You may have to dial that number 30 or 40 times

Because the lines are so busy.

A lot of people; have a lot of problems

But nobody to talk to

Nobody to listen

And they say please God,

Somebody answer the phone

I dream of a war.

A war on suicide,

But I don't even know;

Who is the enemy?

Who is it? What is it?

That's killing so many of us?

1 million people in the world every year.

30,000 lives lost in Japan alone.

I don't know, what I'm doing,

I just know, I have to do something.

In Japan, nobody dares to talk about the causes of suicide

or how to fight them.

But books teaching you how to kill yourself,

Sell over a million copies.

What if 10,000 lives could be saved in Japan?

Not by miracles but by ideas, by honesty?

Would anybody dare to listen?

If death, is darkness,

This is about life:

This is about trying to take back life;

From the jaws of death.

This is about choosing hope over despair,

Even when you are desperately hanging on by your fingernails

300,000 Japanese people have killed themselves in the last 10 years

That's around the population of Iceland.

The suicide rate in Japan is twice that of America.

3 times that of Thailand.

9 times higher than Greece.

12 times higher the Philippines.

Is that something acceptable?

Or is it time we start to fight back?

Suicide virus

One year driving around Tokyo

Asking so many people,

The same question, again and again.

The suicide rate is high in Japan still 　

To be honest I don't know the real reason

But the fact is that killing ourselves is always in the back of minds

We see everyday in the newspaper in the media

Some people killing themselves

Including famous and successful people

Like politicians and business people

When we face a serious problem

We have to make some certain choices

One the ultimate choices that we may make

Is killing ourselves

One of the features of suicide in Japan

is the weakness of people to suggestion.

Look at how often Japanese people try to find others to die with.

Others who share the same despair.

So they will search online to find each other,

and they make plans to die together.

There are a lot of Japanese who do this.

The feeling behind this behavior is that

it seems more reassuring and safe to be with others.

Even though everybody is going to die.

Why are we Japanese so vulnerable to the power of suggestion?

There are no Samurai left in Japan

There are no Kamikaze pilots either

All that remains is a feeling

That suicide can be beautiful

The suicidal tendency amongst Japanese authors has been extremely high

If you just list them

Going through the decades

There are many who took their lives

And the pattern is totally out of shape with the rest of the world

There is nowhere else where the suicide of novelists is so prevalent

What makes a suicide hotspot become a famous location for suicide?

In the case of the Tojimbo cliffs, there was the local author Jun Takami.

He wrote a book "From the edge of death".

Death is always a best seller and it made here a tourist attraction.

For Cape Ashizuri, there's the author Torahiko Tamiya.

His novel was also made into a movie.

It made the Cape a popular spot for suicide.

Yes I was the person that think suicide is a kind of beautiful thing

Before having the experience that my friend has committed suicide

Suicide was something unrealistic

That's why I could easily believe that suicide is something that is beautiful

What Mishima did in real life

Was not so beautiful

How he killed himself in real life

Is so different from how he

Wrote in his novels right

In his novels, killing himself is so beautiful

It's such a gorgeous moment that what he described in his novels

His suicide should not have happened

I was broken by it

I was really really unhappy with this suicide

And its still with me today

It is an unbearable event

And when I say that it should not have happened

I mean that those of us who knew

He had suicidal tendencies

And should have found a way to enable him to continue to live

Talking about the book publication

I was stunned to find

How to kill yourself

In which how to tie your hanging ropes,

how to make it, all the details

I think its quite natural to have such a manual of how to kill yourself

Because, if I decide to kill myself

I don't want it to take so much time until I totally die

Because I don't want to be suffering from pain

It was a like a teenager's room

And, unusually for Japan he had a bunk bed

He was half naked, wearing pyjama bottoms

On the bed with his back facing me

His back looked kind of pink

But he looked like he was asleep

And, there was a piece of paper on his back

And I didn't really pay attention to it

You know, for some reason I felt like

I should wake him up and see what's going on

And just as I was about to do that, the detective said

"Hey, STOP, Move back. Do not touch that kid"

And when I looked at his back written on the paper was

"Do not touch, fear of electrocution"

And, looking from the side, you could see that

He had taken wires and plugged into the sockets

And taped them to his chest

And had electrocuted himself

There was a kind of slightly unpleasant acrid smell

I guess it smelled a little like burnt bacon,

I don't know how to describe it.

The detective showed me a copy of the book

That had been marked with a fusen which is like a post-it in English

At the section for electrocuting yourself

The detective said, you know

I'd like you to write about this,

Because this book is really a horrid thing

Parents should know,

if they see their kids with this book

That they may seriously be considering suicide

And that they should talk to their children

And explain to them that suicide is never a very good answer

And I agreed with him

Last year I performed funeral ceremonies for about 80 suicide victims.

I talked with each family one by one.

Almost all of them knew about this book.

Whether they had read it or not, they knew about it.

I've talked with several hundred people who've told me that they want to die.

They say that life is so hard that they cannot bear to keep living.

Almost every one of them knew of that book.

I'm sure there must be some kind of influence coming from it.

It whispers in your ear: kill yourself

Are you tired, are you overworked?

Are you burdened with problems?

Wouldn't it be nice to go to sleep

And never wake up again?

That's kind of how one of the chapters runs

It makes suicide seem like an appealing solution

And by rating the levels of impact

And the lethality, the amount of pain involved

It appeals to different kinds of various people

How do you want to kill yourself?

Why do you want to kill yourself?

Do you want to kill yourself and cause your family great distress?

Well then jump in front of a train because

The train companies are then going to make your family pay huge damages

The problems with most people that kill themselves

Is very short sighted

Or there is some part of their brain that thinks

That they are going to be around to enjoy the funeral

Or the whole commotion that is created by their own death

Or that they will know how much they were loved

Or that their girlfriend will realize that they loved them

But when you're dead

You are not around to do that

Unless you believe in ghosts

Even then, what do you do after that

It's not like you can come back and reclaim your body

I think media, particularly TV stations

Why they are reporting the specific names of the victim

And the way how they killed themselves

These things are just intriguing somebody who wanted to kill themselves

who wanted to kill themselves

They love news stories like this

Somebody goes in front of the train

They are hit by the train

Their body flies in the air off the track

Into the convenience store window

Injuring three people reading magazines inside

That is sensational, people enjoy that

But if you want to do something to stop train suicide

That is not interesting

We are not interested in that at all

When a suicide story is reported by the mass media,

there are copy-cat suicides in the following days. This happens in every country.

But in Japan, the scale is different.

Its 100 or 1,000 people who die.

This is due to the Japanese mentality.

Whether you think it's good or bad,

we Japanese often imitate the person next to us.

They regard suicide as the way

To entertain audiences

Dramatized scenes of people hanging themselves

or jumping off buildings are very common on Japanese TV.

This makes suicide look so easy when people visualize hanging or jumping.

But in reality, people wet themselves, foam at the mouth and tears flow uncontrollably.

The media never bothers to show this very ugly side of hanging.

They never show the horrific physical damage.

Suicide manuals

And all the countless suicide websites

Will all tell you that Aokigahara Forest

Is the most beautiful place on earth in which to die

Now I must admit it is a truly beautiful place

But not to die in

Because your body will be left undiscovered for several months

Be eaten by all the little forest animals

And become the happy home for a wide variety of insect life

Until eventually you will be carried out in a black plastic bag

By tired municipal workers earning 10 dollars an hour

But there is something even worse

The human scavengers who'll come to look for you

Treasure hunting,

They are not looking for gold, or silver

They are looking for a rope, razor blades, shoes, wallets

Or they are looking for the Jackpot

They are looking for a hanging body

You put that hanging body on Youtube

You'll get a million people viewing it,

Downloading it

You get TV shows, serious news shows

Coming here, looking for bodies

Viewing corpses, skeletons from every angle

You've got movies coming here

Talking about ghosts, spirits, it's haunted

All trying to make money

All trying to use here as entertainment, a place of tragedy

And what happens is that

More and more people will come here

More and more people will kill themselves

It's already the number one suicide spot in the world

Stop advertising it, mass-marketing it to make money

Why not try and do something about suicide

Rather than promoting it

The Economy

You've lost your job

You've been cut in all of the employment cutting that is going on