Interpretations of elder suicide, stress, and dependency among rural Japanese

This article explores ideas expressed by older, rural Japanese to explain suicide among their age peers. It also looks at how older Japanese conceptualize residing with children and grandchildren in terms of dependency and stress. While the multigeneration household often is represented by both young and old in Japan as an ideal living situation for the elderly, many elders also see coresidence as a significant source of stress due to conflicting values held between generations. For many rural elderly, the stress associated with coresidence is viewed as being sufficiently severe to lead some of them to end their lives. Based on conversations held with elders in rural Japan, these themes are contextualized in terms of Japanese concepts of suicide. (Japan, suicide, aging, dependency, stress) ********** In the summer of 1998, Satoh Keiko, a woman in her mid-thirties, succinctly expressed a common theme used by people in rural northern Japan to interpret the motivations of elders who kill themselves: "Elderly who are living alone do not commit suicide all that often, but those who are living with children and grandchildren often commit suicide." The idea that living with one's children and grandchildren is likely to influence an elder to commit suicide seems at odds with widely held assumptions about the centrality of filial piety in shaping intergenerational relationships in Japan, as well as stereotyped images of later life in Japan in which older people are represented as being happiest living in multigenerational households (e.g., Palmore and Maeda 1985). Using data from Taiwan, Wolf (1972, 1975) argues that suicide can be a form of sanction against young family members, as people, particularly natal kin, raise questions about what drove the deceased to end his or her life. The actual or assumed threat of suicide can be a strategy elders use to manipulate their children (Ikels 2004b:7; Wolf 1972:159-60). This insight may apply to the high rate of elder suicide in rural Japan, for self-aggression in Japan can be interpreted as a "sign of resentment against a source of frustration" in interpersonal conflicts (Lebra 1984:48). Self-destruction, then, is one possible way for someone in Japan to cope with conflict, particularly where direct confrontation is not valued in interpersonal relationships. For Satoh-san, the multigeneration household does not necessarily insulate an elder from loneliness and isolation. In fact, as will become evident from the data presented here, the multigeneration household in Japan may well represent a context in which suicidal feelings are intensified as a result of stressful relationships with kin. Elder suicide in Japan is interpreted in part in terms of perceptions about multiple and conflicting cultural frames existing within a confined social space. For many Japanese, younger and older generations are perceived as having completely different core values, which leads to considerable stress between those generations (Traphagan 2003). My informants indicated repeatedly that the presence of these conflicting value systems--which can be understood in terms of Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus, the cognitive and motivating structures that motivate and limit behavior--contribute to the generation of stress and alienation that may lead an elder to end his or her life, even if it does not specifically represent a form of sanction against younger generations, as Wolf (1972) found for Taiwan. This article explores narratives that elders living in a Japanese city known as Mizusawa express about motivations behind suicide among their age peers. Given the limited ethnographic work related to elder suicide, the data presented here are important for their ethnographic value. However, an examination of elder suicide in Japan also has theoretical implications because the practice can be understood in relation to rapid social change and perceptions of stress associated with competing values held by different generations. …