Japan is known for it’s high suicide rates. For people jumping from buildings to the point that suicide nets are installed, to shoulder-high railings being installed at stations to prevent jumpers. To the point that they have a word for “death by overwork” called Karoshi, or 過労死.

While many of my courses have touched on this, including my politics and culture class, I’ve never really heard about anything of the sort in recent news or from actual Japanese people.

Cue me attempting to go home one night around 11:30 PM. The usual ticker for train times was empty. All we had instead was a brief message reporting a delay, showing a map of where the delay was, and that a single person had had a “train accident.” The accident had occurred at 3:40 PM. No trains had been running to Nagoya from that station all day, and the trains taking people the other way (the way I was going) came perhaps once an hour, if not less. 

I was lucky and managed to catch the very last train of the night, having only waited 15 minutes or so. My friend, going home around 5:00 the same day, was not so lucky, and ended up waiting an hour for a single, extremely packed train to take her home.

As I waited, people paid the information ticker little mind. They didn’t even seem affected by it. They called friends, they perhaps left to arrange another means of returning home, but all in all, it was a fairly relaxed atmosphere. It wasn’t until I finally got home that my host mother confirmed what I had been thinking all the while. Or rather, what she didn’t say and didn’t feel comfortable discussing.

While the death may have been put under “accident,” the likelihood that it was someone jumping in front of a train were extremely likely. Earlier that day, a single nameless person most likely committed suicide on the tracks. And the result was delays for hours and a tiny blip on an information ticker.

It’s been a while since I had such a sobering moment. This sort of thing would have made headlines at home; here, it’s just a snag in the daily routine. Just as it’s been a while since I had that even subtle reminder that Japan, beneath its salary-men and heavily organized way of life, can be just as flawed as any other country.

Location: Ozone Station, Nagoya, Japan