Zoe Inzer L&S Social Sciences
A Genealogy of Suicide in Japan Through Kierkegaard
Youth suicide in Japan has reached record highs (NHK World-Japan), yet traditional Western frameworks struggle to capture the lived reality of this crisis. While materialist approaches reduce self-annihilation to a secular pathology, existentialists, who frame it as an assertion of sovereign autonomy, equally obscure modern suicide’s deeper spiritual dimensions. My research addresses this gap by investigating Japan’s distinct historical continuum. Historically, acts like feudal harakiri and shinjū (double suicide) functioned as culturally sanctioned reclamations of agency. Today, however, digital modernity has fractured traditional sources of meaning and fueled the rise of hikikomori (social withdrawal). Consequently, this once-active agency has mutated into a passive, internet-mediated contagion. To diagnose this cultural evolution, I apply Søren Kierkegaard’s theology of despair, defined in The Sickness Unto Death as a “misrelation of the Self.” Tracing a media genealogy from the romantic pacts in Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) to the fragmented alienation of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001), I ask: How does the shift from ritualized “death before dishonour” to modern contagion map onto Kierkegaard’s stages of despair? Ultimately, I argue that this “sickness unto death” transcends its Christian origins to define the 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.