SOCIETY FOR DYING

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2670, 15 September 1937, Page 3

SOCIETY FOR DYING

UNIQUE ASSOCIATION IN JAPAN VOTIVE OFFERINGS AT SHRINES. Japan has long been known as a country where suicide is prevalent, says a writer in the News-Chronicle. The widespread belief in the nearness of the dead to the living, which finds expression in votive offerings of food and drink to the shrines of ancestors, helps to rob death of its terror.

Moreover, Japanese classical plays and legends exalt cases of hara-kari, the form of suicide by disembowelling prescribed for the samurai class, when these are committed for some exalted motive, such as devotion to a feudal superior.

The Tokio police registered 2681 actual and attempted suicides during 1936, 700 falling into the class of attempted but uncompleted. Illness was the main cause, accounting for 915 cases, and poison was the most frequent method of taking life.

Among the actual and attempted suicides were 1691 men and 990 women; the largest number of cases fall between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. There was an increase of 266, by comparison with 1935.

A spectacular case of demonstrative .attempted suicide occurred in Tokio recently, when several members of the Nichiren Buddhist sect, who belonged to a self-styled “Let’s Die” society, went through the motions of taking their lives in front of several public buildings in Tokio.

None of the attempts were successful, and one of the Tokio newspapers drily suggested that the professed candidates for self-martyrdom were merely publicity seekers, adding that, they could easily have killed themselves in their own homes. Their alleged motive was a vague discontent with the state of the world and religion.