Few suicides are truly single or passive. Many solitary suicides are acts of "autoplastic aggression" in which the individual kills oneself in order to gain attention and change feelings -- make someone feel guilty (I hope you are happy with your new girlfriend), protest one's innocence (You are wrong about me), seek forgiveness (This is how sorry I am for what I have done or am unable to do), persuade others to act (This is how much I despise this war).

TNS 856a

A virtuous maiden falls on a knife on account of her stepmother's avarice.

TNS 913b

A man feigns suicide at a temple graveyard using fake blood as a ploy to persuade a courtesan to marry him.

TNS 984

A man who has married an emancipated prostitute attempts to kill himself when she goes back to work to support him and his elderly mother.

KCNgZ 43

A reluctant bride suffers at the railings of a bridge in Osaka.

ONgS 14

A 17-year-old girl jumps from a bridge and drowns.

The desire to be with a person one loves who has died is universal. The person can be a lover, spouse, child, friend, respected leader, worshipped hero -- even a favorite pet. Grief is relieved, and fear of death overcome, by the promise of reunion in the next world.

Death sometimes sets in motion a series of suicides as one person after another dies. Suicide contagions hit families, schools, and communities of fans and followers.

TNS 687

Widow kills child and self to follow husband executed for joining Saga Rebellion.

NS 6

A sick mother drowns herself, and her daughter attempts to follow her but is rescued. The same story is reported in ONS 254.

ONS 254

A sick mother drowns herself, and her daughter attempts to follow her but is rescued. The same story is reported in NS 6.

A suicide pact is an explicit agreement between two or more competent individuals to die together. The intent is more important than the agency of death -- the parties may commit suicide simultaneously or in succession, or one person may assist in the suicides or the others, or may outright kill the others before taking one's own life.

Under Tokugawa and Meiji law, as in Japan and most countries today, complicity in another person's death is treated as a form of homicide, and survivors of suicide pacts may face charges, a trial, and punishment.

TNS 694

23-year-old actor Bando Mineji dies in suicide pact with Yamakoshi Kane, a 15-year-old teahouse employee.

TNS 862

Lovers who have killed themselves are married after death by the families that rejected them.

YHS 647

Two foreign bank clerks, caught embezzling, shoot themselves aboard ship on which they were trying to escape.

ONgS 8

An Osaka couple walk half way across a small bridge on the Yodo river, undress, and leap into the water.

There are many kinds of murder-suicides, but all involve the killing of someone against their will or in the absence of their will, followed by the killer's suicide. Babies, young children, and adults in certain states of mind are considered unable to rationally agree to their own death.

Under Japanese law, as in other countries, a parent who survives a suicide attempt after killing their young offspring will generally be charged with homicide. Evidence of neglect or abuse of the offspring will be taken seriously. Also in Japan, as in many countries, and in some states in the United States, mitigating factors, such as post-partum depression or marital or economic stress, can result in a sentence commuted to a period of probation with psychiatric treatment.

TNS 833

A policeman kills three woman and attempts to kill himself but is arrested.

TNS 934

An Edo river boatman takes a razor to a prostitute and then himself.

TNS 1016

An adopted husband, rejected by his wife, writes a suicide note, torches the house, but can't take the heat, escapes, and is caught.

TNS 1020

A man kills his wife, three children, and himself.

TNS 1047

A man kills his wife, who he suspects has been having an affair, and then himself. The same story is reported in YHSNg 9.

ONS M8

A woman kills her husband's lover, serves him the woman's vulva as sashimi, then kills herself.

YHSNg 9

A man kills his wife, who he suspects has been having an affair, and then himself. The same story is reported in TNS 1047.

Both "suicide" in Renaissance Latin and "jisatsu" in Sino-Japanese mean "self-killing". Acts described as "self-killing" are generally those in which someone wants to die for a reason -- even one that may seem unreasonable in the eyes of others -- such as depression, remonstration, or revenge, if not honor in the face of defeat and capture, or surcease when confronted with imminent death from torture or a terminal illness.

The scope of "jisatsu" in Japanese does not generally extend to acts like "jisai" and "kamikaze", People writing in English often associate "jisai" and "kamikaze" with what they regard as Japane's "culture of suicide". But Japanese writers generally do not link these terms with "jisatsu" because acts of "jiketsu" and "kamikaze" were not motivated by personal circumstances but were acting in their capacity as convicted criminals or military personnel.

Jisai means "self-reresp;itopmdetermination" and in the context settlement" in the sense of compliance with a demand that one kill oneself as punishment for a capital offense. Such was the case of the 47 rōnin who carried out an illegal vendetta against Kira Yoshinaka (吉良義央 1641-1703) to avenge the death of their lord, Asano Naganori (浅野長矩 1667-1701), who Kira had ordered to disembowel himself after drawing his sword on Kira -- a breach of protocol -- when Kira insulted him. After killing Kira, Asano's "loyal retainers" were placed under house arrest, found guilt of carrying out an unapproved vendetta, and ordered to commit seppuku. Disembowling oneself was the legally prescribed form of capital punishment for persons of their status, who were thus accorded the gift of death. The alternative would have been decapitation as a commoner, a dishonor that would have reflected on their families.

Kamikaze means "divine wind" and originally alluded to the Ise Shrine of Ameterasu, the legendary Sun Goddess who sent her grandson from heaven to earth to found the dynasty of rulers beginning with Emperor Jinmu. The term was later applied to the typhoon storms that drove Mongol invaders from Japan's shores in 1274 and 1281. This sense of the word inspired its use as a metaphor for an opertion during the Pacific War, in which a pilot was sent on a mission to crash his plane into an enemy ship, thus sacrificing his life for tne glory Imperial Japan. Whether training for or participation in a kamikaze attack was volitional or compelled makes little difference in light of the fact that the act was part of an organized military operation which regarded the act as a tactic for protecting Japan against an enemy that was quickly advancing toward the country, and which associated the act with honorable service to the country as a Child of the Emperor. The willingness or resignment to die for a cause -- which is not the same as a desire to die -- is shared by all people who place themselves, or or placed, in a position to defend something regarded as worth dying for.

Migawari jisatsu

What I will call "migawari jisatsu" or "body-substitute suicide" refers to the killing of oneself so that another person not be killed. An underling might kill himself in order to take the blame in a scandal that entangled his boss. Or a common soldier might assume the identity of his commanding officer, and fight the enemy until death, while the commanding officer slips away in the guise of a peasant,

A look at Seisōjo's "Kenjoden / Kesa Gozen" and 19th century nishikie featuring the story of Kesa Gozen's "migawari jisatsu" in which she kills herself by taking the place of her husband in the sleeping quarters where she had conspired for him to be killed.

In no country in the world do people accept or encourage suicide. People naturally try to save the lives of those they think are about to kill themselves, or try to rescue those who have already already crossed the line between thought and action.

In Japan, suicide after the fact is seen as tragic. Before the fact it is viewed as something to be stopped. Many news nishikie depict acts of prevention and rescue.

TNS 428

A passerby stops elopers from Niigata from jumping off a bridge in Osaka.

TNS 9001

Using a stolen sword, a shizoku kills a restaurateur's daughter on whom he has lavished all his money only to be jilted. A friend talks him into surrendering instead of disemboweling himself.

KSZU 14

A sumo wrestler pulls a man off the railing of Ryogokubashi in Tokyo.

KCNgS 20

An officer saves a couple he spots jumping off a bridge in Osaka. The same story is reported in SZ 20.

KCNgZ 32

A man restrains a man and a woman who are trying to throw themselves off a bridge in Osaka.

SZ 20

A man and woman who have jumped off a bridge are rescued by and officer and resuscitated. The same story is reported in KCNgS 20.

YHSNg 2

A boatmen rescues a grandmother who threw herself and her granddaughter into a canal.

YHSNg 8

A policeman stops a mother from killing her child and herself.