# Paying for Suicide

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2002-08-18T07:38:48Z


Japan's suicide rate tops 30,000 / yr. Over 3X the 10,000 or so automobile related deaths. Most of the suicides are men in the 50's and 60's and often due to job related and financial stress. So, while many Silicon Valley ventures were built buy people who had lost their jobs in the defense industry. Japanese tend to commit suicide instead. Japan's suicide rate is among the top 10 in the world. It is said that Japanese mental health medicine is 30 years behind the US (Although Kurokawa-sensei is trying to do something about that.) So it makes sense that cleaning up after a suicide is as common as cleaning up after a traffic accident and people are being billed the costs. The original article below is from 1998, but suicides have increased since then, making it more relevant.Waiwai is the Mainichi Daily News summary of articles from Japanese Weeklies. This one is from Shukan Hoseki (10/1/98) a bit old. Relevant sections quoted below. See original article for full text.ClassicWaiwai
Paying for suicide costs more than the ultimate price
By Ryann Connell
Staff Writer
August 17, 2002
"Trains don't usually stop too long after a suicide, there's rarely much damage to carriages and we rarely have to send anyone off to catch trains on different lines. In that regard, train suicides probably don't cost too much," says an employee of a commuter line. "But to make sure we can cover the costs incurred when a suicide leads to a derailment, we have to ask the bereaved families of suicide victims to compensate us. The costs are usually in the range of 100 million yen, but I've heard of a case where a family was billed 140 million yen after someone killed themselves by jumping in front of a train." 

"As soon as the news hits that someone's committed suicide in one of our apartments, rents have to drop by about half or we can't get anyone else to live there," laments a Tokyo real estate agent. "In one case a few years ago, an agent sued the father of a man who slaughtered his girlfriend then killed himself in one of the agent's apartments. The agent won the case and the father ended up having to fork out a few million yen." 
"We can get a room back into shape in a couple of days (after a suicide), at a cost of only a few million yen in even the worst cases," says a hotel employee. "We don't usually charge renovation costs, but if the suicide is of a famous person and the hotel's reputation is damaged, the hotel'll sue the bereaved family for whatever they're worth." 
MDN: WaiWai





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