The ”Vocabulary of Motives” of Worker's Suicide in Japan

Recently, Worker’s Suicide has emerged as a serious social problem in Japan. According to the governmental statistics, the number of application for insurance and the total amount of payout about “karo-jisatsu” in the worker’s compensation insurance system in Japan have gone up significantly last ten years. The purpose of this presentation is to examine how worker’s suicide is understood among Japanese people now through the interview researches with bereaved families.     

Japanese government reported the number of the people who committed suicide per year in Japan has been more than 30,000 from 1998 to 2011. This presentation especially focuses on worker’ suicide, what is called “karo-jisatsu” in Japan. Karo-jisatsu is a Japanese word that means working person kills him/herself after too much working or moral harassment in workplace. This word has been popular in our country since 1990’s, while “karo-shi” which means death from overwork has been known since 1970’s. Some lawyers and doctors who are engaged in labor problem or industrial hygiene have claimed that too much working and stress make worker exhausted, so he/she injures his/her mental health, in the worst case he/she kills him/herself. That is called  ”karo-jisatsu”.

  But I point out there is a logical leap between overworking and committing suicide. I clarify how they have been connected in the discourse of “karo-jisatsu” by reconsidering of “medicalization” (Conrad & Schnider,1981) of suicide. My empirical analysis shows that suicide is regarded as one of the symptom of depression today, while“harakiri”, ”seppuku” and “kamikaze” have been traditionally regarded as heroic suicide in Japan. Medical terms constitute a major “vocabulary of motives”(Gerth&Mills,1953) of worker’s suicide. So when bereaved families decide on the significance of their member’s suicide, they tend to use these types of vocabularies.