Shared Death: Self, Sociality and Internet Group Suicide in Japan
- 1 July 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Transcultural Psychiatry
- Vol. 47 (3), 392-418
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461510370239
Abstract
Existing models for understanding suicide fail to account for the distinctiveness of Internet group suicide, a recent phenomenon in Japan. Drawing from an ethnography of Internet suicide websites, two social commentaries in Japanese popular culture, and the work of developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat, I argue that participation in Internet suicide forums and even the act of Internet group suicide result from both a need for social connectedness and the fear of social rejection and isolation that this need engenders. These needs and fears are especially strong in the case of Japan, where the dominant cultural rhetoric ties selfhood closely to the social self that is the object of perception and experience by others. I show how such an understanding of Internet group suicide helps us to understand some of its basic characteristics, which are otherwise difficult to explain and which have puzzled the Japanese media and popular accounts: the “ordinariness” or casual nature of Internet group suicide, the wish for an easy or comfortable death, the wish to die with others, and the wish to “vanish.” Internet group suicide sheds light on questions of Japanese selfhood in modernity and expands our understanding of suicide in Japan in general.Keywords
This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- Secularizing Religious Practices: A Study of Subjectivity and Existential Transformation in Naikan TherapyJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2010
- Others in MindPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2009
- Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in JapanCulture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2008
- A Sociological Investigation on "Group Suicides through the Internet" in JapanJapanese Sociological Review, 2008
- Demystifying Japanese Therapy: An Analysis of Naikan and the Ajase Complex through Buddhist ThoughtEthos, 2007
- Psychopharmacology in a Globalizing World: The Use of Antidepressants in JapanTranscultural Psychiatry, 2002
- Negotiating the "Good Death": Japanese Ambivalence about New Ways to DieEthnology, 2001
- The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.Psychological Bulletin, 1995
- Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.Psychological Review, 1991
- Outline of a Theory of PracticePublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1977