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Some Japanese still choose a traditional form of release: the violence done to oneself. Japan's suicide rate, about 15 per 100,000, is higher than that of the U.S., though lower than those of most North or East European countries. Suicide in Japan was long surrounded by a romantic and aesthetic aura that arose from the samurai tradition. Now it seems an especially unhappy and unheroic spectacle. A group called the Japan Association for the Prevention of Parent-Child Suicide has been established to try to discourage such tragedies. Some 400 occur every year. In recent weeks a man threw himself and his two children into a river, a family of four drove into a river, a mother strangled her child and then took her own life. There is a pattern: the parents cannot pay back loans or cannot endure the financial pressures of their lives. One psychiatrist observes, "Japanese kill themselves for more or less altruistic reasons, not out of egoism or self-pity." And they kill the children to spare them the pain of growing up without their parents. Lately police have found dozens of bodies in the forests around Mount Fuji. People travel from all over Japan to commit suicide there. The place has been named "Suicide Forest." The police have posted blunt notices there that killing oneself is not romantic, that bodies are eaten by animals or decay and can be smelled 50 meters away.
It is their young who most trouble the Japanese. They are a remarkably law-abiding people. Yet at graduation time this spring, more than 10% of the nation's junior high schools were guarded by the police. A group of teenagers in Yokohama not long ago beat several street bums to death. Gangs of motorcycle riders taunt the police on Saturday nights; they blast past the stations and dare police to chase them through the maze of traffic. Juvenile delinquency, historically always low, has increased 80% since 1972. A White Paper issued by the Prime Minister's office concluded of today's youth: "They are devoid of perseverance, dependent upon others and self-centered."
Everyone in Japan talks about the violence in the junior high schools. Students threaten their teachers, even pull knives on them. The Japanese discuss such incidents, curiously enough, without much anger, without the punitive tone one might expect. But they worry. Of course, the violence done in all the schools in Japan in a year probably cannot match what the students in New York City schools commit in a month. Still, the Japanese seem to sense in the rebelliousness of the junior high school students a glimpse of the future, and it frightens them. A country that has lived so long and so successfully on the disciplines of obedience and respect for elders and scholars is shocked and mystified by children who rise up from their chairs and threaten their teachers.