"The end of an era" has been the underlying theme of this column for the last couple of months. In November I wrote about the rapid aging of my hometown in Japan, once lively with working families with young children. Last month, I focused on this side of the Pacific Ocean and contemplated the mass retirement of baby boomers. And now, for the final installment of this trilogy, I return to my home again.
My sister chose to end her life seven years ago, in late December 2012. So late that by the time my flight landed in Narita it was already the evening of omisoka (New Year's Eve). I don't remember much about that hasty trip, but I do remember that it was dark already, and it was raining -- cold, bitter, drizzly -- which reminded me that it was also raining on the last day I saw my sister alive.
She organized her life with the rationality and orderliness of an engineer, and she managed her death in a similarly deliberate fashion. Her apartment was impeccably clean, which was noticed even by the police officers, who were no doubt accustomed to stepping into the living spaces of deceased people. She left her front door unlocked, and my parents' contact information was on the kitchen table. She cleared all the personal records that she deemed private; there was not an item of dirty laundry in her hamper. She thought of everything, it seemed, and took some time to plan her death exactly to her own specifications.
So what is the connection between my sister's death and the "end of an era" leitmotif? Graduating from college in 1990, she was among the last of the bubble generation, the cohort of Japanese who came of age during the final period of effervescence in Japan's postwar economic development. Like many in her generation, she benefited from the unbridled optimism and abundant economic opportunities at the beginning of her professional life. By the time the new millennium rolled in, her circumstances at work began to change. Now in her 30s, she found her managerial responsibilities increasingly stressful, and after struggling with psychosomatic symptoms for years, she resigned from her prestigious job at the age of 40. That was four years before her self-inflicted death.
It is uncanny that, right around the time when she was getting ready to leave her job, I was just starting a research project on the increased suicides of working-age Japanese, which began shortly after the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and rose to a historic high in 2003. In my essay, "Death of a Sarariiman," which was published just months after my sister's death, I characterized sarariiman-hood (salaried corporate workers) as the Showa-era (1926-89) ideal of Japanese middle-class masculinity, and tied its demise in the Heisei era to the spike in the suicide rates among hatarakizakari (prime working age) men.
It's hard to believe that I didn't notice the subtle signs of her distress, but at that time I had no idea that my own sister, whose professional identity was more masculine (full-time, career-track engineer) than feminine (generalist office worker), was going through the very same difficulties as these men.
Instead of staying on as a marginalized madogiwa (literally "by the window") employee with reduced responsibilities, my sister opted to make a clean break. For the next few years, I watched from a distance how her outlook shifted gradually from relieved to optimistic and finally to resigned. She found after the first year of unemployment that the skillset she developed in a large corporation had little value in the outside world, and, after having exhausted all her strength in the last few years on the job, she no longer had the fortitude to think about alternatives, retool and start over. Although her company didn't work her to death in a literal sense, the stress caused by their heavy expectations sucked the life out of my sister to the point of no return.
Emile Durkheim, the founding figure of modern sociology, pioneered the sociological study of suicide. He observed rapidly modernizing European societies at the turn of the 20th century and concluded that the marked increase in suicide rates was related to the state of anomie, or the sense of alienation caused by the breakdown of social standards and accepted values.
In millennial Japan the postwar goal of choantei shakai (a hyper-stable society) dissipated into thin air and the safety of the sarariiman life was replaced by the pursuit of economic expediency and the widespread fuan (anxiety) for the uncertain future. Sarariiman suicides -- including my sister's -- are symptomatic of this anomic condition. If karoshi (death by overwork) was the dark side of Japan's economic growth, karo jisatsu (suicide induced by the stress of overwork) is the byproduct of the post-bubble recessional economy.
As I write this essay, I'm looking at a snapshot of my sister, taken a little over a year before her death. Since she didn't like to be photographed, it became one of the last few remaining images of her. She's sitting cross-legged on the floor in a sunny corner of her living room, smiling down at her cat. Even in what should have been a happy, playful moment, she looks weary and deplete of life. Every time I see her forlorn face, I can't help but feel a sharp pang in my chest. I know one thing for sure: No amount of theorizing can ever make that go away.
Kurotani is a professor of anthropology at the University of Redlands.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
