‘Shinu Shika Nai’ – ‘There is Nothing to Do but to Die’: Contextualising the Rising Young Female Suicide Rate in Japan

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the suicide rate for the 18-39 age cohort of Japanese women has been drastically subverting a long period of prior sustained decline. This work is an anthropological study of social conditions contributing to a social zeitgeist in which these young women are taking their own lives, as told in survivor and advocate testimonies. It seeks to question the ways ideas around what suicide means in the Japanese cultural context to stakeholders in the suicide process. It further elucidates how these ideas exist, and how they have evolved to be meaningful to young women in contemporary Japan.