Japan's Suicide Forest

Mount Fuji

Japanese culture differs from America's in several ways.  One is that there seems to be more acceptance of the idea of suicide.  This may trace to Japanese legends of warriors who committed seppuku and whose acts were regarded as heroic and morally honorable.

In any event, the rate of suicide in Japan is almost twice that in the United States; it rose during the difficult economic times in the 1990s and seems to have declined a bit in recent years.

In America, the most famous suicide attraction is the Golden Gate Bridge.  At least 1,600 desperately unhappy people have climbed over its low pedestrian railings and pitched themselves into the San Francisco Bay since the bridge opened in 1937.  A plan approved recently will set metal mesh under the bridge walkways to catch people on the way down and, it is hoped, to deter their self-desctructive efforts. (I posted about this on March 16 and June 29 of this year.)

Japan has its own suicide attraction, a very different one.  It is the Aokigahara Forest.

The forest is 14 square miles of trees at the base of Mount Fuji.  Fuji eruptions of the past showered the area with fertile soil where trees have sprouted in thick stands.  It is a deeply silent place with few trails.  It is easy to get lost in Aokigahara, inadvertently or on purpose.

Inside Aokigahara

Japanese lore has it that families in times past took very old relatives into the forest and left them there to die, and that angry spirits of the dead haunt Aokigahara.  Now about 100 people each year walk into the forest to die, most often by hanging or overdosing on drugs.

I recently found a video on Youtube that follows a man whose job for many years has been to find or, ideally, prevent suicides in Aokigahara.  The video is posted below, and I hope my readers will not be put off from watching it by the picture on its front, which does not reflect most of its content.

The man is thoughtful and careful and concerned about the people who wander into Aokigahara with self-destruction in mind.  The comment of his that moved me most was this:

"You think you die alone, but that's not true."

Golden Gate Bridge -- Eventual Suicide Relief

Above is one view of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.  What you see are some of the many, many tourists who cross the bridge on a pedestrian walkway each day, looking as they go at the beautiful city and the San Francisco Bay. 

If you take this walk and you are unlucky, you may see more than you want -- someone climbing over the 4-foot-high rail abutting the walkway and pitching himself or herself into the waters below.

This has happened at least 1,600 times since the bridge opened in 1937.

Finally, last Saturday, the board of the bridge authority decided to do something about the suicides.  In a unanimous vote, members approved local spending that, coupled with federal and other funds, will allow the placement of strong metal nets outside and underneath the railings to catch people and stop them from the long drop into the bay, which causes broken bones, massive internal injuries and, almost always, a painful death.  

I discussed the situation at greater length in an earlier post -- "Fixing America's Favorite Suicide Destination?," March 16, 2014 -- and so will not repeat myself here except to say that it amazes me that coming to the decision took so long.  

The design for the nets was approved in 2008 (over other submitted proposals that would have raised the railings, which people feared might block the views.)  

Arranging the funding has taken more than five years, during which period 250 or more people have jumped to their deaths.  Construction of the nets is expected to be finished in 2017 or 2018.

The Golden Gate was built in four years in the 1930s, a period when engineers worked with slide rules and did calculations with pencils and paper.  The construction project required emplacement of huge footings in bedrock under the bay, construction of enormous towers to hold the massive suspension cables, ordering and assembling the steel roadway underlayment and railings, welding all the parts together, stringing the cables a distance of 1.7 miles and paving the bridge, as well as building roads to meet it at both ends. 

Now, in a theoretically more advanced period of design and manufacturing, it is going to take almost as long to get metal nets attached to the side of the bridge as it took to build the entire structure itself.

I am pleased it is happening, finally, but distressed at the seeming lack of urgency.

Fixing America's Favorite Suicide Destination?

Here is what most people think of when they think of the Golden Gate Bridge.  It is a gorgeous structure, perhaps the most iconic in American architecture, easily the most famous symbol of San Francisco.

Below is what comes to my mind.  The picture, shot from a similar vantage point, features a display of many, many, many pairs of shoes.  It was set up as San Francisco celebrated the bridge's 75th anniversary in 2012.

Many people disagree with me, and I can hear it. Desperate people who want to die will find a way. I have known people who killed themselves, and I have talked with a psychology professor who said, essentially, that we just have to let them go.

My point about the Golden Gate Bridge is that it is pernicious for a government to do nothing for 80 years to mitigate an attraction that has made it easy for as many as 2,000 people to commit suicide. (The exact number is unknown, and estimates almost certainly are lower than the real number.)

This doesn't happen in private settings. You cannot climb over a handrail and jump off the Empire State Building; this may be because the building's owner doesn't want lawsuits or because the owner doesn't want to be responsible, even indirectly, for people's deaths. Why shouldn't our government, the people's government, hold itself to a similar standard of caution?

If you were on the Golden Gate Bridge and you saw someone haul himself over that 4-foot handrail, would you stop and try to talk him back onto the sidewalk and, from there, to the parking lot? If not, why not?

Each pair of shoes represents a suicide done by jumping off the Golden Gate

The first desperate person to jump off the bridge did so within weeks of its opening in 1937.  No one knows how many people have died in the same manner, but the number is certainly greater than the official tally of 1,600.  The Golden Gate is by far the most popular suicide destination in the country, possibly the world.

In recent years, suicides have numbered more than 30 annually, with 80 or more attempts frustrated each year by police and pedestrians.

I lived in the Bay Area for a few years and crossed the Golden Gate at least several times a week.  It was understood that many people died jumping off the bridge, but newspapers rarely reported on the phenomenon.  My guess at the time was that editors feared that stories would encourage vulnerable people to try to kill themselves.  This may have had the unintended consequence of dampening public discussion about a lamentable situation.

Now, finally, there is serious talk of doing something.  A coalition of Bay Area transportation authorities has committed most of the estimated $66 million needed to place strong nets under the walkways that edge both sides of the bridge.  People who jumped would be caught in the nets and pulled back up onto the bridge.  The belief is that many fewer people would attempt suicide under the circumstances.

Efforts to prevent Golden Gate suicides have been proposed since at least 1948. Several were shot down by public, and officials' fears that views would be obstructed.  The current proposal seems to answer this concern because the nets would be set below the bridge railings.  The idea received landmark approval in 2010 from the directors of the bridge authority.

In fact, if the bridge had been built according to its original design, the suicides might not have happened. According to the website of the Bridge Rail Foundation, which has lobbied for a suicide barrier, the original engineer, Joseph Strauss, sketched out a 5'6" safety rail with a top cap designed to frustrate attempts to climb over the top of the rail.  Later the bridge architect changed the specifications and redrew the plan for the existing, much lower railing that so many people have straddled on their way into the San Francisco Bay.

This is a gruesome piece of history for  a beautiful city.  People who have opposed barriers -- and there have been many over the years -- insist that mentally disturbed people will continue to find ways to kill themselves.  There is some truth to this, but a number of the very few survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps report they regretted their action before they hit the water.

It strikes me as grotesque that no action has been taken for 77 years while a known attraction has allowed so many people to kill themselves with relative ease.  Preventing suicide in all cases is impossible, of course, but efforts to make suicide more difficult seem to me worthy and humane.

Over the last 20 years, suicide barriers have been placed on bridges in Toronto, Washington, D.C, Auckland, New Zealand, and Augusta, ME.  There have been no suicides off those bridges since the structures were put in place.  In Augusta, authorities report a lower rate of local suicide overall.

I say do it.  Do it now.

Note

A moving documentary about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge was released in 2006.  The filmmakers trained cameras on the bridge for a year, documenting many suicides and preventing a few, and then followed up with friends and family members of those who died.  It argues for no point of view.  The Bridge is available for streaming. 

Update

Funding for construction of a safety net under the Golden Gate was approved in 2014.  Work on the project, whose cost had nearly tripled to $200 million, began in 2017.  It is expected to be completed in 2021.  

Construction of the bridge itself -- setting footings in bedrock under the bay, erecting the iconic metal metal structure, stringing suspension cables and laying roadway to meet the bridge on either end -- took four years in the 1930s.