In foreign parts: Corporate samurai pay high price for failure

One morning in February last year, Takahiro Arai closed the small Ramen noodle restaurant he owned in western Tokyo, threw a rope over a beam in his apartment and hanged himself before his wife got home. Friends and neighbours say the shop had started to fail, debts were piling up and the middle-aged businessman could see no way out.

Mr Arai was among more than 31,000 Japanese who took their lives in 2001, the fourth consecutive year the figure has exceeded 30,000.

Since the Asian crash of 1997-98, when the statistics jumped 35 per cent, suicides have claimed three times more people than traffic accidents, yet another grim indicator of the toll the country's seemingly endless economic slump is having on ordinary people.

The figures are far more than twice the per-capita suicide rate in Britain and they are heavily weighted by middle-aged men, who bear the brunt of restructuring the world's second-largest economy.

Many of the corporate samurai who helped to stoke Japan's miracle growth in the Seventies and Eighties have been pushed aside as the slump deepened. Those, such as Mr Arai, who use redundancy money to set up small businesses, often run into trouble and fall into depression.

Yukio Saito, who runs Inochi no Denwa, Japan's largest phone helpline network, says: "The problem is that the concept of gaman [endurance] is so strong in older men. They won't discuss their problems with others because they think it's a sign of weakness and they can just tough it out, which leads to depression and sometimes suicide."

Mr Saito's nationwide network dealt with a record 700,000 calls for advice last year, a number he thinks is still low, given the economic and social climate and the dire state of mental health treatment in Japan. There are far fewer psychiatrists than in most other advanced countries and family doctors routinely misdiagnose mental illness, pre-scribing useless drugs to treat it. Approval for drugs such as Prozac is stalled in the offices of Health Ministry bureaucrats.

Failure in work is widely seen as evidence of mental weakness, helping to explain the odd, job-related suicides that occasionally grab the headlines, such as the city official in Shizuoka in charge of Senegal's World Cup facilities who hanged himself in May. The official, Osamu Okamura, silently endured a massive increase in his workload, then left a suicide note saying he could not deal with the job.

The government has acknowledged it has a suicide epidemic on its hands with some half-hearted initiatives, including funding a week-long free trial at Inochi no Denwa. But the most visible measures seem to have been taken by commercial companies.

In the country's huge train network, where about 1,000 depressed commuters leapt to their deaths last year, steel guards have gone up on some of Tokyo's main lines and mirrors have appeared opposite platforms in an effort to deter potential jumpers.

Whether these initiatives indicate a kinder, gentler approach to the suicide problem or simply frustration at the inconvenience suicides cause, though, is a moot point. A "human incident" as it is euphemistically called by train announcers, on Tokyo's Yamanote Line, among the world's busiest, means long delays and thousands of late workers in a country where punctuality is prized. Little official sympathy is shown to the families of victims, who are sent an invoice for the costs of removing the body.

With a fragile economic recovery in Japan again threatened, this time by the global stock market crash, and unemployment still at record highs, few expect the suicide epidemic to abate soon. The latest statistics showed that 14,443 of last year's suicide victims were out of work.