Suicidology and rational suicide
By William Wetherall
The coiner of "suicidology" must have thought that there is an "ology" for everything else, so why not suicide? The term has been hijacked by the academic arm of the suicide prevention movement, which assumes practically a priori that suicide cannot be rational and hence must be stopped -- prevented, intervened, postvented -- but never allowed, much less assisted.
While no religion in the world encourages suicide, none totally condemn it, either. Neither the Old nor New Testaments in the Bible proscribe suicide as such. Christianity's sinification of suicide is rooted in St. Augustine's City of God. This 5th-century work of history, philosophy, and religious lore laid the foundation for the "suicide horror" that swept greater Europe in later centuries.
Yet even at their height during 18th and 19th centuries, anti-suicide sentiments were not as absolute in greater Europe than is commonly thought. Despite the position of Church and secular law, some degree of sympathy was shown for individuals who killed themselves. And suicide in defense of virtue or honor, or for love or for country, continued to be beautified in art and literature.
The story of suicide in Japan is not that different. Japan's long traditions mostly oppose suicide while tolerating acts of suicide after the fact. In the past, some acts of suicide have been legally proscribed, and assisting suicide has been illegal for several centuries. Yet, as in Europe, suicide in defense of virtue or honor, and for love or for country, have been to some extent romanticized.
Suicidology in Japan, as in other countries, is mostly about prevention. Most preventionists in Japan, like their counterparts in other countries, believe that all acts of suicide are motivated by some degree of emotional distress. Consequently, the idea of "rational suicide", as an expression of a right to choose death over life, remains an anathema to most preventionists.
However, in Japan as elsewhere, more people seem to be embracing the notion that someone suffering from a terminal illness that will soon incapacitate them, for example, might be justified in seeking to end their own life, with or without assistance. While I personally would want to talk anyone out of jumping off a bridge simply because they had lost their job or a lover or were depressed about a physical or emotional handicap, I might want to assure someone concerned about the dignity of their own immanent death that their right to determine how they want to die is as sacrosanct as their right to decide how they want to live.
General reports
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Statistics
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History
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Classical literature
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Chushingura
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Misconceptions
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Terminology
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Prevention
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Choice and assistance
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Age groups
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Children
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Youth
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Middle-aged
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Elderly
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Styles
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Individuals
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Murder-suicide
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Suicide pacts
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Mass suicide
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Following-in-death
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Kamikaze
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Seppuku
Neither suicide nor ritual
Though listed here as a style of suicide, not all acts of seppuku (self-disembowelment) are in fact suicide. Seppuku is merely another style of autothanasia -- self-inflicted death -- no different than jumping off a bridge or taking sleeping pills. Whether seppuku is suicide depends on motivation and other circumstances. Some acts are suicide, but others are self-execution.
The distinction between suicide and self-execution is often lost on writers who do not understand the function of seppuku as a legally provisioned form of execution reserved for members of the samurai caste condemned to death for capital crimes. The 47 ronin of Chushingura fame, for example, committed self-execution, not suicide.
Nor is seppuku "ritual suicide" or even "ritual disembowelment" -- as it tends to be dubbed in English by writers who do not seem to understand the nature of suicide either. All acts of suicide are "ritual" in the sense that they follow patterns associated with choices of place and method. As no pattern of behavior is singular, the ways in which one can commit seppuku vary as much as the ways one can jump off a bridge or take sleeping pills.
Reflexive associations of seppuku with "suicide" and "ritual" mostly reflect the needs of writers to "exotify" such acts as exceptionally "Japanese" rather than to understand them as human. The impulse to exotify seppuku is not limited to foreigners writing about Japan, but is also found among Japanese who write in English and other languages with the intent of "explaining" seppuku to foreigners.
Whereas most people who write in Japanese do not use "jisatsu" (suicide) as a synonym for "seppuku" (disembowelment). Nor do they reduce seppuku to a matter of ritual, but recognize that acts of seppuku, though sharing certain elements of style, vary according to motivation and other circumstances.
In short, some acts of seppuku are suicidal, others executional. Some are conducted according to highly formalized procedures, others not.
Culturalization
The distortion of the meaning of seppuku, when crossing the divide between Japanese and other languages, is a good example of a phenomenon I call "culturalization" -- the attempt to explain behavior in terms of a particular "culture" rather than in terms of universal human terms. While "culturalization" also takes place in writing in Japanese, by Japanese, and for Japanese -- it is more likely to occur when writing in English and other languages because writers become possessed by a real or imaginary need to "explain" things "Japanese" to "foreigners" who presumably have difficulty understanding "Japan" and "the Japanese".
Culturalization occurs in when a writer "Japanizes" human behavior with the intent of exceptionalizing "Japan" and "the Japanese" in order to promote the belief that they are not just different but unusually so. Writing this way in Japanese is mostly an act of preaching to the choir. Stressing the "Japaneseness" of "Japan" and "the Japanese" in English and other languages, though, is like evangelizing pagans not already converted to Japanism, in the hope of convincing them that "harakiri" can only be understood as something peculiarly "Japanese" and therefore otherworldly.
Culturalization is facilitated by the belief that behavior is best understood as a product of a particular "culture" rather than a universal human condition. Hence understanding suicide as an act enabled by human emotions and behavioral capacities, is secondary to imputing culturalist meanings to suicidal acts in order to maintain politically useful views of "Japan" and "the Japanese". In other words, suicide as a universal human behavior is pressed into the service of what amounts to an ideology of culturally determined national character.
Circumstances
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Causes
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Contagion
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Illness
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Marital status
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Employment
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Time and place
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