A few days ago, an authoritative foundation in Japan made an in-depth research report on Japan, and counted the proportion of people with suicidal intent in the country (Japan) to be more than a quarter, this report was published in theIt was officially opened to the public on September 7th. In this survey report, it was revealed that the percentage of respondents in the age range of 20-39 years old who had ever intended to commit suicide was 34.7%.

This latest survey is truly alarming, with one in every one hundred human youths in a nation35 people have suicidal thoughts. So what exactly is it that makes Japanese society so full of despair? What is behind the high suicide rate that plagues Japan that China should be wary of?

Living in the Land of Dreams

Some people believe that suicide in Japan is a liberating belief, while others believe that the intense work pressure in Japan causes the high incidence of suicide. In addition to these well-known answers, some deeper, uncharted and horrific reasons are offered here today.

Japan is the kingdom of anime, how crazy is this country about anime? In the streets of Japan you can see buses plastered with posters of the latest anime characters, you can see local governments with walls painted with Pikachu, you can see civil servants put into a cute black bear doll to promote local tourism, and countless girls and boys have added more or less cartoonish items to their rooms. However, all this is very hard to imagine in other normal countries.

In China, most of the prime time slots on TV stations are for variety shows or news, while in Japan, on the contrary, the prime time slots on Japanese radio stations actually show cartoons! This can be seen in the whole Japanese society's fervor for anime. Without judging the good and bad of Japanese anime, it is important to realize that all movies and TV shows have a certain gap with real life. Movies and TV shows are usually happy to magnify the good and sunny side of the world, while ignoring the flaws of society. For example, it is easy for the audience to see that the protagonist pays off, that the protagonist has amazing luck in life, and that the protagonist is surrounded by beautiful women. However, this is not the case in real life. Payment is not always rewarded, and it is difficult to open God's perspective to see the suffering behind a person. It may be very negative, but this society really doesn't have that much ravishing luck, no doraA dream, can't be a ninja and can't get out of the ocean.

It is not that anime works are bad, but when a person is madly immersed in the fairy tale world, then the mind is bound to become fragile. There is a huge gap between the anime world and real life. When a person thinks about the situation in the real world with the anime worldview, he or she may have all sorts of discomfort, all sorts of incomprehension about life and society. This leads to anxiety, negative emotions, and then to despair.

Anime and manga have brought joy to Japan, but there is no denying that they have also dampened the people's tolerance for real-life setbacks. The majority of Japanese families are middle class, and if you compare the difficulties and pressures of life, it is far less than the low-income class in China. China's low-income class may complain about society, but they are far from despairing about life. Different external environments foster different mentalities. The high suicide tendency in Japan has nothing to do with the popularity of anime.

Heavy overtime is not the main cause of suicide

The Chinese community is happy to blame the high suicide rate in Japan on the high intensity of work in Japan. It is true that excessive overtime exists in Japanese companies, but it is not as exaggerated as portrayed in the Chinese media. After reading many articles about the Japanese workplace, most authors describe Japanese companies as horrible running machines, claiming that the average Japanese company works overtime every day.5 hours.

It is possible to do some good calculations to see if this figure is accurate. Measured according to the normal labor law, the daily overtime5 hours means 25 hours of overtime a week and over 100 hours of overtime in January. And according to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2016 released the latest workplace white paper shows that in the month with the longest overtime, overtime 80-100 hours of overtime only accounted for the total number of enterprises 11% (note that it is the longest month of overtime). So it is inaccurate to assume that the average company works 5 hours of overtime per day, and according to the white paper data, it is understood that Japanese companies do have the phenomenon of overtime being too severe, with the majority of industries working in the range of 45-60 hours of overtime per month. So this means that the average Japanese company works about 15 hours of overtime a week, an average of 3 hours a day.

Japan has a perfect labor protection law, basically all regular enterprises also have a clear division of overtime, which is different from China. In China, there are many enterprises that do not have uniform work and rest schedules, some jobs have only one day of vacation a week, and in backward areas, a job even has only two days of vacation in a month. Many media are eager to please the workplace, biased reports of some negative content, alert to corporate oppression, the media as an important party of society to protect the workplace this is not wrong. However, if we objectively compare the actual total working hours of Chinese workers with those of Japanese workers, there is not much difference. Simply amplifying the length of overtime work in Japanese companies is not a reliable basis.

The reason why the world will feel the squeeze of Japanese enterprises, on the one hand, is derived from Japan's more transparent data, the community has a standardized system; on the other hand, the rest of the world's working environment and East Asia even more stark contrast exists. Here will not discuss the laid-back Europe and the United States, take the same deep in Asia, Malaysia, Malaysia, in addition to the normal weekend vacation, most companies even Tuesday is not to work (in recent years, part of the change to Tuesday afternoon), in addition to the holidays are far more than in China and Japan. And Malaysia's state of leisure is just a very common work culture in the international community.

But the fact is that the problem of work stress also occurs in China, yet the Chinese workforce seems to have much stronger willpower.In 2015, Japan's Cabinet Office in March announced a year of Japan's suicide situation, and this data shows that the age of 50-80 years old for the main suicide group, to reach the total number of suicides 56.2%, 20-29 years old youth suicide rate accounted for all of the 10.5%. Obviously, the group of people aged 50 years old and above suicide is not because of the pressure of the work, but rather, the sadness of the aging society. The old, countless elderly people have no support, lonely and full of despair for life, causing them to embark on a road that is difficult to turn back. China is also facing the crisis of aging society in the future, will China's aging population also choose such an extreme approach in the future, resulting in social pain? The current situation in Japan warrants our vigilance.

On the other hand, it was found that the majority of youth suicides were psychological problems ((The number of suicides among Japanese citizens suffering from psychological depression in 2014 was 5.439). What makes Japanese youth depressed is not the pressure of work, but the anxiety about the status quo of society as a whole. Post-war Japan's rapid development so far, the bourgeoisie further solidified, the current Japanese youth most of the way out is only to go to work in the enterprise, the difficulty of entrepreneurship is too high, the pressure of employment is even more enormous. Under these circumstances, the phenomenon of the "hidden tribe" is particularly serious among Japanese youth. According to the results of the report released by the Cabinet Office of Japan in July 16, a total of 541,000 young people in Japan neither go to school, nor work, and even do not like to go out. To put it plainly, otaku and geeks have a strengthened version. 540,000 people in China's cognitive concept is not much, this is because China's population is more than ten times more than that of Japan. If we were to translate that into China's population base, the number would be 5.4 million! Imagine if there are 5.4 million young people in China who have abandoned their jobs and stayed at home, what a horrible social problem that would be.

Japan is currently facing such a grim situation, although there is no direct data to show, but it can be presumed that most of the youth suicide comes from years of seclusion, resulting in psychological depression and finally suicide, which stems from the society, in addition to oppression and consumption, the general acceptance of youth is very low, resulting in the difficulty of young people to integrate into society. The solidification of capital will bring very cruel social problems, and this problem should also be alerted by China. There is a popular saying in China that"Door to door", this idea is called union in the upper class. When rich families keep uniting together, the fragmented capital of society gathers like a sucking iron into one big rock, which will greatly block the way out and direction of the future youth.

Japan than China's social development a few decades in advance, the two countries have many similarities, the current problems faced by Japan is also worth China to reflect and vigilance. Japan's suicide ideology set a new high, absolutely not simply overtime overwork can be justified, China should be more alert to Japan's social contradictions, to avoid repeating the same mistakes!