From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Doughty travels with her interpreter, Emily (Ayato) Sato, or Sato-san, through Shibuya station. They see glass barriers keeping people from the train tracks. Sato-san says that this is to keep people from dying by suicide. Doughty explains that the Judeo-Christian view of dying by suicide, which has influenced the entire West, is that it “is a sinful, selfish act,” despite increasing research establishing its “root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse” (155). In Japan, dying by suicide can be honorable. Doughty discusses the samurai’s cultural “self-disembowelment by sword to prevent capture by the enemy,” called seppuku (155), and World War II-era kamikaze pilots.

Doughty pre-empts any misconception that the Japanese “romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a ‘suicide culture,’” stating that it is more related to a cultural desire “not to be a burden” (156). She cites Japanese writers who say that foreigners can look at statistics but will never truly understand this from the outside.

While most of Japan’s death culture is as modernized and corporatized as that of the United States, Doughty is visiting Koukokuji Buddhist Temple, where a priest, Yajima, is rethinking cremation practices. In Japan, 99% of people are cremated, more than any other country.