It’s not that he wanted to die. Rather, Kazuo Sawato says, he couldn’t bear his life anymore. The 31-year-old Japanese…
TOKYO —
It’s not that he wanted to die. Rather, Kazuo Sawato says, he couldn’t bear his life anymore. The 31-year-old Japanese office worker ran to the roof’s edge and jumped.
“I just wanted to free myself from all the suffering,” he said in an interview, 12 years after that August afternoon in 2005. “I felt as if I was getting endless barrages of punches, or gasping for air every second with my face being pushed into the water. I thought I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
He landed on his legs, and initially regretted surviving. Now 42, Sawato says he is glad to be alive and wants to share his journey back to the world of the living with others who struggle under the societal pressure that make Japan one of the world’s most suicide-prone societies.
Suicide in Japan surged in 1998, a year after a major brokerage went bankrupt, triggering an economic crisis. Only in 2010 did the number of suicides start coming down, following a series of preventive measures started by the government in 2006 – one year after Sawato’s attempt.
Still, the suicide rate of 17.3 per 100,000 people remains high. Recent surveys estimate that more than half a million people tried to kill themselves over the past year, while one in four people considered it.
Sawato said he felt pressured to enter a top university and join the office-working elite.
