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JAPAN: Tokyo worried by suicides

The number of suicides in Japan topped 30,000 for the ninth straight year last year, the government said yesterday, urging employers to do more to tackle depression at work.

Japan's suicide rate has shot up since the mid-1990s to become one of the highest outside the former Soviet Union as the Japanese ideal of lifetime job security crumbled away amid years of recession.

The government said 32,155 people killed themselves last year, a decrease of 397 from the previous year. Japan's suicide rate remains the ninth-highest in the world, the Cabinet Office report said, citing WHO data.

Lithuania had the highest rate, followed by Belarus and Russia, while the US ranked No. 43, the data showed.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said economic bad times and difficulties in the workplace appeared to remain among the leading factors behind the high suicide rate.

"This is a problem that needs to be dealt with comprehensively by society," Machimura told reporters at a regular news conference.

"Suicide can be prevented. A sickness of the heart is a sickness, therefore it can be cured," he said.

The government has pledged to cut the number of suicides by 20 percent by 2016 with a range of measures including raising society's awareness of depression and promoting mental health.

"Suicide rates tend to rise when there is a recession and long working hours may also have an influence," Machimura added, saying there was a need for counsellors in the work place as well as in schools.

The report showed the highest rates of suicide in the northern prefecture of Akita. It also found that men are more likely to commit suicide on a Monday than a Saturday or holiday.

Tokyo train services are frequently halted by suicides on the tracks, and small groups of young people using carbon monoxide from charcoal burners to kill themselves often make news headlines, but the most common method chosen by Japanese is hanging.
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