Japan suicides top 30,000 for ninth straight year

TOKYO, June 7 (Reuters) The number of Japanese who killed themselves edged down last year but stayed above 30,000 as it has for nearly a decade, with suicides among the elderly rising to account for more than a third of the total, police said today.

The issue was grimly highlighted last Monday when scandal-tainted Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka hanged himself.

According to statistics compiled by the National Police Agency, 32,155 people took their own lives in 2006, down from 32,552 the previous year but still the ninth straight year above 30,000. The record high was 34,427 in 2003.

Police attributed the lower number to an improved economy, noting that the number of those who killed themselves due to financial problems fell by 10.1 per cent to 6,969.

''The change is probably due to the economic upturn, signalling a return to more typical patterns,'' said Yukio Saito, who heads Japan's Inochi no Denwa - Phones of Life - suicide telephone hotline.

''But the government still has to do a lot more work to prevent suicides. They still don't really have many programmes in place to deal with this problem,'' he added.

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among industrialised nations, which experts attribute partly to an absence of religious prohibition against committing suicide as well as a custom of committing suicide to save loved ones from embarrassment or take responsibility to failure.

According to the World Health Organization, the suicide rate in Japan came to 24.1 per 100,000 people in 2000, the second-highest in the Group of Eight industrialised nations after Russia's 39.4. Rates for other G8 nations included 18.4 in France and 10.4 in the United States.

Japan's suicides fell in all age groups last year except for those aged 60 and up, which rose by 226 to 11,120, and those aged 19 and under, which edged up to 623 from 608 a year earlier.

One alarming change was a sharp rise in suicides among junior high school students, which jumped by 22.7 per cent, though the total figure remained small at 81. Police said the rise was due to a spate of suicides triggered by school bullying.

Experts noted that suicides among the elderly have always made up a high proportion of the total and that the drop in most other age groups was a good sign.

Referring to Matsuoka's suicide, Inochi no Denwa's Saito said that while it was simplistic to attribute such an act to a single cause, the minister's death most likely fell into the category of taking responsibility for failure, which he said was common among middle-aged men.

Matsuoka, 62, had been under fire for a series of political funding scandals but had repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

He died in hospital after he was found unconscious in his room at a Tokyo residential complex for lawmakers just hours before he was scheduled to be grilled again by parliament.

Other reasons behind Japan's high suicide rate are the fact that the national system of mental health care remains limited and cultural mores make it hard for people, especially men, to bare their deepest feelings.

''In addition, there's still a bit of a stigma attached to mental health problems, and this has made it hard for people to get the care they need,'' Saito said.

''If more people could get treatment, the number of suicides would fall.'' REUTERS GL ND1522