The NHK news feature above reveals a sad phenomenon in Japan society: the rising number of suicide. Of all the reasons behind the rising number of suicide cases, overwork remains the most serious and important. This explanation was deduced from notes and writings left by those who committed suicide themselves and also from the stories of their family members who knew the victims well although admittedly were not aware of what the victims are really going through in their final days.

As much as I praise the courage and thoughtfulness of the victims’ families who have gathered to relive the painful experience of losing a loved one to let others understand more about this sad phenomenon, I can’t help but notice the silence of business community about this problem. Their absence from this worthy movement seems to define their stand on this matter–that the business community still do not take overwork-related suicides seriously. Well, they should. If employers are serious in raising the overall efficiency of their workers, they should probably take the issue of overwork as their top priority.

Japan Times has a lengthy article about the social pressure that prompted Tomohiro Kato to drive a truck to Akihabara and start stabbing people to death. This is one of the most useful articles that explain the desperation of a man driven to extreme loneliness by being excluded from society.

Japan has a very rigid social structure that is mosty very hard to break into, not only for socially spurned loners like Kato, buy also for foreigners living in Japan. The big difference, of course, is that foreigners have others of their own countries to have relationships with, while for Japanese like Kato, there is no other people to turn to.

{Photo CC Or Hiltch.}

Dr. Naoki Sato, a professor of Information Engineering at the Kyushu Institute of Technology, notes in his book “Boso Suru ‘Seken’ ” (”The Rampaging Society”) that while social relations are important everywhere, they carry particular weight in Japan, where the word for “individual” — “kojin” — did not make its first appearance in print until 1884, in a translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract.”

“In Japan, individuals are created by their relation to the people around them,” Sato says. “Whenever anyone causes an incident here, their parents immediately apologize to the seken: That relationship takes precedence over everything else.”

Sato describes seken as a double-edged sword: On the one hand, pressure to live within it has contributed to Japan’s famously low crime rate; on the other hand, it can also push people excluded by it to desperation.

“The problem is that because people think it isn’t possible to live outside the seken in Japan . . . these individuals have to disappear, commit suicide — the number of suicides in Japan still exceeds 30,000 each year — or resort to self-destructive crimes, such as this one.”