by the government; in fact, until 2000 they were forbidden to place ads
displaying their number in public places. After the Prime Ministers decision to
make suicide prevention a priority and the enactment of a directive in 2006, a large
number of organisations were founded. A White Paper on suicide (2010) written for
the Cabinet publishes charts listing institutions or key persons to contact. As Watts
(2007) notes in a report on a hereto rarely mentioned topic, no Buddhist institutions
are mentioned. He met four men he describes as suicide priests who have worked
as counsellors and founded various Buddhist networks. One of these is quite
extensive, including, so far, 37 branches. As priests, Watts writes, they are often the
only ones to know that the person whose funeral they celebrate has killed himself.
Families hide the event for fear of stigma, which is still very strong. Some centre
their activity on listening quietly to those who seek them out within their temples.
Fujisawa Katsumi (Pure Land) has a more outward-looking approach and has
changed his temple into a community centre. Another activist, Nemoto Jotetsu
(Rinzai Zen) has organised an internet counselling chat group reaching even the
entirely self-secluded known as hikikomori. He also leads group visits to well-
known suicide spots such as the forest of Aokigahara where participants pray
together for the souls of the dead.
I found another priest, the locally based Rev. Nakashita (no first name, Shin sect)
who also performs memorial services in this area. He chronicles local events and
some nation-wide attempts at suicide prevention. Still another temple, the Ishite-ji,
on the island of Shikoku, has also started to hold memorial services. The intention,
as stated on the temple web site, is to console bereaved families who, by praying
together will share their trouble. Even the congregation of Catholic Bishops in
Japan decided to change doctrinal orthodoxy on the subject and, in 2001, issued a
statement of repentance for their unforgiving attitude. Last year the first of a series
of masses also intended for grieving family members was celebrated in a Cathedral
at Kojimachi, Tokyo.
A series of interfaith conferences are organised by Pure Land Schools of
Buddhism. The announcement for one held in 2009 stated the intention to combine
religious teachings from Buddhism, Konkokyo (a Shinto-based New Religion) and
Christianity with the methods of various lay organisations. One sign of change is
apparent in the use of a new word, jishi, or self-death, instead of the standard
jisatsu or self-murder.

Conclusion

In many cultures unhappy or threatening spectres share a number of the characteristics

of their Japanese counterparts. In Christian traditions, the apparition of the ghosts of
suicides is often considered to be a consequence of religious prohibitions. However, as
in Japan and other Buddhist countries, it is violence inflicted or undergone or
unrequited passion rather than sin which causes spirits to linger in this world.
Sometimes their presence is a last attempt to set right injustice suffered by the weak, a
posthumous continuation of protest suicides.

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Historically, the threat of taking ones life may well have helped the protester
before he or she actually accomplished the act. In pre-modern Japan the most
common pattern consisted of allowing the death then propitiating the spirit. Even
today public memorialisation continues in an increasing variety of contexts, from
stelae for the souls of eels to shrines for victims of great catastrophes whereas
families will hide the suicide of one of their own. Yet if we look more closely ghosts
appear when social imperatives are contradictory. The most obvious case is the
deification of fallen soldiers who so clearly, notwithstanding the rhetoric of self-
sacrifice, conform to all conditions of bad deaths. Contemporary spirit narratives
are less clear in this respect. For religious practitioners social injustice is not
acknowledged and individual misfortune is projected into the past and attributed to
previous lives and/or to the influence of the souls of distant suicidal ancestors.
The very frequent identification of suicide with murder by other means could be
seen as a reaffirmation of the pre-modern equivalence of all violent deaths, or as a
refusal of agency. Coincidentally this problem is now a cause for serious concern
for police agencies and institutes of forensic medicine. In cases of even possibly
suspicious deaths, including only 4% of suicides, autopsies are very rarely carried
out in Japan due to lack of funds (Yomiuri Shinbun, 19 July 2010).
In films dealing with the supernatural some of the problems of adolescents are
given centre stage. Social malaise is also expressed in the form of random
contagion of evil intent and in the frequent motif of suicide as willed by invisible
forces. Some films like Kiyoshi Kurosawas Kairo (2001) and Sonos Suicide Circle
are metaphors for the disintegration of society which affects the young: increasing
numbers of whom are exploited or unable to find status or employment. Meanwhile
some schools of Buddhism or individual priests are trying to react to the increasing
disaffection of parishioners and to accusations of being merely purveyors of funeral
rites, by creating or participating in public and private suicide prevention
programmes. When once a funeral oration would not mention self-inflicted death,
now a gathering of bereaved families may be encouraged. On this occasion the
priest may say by making us understand the profound suffering that exists in our
world the deceased has ultimately guided us to seek a life of greater wisdom and
compassion (comment by H. Adams).

Notes

(1) Unless otherwise indicated translations are my own.

(2) The Hagakure was read exclusively by a restricted circle even after the
authors deathof old ageand was published only after the Meji restoration
in 1868. He primarily extols loyalty suicide, that is the act of following ones
lord in death.
(3) Increasing poverty and insufficient welfare payments were considered to be
the primary cause of the problem until medicalisation took over as the
dominant discourse.
(4) The original project, which was interrupted by the March 11 disaster after the
first day of specific fieldwork on the subject was meant to contain: surveys of

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suicide siteslocal, not virtualincluding interviews with local suicide

prevention groups, police, priests and other inhabitants. I also planned to ask
many more Buddhist priests about their views of suicide. Other planned
interviews included several estate agents and worshipers at the graves of the 47
ronin.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Elizabeth Kenney (Kansai Gaidai, Osaka) for her great help
with this and other projects, and the Rev. Henry Adams (Pure Land) for some of the material cited in the
last section; any mistakes are my own.

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