Elanso

The latest issue of the Economist has an article focusing on Japan’s high suicide rate, which includes the following graph*:

The author of the article mentions financial trouble and unemployment as major causes of suicide, but also blames an unforgiving culture:

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries. Cultural factors are partly at play. Japanese society rarely lets people bounce back from the perceived shame of failure or bankruptcy. Suicide is sometimes even met with approval—as facing one’s fate, not shirking it. The samurai tradition views suicide as noble (though perhaps out of self-interest, since captured warriors were treated gruesomely). Japan’s main religions, Buddhism and Shintoism, are neutral on suicide, unlike Abrahamic faiths that explicitly prohibit it.

The author ends the article by calling for the Japanese society to give more chances to those who fail.
[*No, Japan does not have the world’s highest suicide rate. A a larger graph from the same organization shows that Finland and Hungary have higher suicide rates than Japan.]