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From: gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith)
Newsgroups: net.suicide
Subject: Re: painless for whom?
Message-ID: <12526@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 21-Mar-86 07:30:30 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12526
Posted: Fri Mar 21 07:30:30 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Mar-86 22:38:38 EST
References: <5121@alice.uUCp>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: gsmith@brahms.UUCP (Gene Ward Smith)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 27

In article <5121@alice.uUCp> bart@alice.UucP (Bart N. Locanthi) writes:

>>...that the Japanese
>>are wonderful for romanticizing suicide like we Americans do violence
>>(and also because of their willingness to slice up their friends)...
>
>if i were despondent and saw no way out i think i would be insulted if my
>friends said "there, there, things aren't so bad - you'll get out of federal
>prison in 45 years, your wife won't hate you after you've gone in and she
>takes up with someone else, ...".  a second for a japanese understands and
>agrees that there is only one way out.

    My point is that a "second for a Japanese" is all too willing to
think this when it is manifestly not true. I got a letter roasting me
for this sentiment; but the truth hurts sometimes. In the US you would
never hear a story about two young lovers who realized they had achieved
the heights of human bliss; so as a consequence, they walked arm-in-arm up
a volcano and jumped in. This kind of bilge is a part of Japanese culture,
and sometimes they act on it. Was there "only one way out" for Yukio
Mishima? Is not the suicide of Mishima the product of this Japanese
societal sickness, just as all the murders in the US are a product of
our different sort of warpage? I say yes, and I think a lot of you
turkeys sound like ghouls and sickos.

ucbvax!brahms!gsmith    Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
        Fifty flippant frogs / Walked by on flippered feet
    And with their slime they made the time / Unnaturally fleet.