Japan suicide latest of many sparked by scandal
TOKYO (Reuters) - The suicide of an investment firm executive questioned over suspected illegal activities at Livedoor Co. added an element of tragedy to scandal after the Internet firm's woes triggered stock market chaos this week.
But the incident surprised few in Japan, where suicide is not prohibited by religious beliefs and death has long been seen as a way to escape failure or protect loved ones from shame.
Indeed, ritual disembowelment, or "harakiri," was an accepted form of punishment for the samurai warrior class for hundreds of years.
H.S. Securities head Hideaki Noguchi, 38, was found dead on Wednesday in a room at a hotel on the southern island of Okinawa from what police said appeared to be self-inflicted knife wounds.
Noguchi apparently took his own life after being quizzed at length by prosecutors who raided his home and office over alleged violations of security laws in multiple acquisitions at Livedoor, an affair some commentators are dubbing "Japan's
The exposure of a construction industry scam that has left thousands of homes vulnerable to collapse in an earthquake led to a suicide in November, while a chicken farmer and his wife killed themselves over an alleged bird-flu cover up in 2004.
Scandals and bad-loan woes at Japan's banks in the 1990s resulted in multiple suicides.
"There is often the feeling of trying to make up for some wrongdoing that has caused trouble for one's family, for the managing director or other people," said Seizo Fukuyama, a professor of clinical psychology at Rikkyo University in Saitama, north of Tokyo.
Such motives are perhaps particularly common in Japan, where devotion to a company often runs deep.
"He had a very strong sense of responsibility," Noguchi's father said of his son in an interview with private broadcaster TBS broadcast on Friday. "He was at work all the time and hardly saw his family."
MORAL HIGH GROUND
Fukuyama said suicides often achieve the desired effect of cleaning the slate.
"We have a saying about 'whipping the dead,' which means that punishing a dead person is about the worst thing you can do," said Fukuyama, who has been involved for 30 years with Inochi no Denwa (Phone of Life), a suicide counseling service.
"Attacking the dead, or trying to investigate what they have done is really frowned on in Japan," he added.
Like Noguchi, people who commit suicide in the hope of protecting their families from the fall-out of a scandal often choose to do so far from home. As a result, hotels in remote areas sometimes look with suspicion at lone travelers.
But those who take their lives under pressure are not necessarily guilty of wrongdoing. Sometimes they simply feel they cannot bear to undergo an inquiry, Fukuyama said.
"Another possible reason is to claim the moral high ground. Some people feel that they can prove their innocence by dying," Fukuyama added.
Taking one's own life when implicated in a high profile scandal is not unknown in other countries.
Former Enron Corp. vice chairman J. Clifford Baxter shot himself in 2002 as the U.S. company's finances unraveled in public. In Britain, government weapons expert David Kelly committed suicide in 2003 after being named as the source for a BBC story saying the case for the Iraq war had been exaggerated.
But suicide rates are far higher in Japan than in most industrialized countries, with 32,325 people taking their own lives in 2004.
According to data on the World Health Organization's Web site (http://www.who.int/en), the suicide rate in Japan was 24.1 per 100,000 people in 2000, compared with 18.4 in France and 10.4 in the United States. The rate was 39.4 in Russia.
