Japanese Put Ads Up at High Suicide Spots
A community-based organization to help people free themselves from excessive debt is planning to erect signs in a forest at the foot of Mount Fuji where people often commit suicide, in a bid to stop people overwhelmed by debt from taking their own lives.
The organization, Cre-Sara Hirenkyo (credit and consumer financing victims liaison committee), plans to erect the signs in the Aokigahara “Sea of Trees” forest in Yamanashi Prefecture. It is the first nongovernmental group to erect official suicide prevention signs in the forest.
The group erected signs two times in the past, but it was forced to remove them because the group didn’t get formal approval from the prefectural government. However, during the short time that these signs were up, about 10 people who saw them phoned the helpline. The group plans to formally apply to erect the signs in the near future.
Cre-Sara Hirenkyo has been operating since 1982, with lawyers serving as advisors. In a bid to prevent suicides of people in debt, the group came up with the idea of signs bearing the message, “There is always a solution to debt. I was helped out too. First talk things over.” The signs carry a Cre-Sara Hirenkyo contact phone number.
Organization officials said that they phoned a prefectural forestry division to ask if it was all right to erect the signs, since the land belongs to the prefectural government, and were told there was no problem. Accordingly, they set up seven signs on Jan. 20.
However, the division later contacted the group, saying official permission had not been received, and the signs were removed on March 9. Officials told the group that they should cooperate with a public body, so they discussed the matter with police. On March 30, they erected signs carrying the names of Cre-Sara Hirenkyo and local police, but it removed them the following day following complaints that the police had not given their consent and there had been no formal approval from the prefecture.
The signs erected without permission were up for 51 days in total. Officials said that during that time about 10 people who saw the signs phoned the group. One caller was a woman in her 40s who had racked up loans of about 3 million yen from five consumer moneylenders, spending 10 years making repayments. She reportedly abandoned the idea of committing suicide after realizing that she had paid back several million yen too much.
Cre-Sara Hirenkyo officials want to erect the signs as soon as possible.
“The previous two times we erected signs, we admit it was done prematurely. But even as we speak, the number of suicides is increasing,” a group official said.
National Police Agency statistics show that Yamanashi Prefecture has the highest rate of discovered suicide victims per head of population among Japan’s 47 prefectures. Between about 50 and 100 bodies are found in the Sea of Trees area every year.
(每日新闻)
This is a good thing.