Zoe Inzer L&S Social Sciences
A Genealogy of Suicide in Japan Through Kierkegaard
While youth suicide in Japan reaches record highs (NHK World-Japan), Western materialist theories (Durkheim, Améry) fail to capture the lived reality of this crisis, reducing self-annihilation to secular pathology and obscuring its spiritual affliction. My research addresses this by investigating Japan’s distinct continuum of suicide. Historically, acts like feudal harakiri and shinju (double suicide) functioned as culturally sanctioned reclamations of agency. Today, in a digital modernity engendering hikikomori (withdrawal) and fracturing ikigai (meaning), this active agency mutates into a passive, dissociative contagion. To diagnose this evolution, I apply Søren Kierkegaard’s theology of despair—defined in The Sickness Unto Death as a “misrelation of the Self.” I trace a media genealogy from the romantic pacts of Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) to the fragmented dissolution of self in Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001). I ask: How does the shift from ritual “death without dishonour” to internet-mediated suicide map onto Kierkegaard’s stages of despair? Ultimately, I argue the “sickness unto death” transcends Christendom to define the alienated modern subject.
Message To Sponsor
I am profoundly grateful for your support, which allows me to bridge my Japanese heritage with my advanced Danish studies to address an urgent global crisis. This research seeks to illuminate the profound spiritual severance at the core of our worldwide epidemic of isolation and loneliness. As Scandinavian programs face closures nationwide, your funding empowers me to defend the theoretical weight of a fading academic tradition, proving its vital capacity to decode the modern world.