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From: weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener)
Newsgroups: net.suicide
Subject: Re: The Japanese attitude toward suicide
Message-ID: <12605@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 23-Mar-86 18:37:49 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12605
Posted: Sun Mar 23 18:37:49 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Mar-86 03:43:37 EST
References: <5121@alice.uUCp> <12526@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <2871@reed.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: weemba@brahms.UUCP (Matthew P. Wiener)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 34

In article <2871@reed.UUCP> ellen@reed.UUCP (Ellen Eades) writes:
>> >>...the Japanese are wonderful for
>> >>romanticizing suicide like we Americans do violence
>> >>(and also because of their willingness to slice up their friends)...
>> >
>> >a second for a japanese [understands and]
>> >agrees that there is only one way out.
>> ...
>> 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
>> ....
>
>I have tried (really hard!) to stay out of this debate on
>Japanese/Moslem attitudes toward suicide, but Mr. Smiths commeent
>perpetrates some nasty stereotypes which I feel I must, as a
>person of Japanese descent, oppose.  Mishima, who incidentally
>gets a lot more press in the US than he ever did in Japan, was
>a right-wing fanatic and taken just about as seriously as, say,
>Jerry Falwell here; that is to say, some idolized him, some
>....

There was a case in California recently that got a lot of attention about a
native Japanese woman, whose husband had been unfaithful, committed ritual
murder of her two children and then attempted to kill herself.  The defense
argued that this was an acceptable Japanese response to her shame, and all
the newspaper accounts I read played on this.  Could you clarify this Ellen?
No mention was made of her being a fanatic or anything.

Such tragedies do occur among Americans, of course, but the general attitude
is that this response is an act of further shame itself.

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720