apparently there was a knife attack in tokyo where a man ran down a busy street and , for 3 minutes , stabbed 17 people , killing 7.
full story - Seven die in Tokyo knife attack rampage - Scotsman.com News
doesnt japan also have an unusually high suicide rate?
Yes I saw that on the news a few days ago. Japan is one of many Asian countries where death by suicide is considered honorable and is covered by insurance companys.
Suicide in Japan
Death be not proud
May 1st 2008 | TOKYO - From The Economist print edition
A rash of suicides horrifies Japan
DO NOT open! Gas being created! Written in red felt-tip pen and affixed to a door, they are among the last words of a 14-year-old Japanese schoolgirl, who took her life on April 23rd. The warning followed the advice of a website that also provided instructions for creating hydrogen-sulphide gas by mixing toilet-bowl cleaner with bath salts.
This simple method of suicide claimed some 60 lives in Aprilmainly of people in their teens or 20sand around another 20 earlier this year. The colourless, pungent gas does not dissipate easily. So bystanders and would-be rescuers are put at risk. The girl's mother was hospitalised and around 100 neighbours had to evacuate their homes.
Yet this is only the latest, macabre, technique in a country that suffers an epidemic of suicides. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries. Cultural factors are partly at play. Japanese society rarely lets people bounce back from the perceived shame of failure or bankruptcy. Suicide is sometimes even met with approvalas facing one's fate, not shirking it. The samurai tradition views suicide as noble (though perhaps out of self-interest, since captured warriors were treated gruesomely). Japan's main religions, Buddhism and Shintoism, are neutral on suicide, unlike Abrahamic faiths that explicitly prohibit it.
Yet economic woes play an even bigger role. Suicide rates increased sharply in the mid-1990s as the economy soured, and have remained high since (even as the economy has improved slightly). Financial concerns are cited in one-fifth of suicide notes; almost half of all suicides are unemployed. Some take their lives so that surviving family members can collect insurance, which has led insurance firms to defer payments for two or three years as a deterrent. For the same reason, Japan Railway charges suicide victims' families for the cost of the inconvenience and clean-up.
Last year the government instituted measures such as a counselling service and hotlines, with the aim of cutting the suicide rate by 20% in nine years. But these are palliatives. More important would be a change in social attitudes. Suicide might be less common if, rather than force people to endure lifelong shame, Japanese society began to allow its people second chances.
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Why are there so many suicides in Japan?