Japan's Pandemic and Suicides: Drawing the Wrong Conclusion

Last week CNN World published a story about rising suicide rates in Japan. It pointed out, sensationally, that more Japanese took their lives in October than lost them to Covid-19 during the entire year. After a period of substantial decline, suicide rates were once again on the rise. Japan’s rate is roughly the global average—though, as the article pointed out, Japan is one of the few developed countries to publish timely statistics on suicides, so to what extent this is disguised in other nations remains an open question. 

The CNN article also acknowledged that the Japanese response to the novel coronavirus, unlike its neighbors, had depended far more on individual behavior than that of its neighbors, most of which had practiced a much more rigorous public health regimen of early testing, tracing, quarantines, and genuine lockdowns. The lesson it took from this comparison, according to experts quoted in the article, is that other countries with more severe constraints might leave its citizens with higher risk of suicide, and it warned darkly that a new surge of Covid-19 cases in winter might push local suicide rates even higher. 

On its own terms, this article merits few complaints. Japan, no doubt, has an historic problem with high suicide rates, for reasons related to school pressure, a culture of shaming, a stigma toward mental health treatment, limited opportunities in the workplace, and other factors. 

But there is an old saying in homiletics that you are responsible not just for what you say but what the reader hears. And in this article, out of context, and aimed at an American audience, the clear message is that public health measures designed to combat the coronavirus trade off fatalities related to Covid-19 for other deaths and harms. 

Once again, at the margin, this is an implicit argument worth taking seriously. But what the article entirely fails to offer is any sense of the magnitude of the difference between Covid-19’s relative impact on Japan compared to the United States and in fact many other Western countries. 

The total number of deaths from Covid-19 in Japan is under 2,000. The U.S. has exceeded this number of fatalities on dozens of individual days during 2020. In terms of deaths per capita, Japan has fewer than 2 percent of the U.S. total. As mentioned, it has done this largely without lockdowns and mostly thanks to the Japanese wearing masks, speaking softly, and avoiding crowded places. And, not incidentally, the most recent quarter featured one of the country’s best economic performances in years. 

Japan, remarkably, does not even have the lowest rate of Covid-19-related mortality in Asia. South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and New Zealand all have even lower ones. And Australia is in the same ballpark. Some of these countries had prior recent emergencies that made them more sensitive when the outbreak struck—South Korea had a brush with MERS, and Australia was punished by wildfires—but in general they have succeeded largely through taking standard public health precautions and sticking to them rigorously. 

Focusing on Japan’s suicide rate draws attention away from this astonishing gap between Asian and American performance relative to the coronavirus. It is neither misinformation nor disinformation, but it acts as a bridge to the kind of commentary that focuses on the harms of responding to the coronavirus by wrongly diminishing the impact of the disease itself. The article helps obscure, in more subtle ways, the extent to which the American response to Covid-19 has fallen tragically short.