Jinshinjiko

I woke up late today, and started on my way to the university. I got to Shibuya station about 8:30, and took my usual train to the university. I waited, and thought about some things that was on my mind, and I waited. Before I knew it, half an hour has passed. It's particularly strange for the Japanese train to be this late, as they are known to always be on time, and usually I have to wait no more than 3-5 minutes for the train to part. I noticed that some people started to leave the train after some announcement. I couldn't hear the announcement well, so I didn't know what was happening, but I knew something was up. After waiting another 10 minutes or so, I decide to leave the train.

There is a giant board displaying the time table at the station. I couldn't catch what it said really, but I knew that many trains have been canceled. Then I saw a familar kanji on the board. I looked it up on my electronic dictionary, and found the word to be "jinshinjiko". It is a word that I have learnt before in my Japanese class. It literally means a traffic accident resulting in personal injury or death. Then it was all clear to me. Althought "jinshinjiko" has the dictionary definition of a traffic accident, when you see this word at the train station, it usually means that someone has commited suicide. I was a little shocked, and sort of felt sad for that person.

As I would be late for my usual morning Japanese class, I decided to cmail "equivalent to sms" a friend, to tell him that I would be late. My mobile has word recognition, so after only pushing in "jin" the option that came up was "jinshin", followed by "jiko". It then occured to me that this sort of suicide must not be so rare, seeing as it is on my phone word recognition as some commonly used words. I recalled from my Japanese teacher that she had once been delayed twice on the same day because of "jinshinjiko". Yes, it seems to be not such are rare event at all. Later I asked my friend, and he said that this kind of suicide is not rear in Japan. This year alone he had been delayed by "jinshinjiko" twice.

I felt a little sorry for the person who commited suicide. I thought about why someone would want to commit suicide this way. Japanese people are known to be very "socially strict" people, and would normally not do anything in public to cause another person to be toubled by his/her action. Japanese people can be said to be socially conforming to social "rules", but why would someone want to commit suicide this way, when it would cause other peole so much trouble? It seems to be the opposite to the Japanese people's character. I thought about it for a while, and came up with this explination.

Eventhough Tokyo is a very big city, with a large population, it's not strange for Japanese people to feel lonely. I think this is because many people spend so much time at work or school that for some people they probably don't have many friends to consult when they are in trouble. For these people, if for some reason they want to commit suicide, they might want to commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. My conclusion came from the reasoning that since these people are probably "loners", by commiting suicide this way what ever the reason (be it disappointment from school, or work, or love, stress), they want to tell the people in Tokyo, "Hey, I exist! Eventhough not many people know me when I'm alive, many people will be stopped by my death, and maybe someone will wonder, who was that guy/girl that comitted suicide?" So in some way they will be remembered as existing. Well, that's just one possibility that I have thought of. It's a pretty sad thing actually, at least for me. But people here seems to have gotten used to it. It probably doesn't happen that often, but it's obviouly not a rare event. I wonder how many people commit suicide this way?