My sister's self-inflicted death symbolizes the cost of "Bubble" economic boom
My sister chose to end her in the late December, 2012 - so late that by the time my flight landed in Narita it was already the evening of omisoka (last day of the year). I don’t remember much about that hasty trip, but I do remember that it was dark already, and it was raining – cold, bitter, drizzly – which reminded me that it was also raining on the last day I saw her alive.
My sister organized her life with the rationality and orderliness of an engineer, and she managed her death in a similarly deliberate fashion. Her apartment was impeccably clean, which even the police officers, no doubt accustomed to stepping into a living space of the deceased, took notice.
She left her front door unlocked, and my parents’ contact information was on the kitchen table. She cleared all the personal records that she deemed private; there was not a piece of dirty laundry in her hamper. She left enough food out for her beloved cat to last for a few days and kept the heater on so it wouldn't be cold. She thought of everything, it seemed, and took some time to plan her death exactly to her own specification.
Bursting of the Bubble
Graduated from college in 1990, my sister was among the last of the Bubble Generation, the cohort of Japanese who came of age during the final period of effervescence in Japan’s postwar economic development. Not unlike the Baby Boomers in Part 2, her generational cohort benefited from the unbridled optimism and abundant economic opportunities.
It was no exception for my sister, at least at the beginning of her professional life. By the time the new millennium rolled in, however, her circumstances at work began to change. Now in her thirties, she found her managerial responsibility progressively stressful, and after struggling with psychosomatic symptoms for years, she resigned from her prestigious job at age of 40. That was four years before her self-inflicted death.
It is uncanny that, right around the time when she was getting ready to leave her job, I was just starting a research project on the increased suicides of working-age Japanese, which began shortly after the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and rose to a historic high in 2003. In my essay, “Death of a Sarariiman”, which was published just months after my sister’s death, I characterized sarariiman (salaried corporate workers) as the Showa-era (1926-89) ideal of Japanese middle-class masculinity, and tied its demise in the Heisei era to the spike in the suicide rates among hatarakizakari (prime working age) men.
It is hard to believe that I didn’t notice the subtle signs of my sister's distress, but at that time, it didn't occur to me that her professional identity as a full-time career-track engineer was more masculine than feminine, and that she was going through the very same difficulties as these men I was writing about.
Although her company didn’t work her to death in a literal sense, the stress caused by their heavy expectations sucked life out of my sister to the point of no return.
When her productivity at work dwindled, my sister opted to make a clean break, rather than taking a more common path of depending on the corporate largess and staying on as a marginalized madogiwa (literally “by the window”) employee with reduced responsibilities. For the next few years, I watched from distance how her outlook shifted gradually from relieved, to optimistic, and finally, to resigned.
She found after the first year of unemployment that the skill set she developed in a large corporation had little value in the outside world, and, after having exhausted all her strength in the last few years on the job, she no longer had the fortitude to think alternatives, retool, and start over. Although her company didn’t work her to death in a literal sense, the stress caused by their heavy expectations sucked life out of my sister to the point of no return.
Sunny Corner of a Dying City
Emile Durkheim, the founding figure of modern sociology, pioneered the sociological study of suicide. He observed rapidly modernizing European societies at the turn of the 20th century and concluded that the marked increase in suicide rates was related to the state of anomie, or the sense of alienation caused by the breakdown of social standards and accepted values.
In the Millennial Japan the postwar goal of choantei shakai (hyper-stable society) dissipated into thin air and the safety of sarariiman life was replaced by the pursuit of economic expediency and the wide-spread fuan (anxiety) for the uncertain future. Sarariiman suicides – including my sister’s – are symptomatic of this anomic condition. If karoshi (death by overwork) was the dark side of Japan’s economic growth, karo jisatsu (suicide induced by the stress of overwork) is the byproduct of the post-Bubble recessional economy.
As I write this essay, I am looking at a snapshot of my sister, taken a little over a year before her death. Since she didn’t like to be photographed, it became one of the last few remaining images of her. She is sitting cross-legged on the floor in a sunny corner of her apartment, overlooking the very intersection I described in Part 1 of this essay series. She is smiling down at her cat, but even in what should have been a happy, playful moment, she looks weary and deplete of life.
Every time I see her forlorn face, I can’t help but feel a sharp pang in my chest. I know one thing for sure: no amount of theorizing can ever make that go away.
[This article was originally published on Japan News (Jan 16, 2020)]
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