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Japanese Military Suicides During the Asia-Pacific War: Studies of the unauthorized self-killings of soldiers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Given the numerous news reports and articles describing unprecedented rates of self-inflicted deaths among U.S. active-duty personnel, with figures by 2012 exceeding those of soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan, military suicide has become an issue of burning relevance for today's U.S. military Rising rates have also been recorded in other countries, including Japan, where the number of suicides among members of the Self-Defence Forces has remained higher than the national or civilian average since 2003. Moreover, in the case of Japan, it would not be the first time that officials were confronted with data indicating an increase in suicides among military personnel.
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Notes
1 Mitchel L. Zoler, “U.S. Army Soldier Suicide Rate at Unprecedented Level,” Clinical Psychiatry News, Vol. 40, No. 6, June 2012, p. 6.
2 Aiko Hayashi, “Suicides Surge in Japan's Military,” AP Online, August 20, 2004 (accessed August 10, 2013); Deborah Cameron, “Suicide Rate Among Japanese Soldiers Soars,” The Age, February 26, 2005. www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/25/1109180109058.html (accessed August 10, 2013); Takehiko Kambayashi, “Suicide case highlights stresses in Japan's Self-Defense Forces,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 20, 2009 (accessed August 10, 2013); “SDF suicide rate outpaced national average 2003 to 2014,” The Japan Times, June 6, 2015 (accessed June 6, 2015).
3 Edward J. Drea, Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1953-1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), p. 198.
4 Kempei shireibu, “Saikin ni okeru gunjin gunzoku no jisatsu ni tsuite” [Special Report, October 1938], in Shimizu Hiroshi, ed., Shiryōshū Sensō to shōgaisha, Jūgonen sensō gokuhi shiryoshū, Supplement 28, Volume 4 (5 Volumes, Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 2007), p. 44.
5 Lee A. Head Headley, Suicide in Asia and the Near East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 20. Louis Dublin states that for many years prior to the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan, the latter's suicide rate for the general population remained around 20 per 100,000 persons, but that it declined to 13.8 by 1940 and continued to remain comparatively low until 1945. Louis L. Dublin, Suicide: A Sociological and Statistical Study (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1963), p. 70.
6 For example, the rate for American soldiers dropped from 56.5 per 100,000 in 1910-1916 to a 14.9 during World War I. Paul C. Yessler, “Suicide in the Miltary,” in H.L.P. Resnik, ed., Suicidal Behaviors: Diagnosis and Management (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1968), p. 243.
7 Émile Durkheim, Suicide: a study in sociology (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 165-67.
8 Fujii Wataru, “Chōheisei to shōgaisha,” Igaku kenkyū,“ Vol. 92, 2009, p. 605.
9 Even if the soldiers had not left messages that were critical of the army or the war, as was evident in the statements made by the Kempeitai authors, the authorities recognized that self-destruction without authorization was political and subversive. Stuart J. Murray addresses the concept of thanatopolitics (“the politics of death”) and, providing the example of the contemporary suicide bomber, the use of death to resist a state's control of the population and regulation of life. Stuart J. Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life,” Polygraph, Vol. 18 (2006), p. 195, p. 193.
10 Kempei, p. 52.
11 Kempei, p. 44.
12 For historical studies of Japanese psychiatry, see the works of Akihito Suzuki and Christopher Harding: e.g., Suzuki, ‘Global Theory, Local Practice: Psychiatric Therapeutics in Japan in the Twentieth Century,’ Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective c.1800-2000, Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller, eds. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2010), pp. 116-141;Suzuki,’The state, family, and the insane in Japan, 1900-1945,’ Psychiatric Confinement in International Perspective, Roy Porter and David Wright, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 193-225; Harding, ‘The therapeutic method of Kosawa Heisaku: ‘religion’ and ‘the psy disciplines’,’ in Japanese Contributions to Psychoanalysis, Vol. 4, Toyoaki Ogawa, et al., ed. (Tokyo: The Japan Psychoanalytical Society, 2014), pp. 151-68; Harding, ‘Sigmund's Asian Fan-Club? The Freud Franchise and Independence of Mind in India and Japan,’ in Celebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power and Representation in (Post) Colonial Cultures, Robert Clarke, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 1-15. The scholarship on military psychiatry in other countries is far more extensive, as illustrated by the following well-known examples: Jones Edgar and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (London: Psychology Press, 2005); Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000); Hans Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997); Paul Wanke, Russian/Soviet Military Psychiatry, 1904-1945 (New York: Frank Cass, 2005); Hans Pols and Stephane Oak, ‘War & Military Mental Health: The US Psychiatric Response in the 20th Century,’ American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 97, No. 12, 2007: 2132-42.
13 War-induced mental illness has been identified under multiple, changing labels, and psychiatrists did not provide a fixed set of symptoms, but the ones that often turn up in their discussions are deep anxiety, depression, irritability, fatigue, disconnection from one's surroundings, and inability to prioritize.
14 Sakurai Tonao, “Guntai ni okeru jisatsu nami ni jisatsu kito no igakuteki kōsatsu,” Gun'idan zasshi, Vol. 316, 1939, p. 933.
15 Edward Drea discussed how army officials promoted this false image of army life by producing illustrated postcards for recruits to send back home to reassure family and friends that they were well-treated by their officers and comrades. The impression that one could receive from these postcards is that
First-year soldiers – often shown doing favors for their senior (second-year) comrades – benefited from their association with such veterans. Officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) served as surrogate parents, either tucking the recruit into his futon (bedding) or patiently correcting rookie mistakes.
Edward Drea, “In the Army Barracks of Imperial Japan,” Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 1989, p. 331; Sakurai, p. 337.
16 ‘From a Memorandum sent by Tadaichi [sic?] Kawahara, Adjutant in the Ministry of War, “Measures to Enforce Military Discipline from the Experiences in the China Incident,” 19 September 1940, Shiryoshusei, Vol. II, pp. 49, 50.‘ Digital Museum: The Comfort Women Issue and the Asian Women's Fund (accessed August 10, 2013).
17 Koji Taira, “The Battle of Okinawa in Japanese History Books,” JPRI Working Paper No. 48: July 1998 (accessed August 10, 2013).
18 For example, see Kinjo Shigeaki, Michael
Bradley, Naoko Maehara, “‘Banzai!‘ The Compulsory Mass Suicide of Kerama Islanders in the Battle of Okinawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, June 2014; Sarah Bird with Steve Rabson, “Above the East China Sea: Okinawa During the Battle and Today,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2014.
19 Joseph Margolis, Negativities: The Limits of Life (Columbus: Merrill, 1975), pp. 23-36; Tom L. Beauchamp, “Suicide,” in Matters of Life and Death, eds., Tom Regan and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 76.
20 Aniya Masaaki and Kyoko Selden (trans.), “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook Controversy,” Asia-Pacific Journal, January 8, 2008 (accessed July 15, 2014).
21 Steve Rabson, “The Politics of Trauma: Compulsory Suicides During the Battle of Okinawa and Postwar Retrospectives,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Issue 24, June 2010. (accessed March 14, 2014); Koji Taira, “The Battle of Okinawa in Japanese History Books,” JPRI Working Paper, No. 48, July 1998 (accessed March 14, 2014).
22 Naoko Shimazu observes that the suicide rate among soldiers had also increased during the Russo-Japanese War. However, her sources of information appear to be limited to accounts in newspapers, such as the anti-war Heimin Shimbun. Naoko Shimazu, “Patriotic and Despondent: Japanese Society at War, 1904-5,” The Russian Review, Vol. 67, 2008, pp. 42-43.
23 After the war, Sakurai would become head of the Neuropsychiatry Department at Kyūshū University and an authority on neurosis, particularly “war neurosis.” Kyūshū daigaku daigakuin igaku kenkyūin/seishinbyō nōiaku/Kyūshū daigaku byōin/seishinka shinkeika. 2008-03-25 (accessed August 22, 2013).
24 Okada Yasuo, “Gun'i Hayao Torao no senjō hōkoku,” 15 nen sensō to Nihon no igaku iryō kenkyūkai kaishi, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2009: 1-6.
25 Akihito Suzuki, “Psychiatry in the Land of Suicide: Medicalization of Self-killing in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” Nihon ishigaku zasshi, Vol. 59, No. 1, 2013: 3-15; Francesca Di Marco, “Act or Disease? The Making of Modern Suicide in Early Twentieth-century Japan,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2013: 325-58.
26 Suzuki, “Psychiatry in the Land of Suicide,” pp. 4-5.
27 A year after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), D.T. Suzuki declared that “[t]he calmness and even joyfulness of heart at the moment of death which is conspicuously observable in the Japanese, the intrepidity which is generally shown by the Japanese soldiers in the face of an overwhelming enemy…so strongly taught by Bushidō - all of these come from the spirit of the Zen training.” Brian Daizen Victoria, “Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 30, No. 4, August 5, 2013.
28 Inazo Nitobé, Bushido The Soul of Japan, p. 19 The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bushido, the Soul of Japan, April 21, 2004 (accessed August 1, 2013).
29 Similar views were expressed by the Tokugawa period scholar Motoori Norinaga, who condemned suicides for atoning for some trivial offense as a waste of life. Norinaga is cited in an essay on anti-suicide traditions in Japan by the sociologist William Weatherall, who also refers to early modern laws prohibiting junshi and shinjū (lovers' pact suicides). William Weatherall, “Japan's Anti-Suicide Traditions” (accessed August 23, 2013).
30 Nitobé, p. 20.
31 Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 222, endnote 41, p. 373.
32 Doris G. Bargen, Suicidal Honor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), p. 67.
33 Mushakōji Saneatsu, who was just embarking on his literary career at the time, described Nogi's junshi as “an act that could be praised only by the warped intelligence of men who have been nurtured on thought shaped by a warped age…” One of Japan's early socialists, Arahata Kanson also suggested that there was something unhealthy about Nogi and his admirers, calling positive opinions of the General's death “nothing more than sad dreams of inmates of a mental hospital.” Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 714; “Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912): The Emperor's Samurai,” in Robert Jay Lifton, Shūichi Katō and Michael R. Reich, eds., Six Lives Six Deaths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 61.
34 Whereas under Nogi's command at Port Arthur, 15,390 soldiers were killed and 43,914 were wounded, resulting in a total of 59,304 casualties, in the subsequent Battle of Mukden under Ōyama Iwao, 15,683 were killed and 51,247 wounded, resulting in a total of 70,028 casualties. Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, p. 119, pp. 121-22.
35 Suzuki, “Psychiatry in the Land of Suicide,” p. 3, p. 12-13.
36 Suzuki, “Psychiatry in the Land of Suicide,” p. 13.
37 Sakurai, pp. 927-9, pp. 937-8.
38 Hayao Torao, “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” January 1939, in Senjō shinri no kenkyū, Jyū go nen sensō gokuhi shiryōshū, Supplement 32, Volume 4, Okada Yasuo, ed. (4 Volumes, Fuji shuppan, 2009), p. 89.
39 Japan, Rikugunsho, Field Service Code (Senjinkun)/Adopted by the War Dept. on January 8, 1941 and translated into English by the Tokyo Gazette Publishing House (Tokyo: Tokyo Gazette Series; No. 1, 1941), pp. 17-18.
40 According to the report, 581 soldiers committed suicide from around 1933 to 1938; the majority (130) died of strangulation, followed by 117 dying of poison, 106 committing seppuku or being decapitated, and 104 being killed by a vehicle. Kempei, pp. 49-50.
41 Specific terms had developed for remonstrative actions, such as eyagarase jisatsu (suicide as an act of ‘scolding’ or effort to embarrass another). George A. De Vos, ‘Suicide in Cross-Cultural Perspective’, in Suicidal Behaviors: Diagnosis and Management, H.L.P. Resnik, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), p. 126.
42 To quote one retired U.S. Navy commander and Gulf War veteran, “World War II was just as difficult as war today. But think about what the World War II (soldiers) had just come through: The Depression. What creates our coping skills? Trauma, difficulty, adversity…I'm not stereotyping individuals. I'm stereotyping populations…. We typically do not develop the coping skills that some of the older generations did.”Bill Briggs, “Why modern soldiers are more susceptible to suicide,” NBC News, Saturday Mar 2, 2013 (accessed August 10, 2013).
43 The Kempeitai report's authors were referring to the arguments of 19th European psychiatrists that suicides increased during the warmer months of the year because of the effects of hot weather on the nervous system. Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, Christoph Lauber, Roberto Sansossio, Matthias Bopp, Dominique Eich, Michael Gostynski, Felix Gutzwiller, and Wulf Rössler, “Seasonal Associations between Weather Conditions and Suicide—Evidence against a Classic Hypothesis” American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 165, No. 5, 2006, p. 561.
44 Kempei, pp. 45-46.
45 In a 2013 Army-National Institute of Mental Health study, researchers observed that more than half of the suicides that they analyzed in this study had never been deployed to a war zone and half had attempted suicide prior to their enlistment. Rather than deployment-related factors (combat experience, cumulative days deployed, or number of deployments), it was proposed that the strongest suicide risk factors among American military personnel were the same as those in the larger civilian population – mental heath problems (depression/bipolar disorder) and alcohol abuse. “Suicide in the military: Army-NIH funded study points to risk and protective factors,” March 3, 2014. Cynthia A. Leard-Mann, MPH; Teresa M. Powell, MS; Tyler C. Smith, MS, PhD; Michael R. Bell, MD, MPH; Besa Smith, MPH, PhD; Edward J. Boyko, MD, MPH; Tomoko I. Hooper, MD, MPH; Gary D. Gackstetter, DVM, MPH, PhD; Mark Ghamsary, PhD; CharlesW. Hoge, MD, “Risk Factors Associated With Suicide in Current and Former US Military Personnel,” JAMA, Vol. 310, No. 5, 2013:496-506.
46 Coox, p. 506; Edward J. Drea, “Trained in the Hardest School,” In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2003), pp. 83-84.
47 “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” p. 98; Kempei, p. 48, p. 52.
48 Kempei, p. 47.
49 Louise Young notes that although the “Three Human Bullets” became the subjects of songs, plays, and movies, and even had a medal named after them, rumors soon began to spread that the men had not volunteered for a suicide mission and had died as a result of human error. Their commanding officer had cut too short the fuse on the bomb that they were carrying. Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 77.
50 Steve Rabson, “The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 41, No. 1, October 13, 2013, footnote 36.
51 For Hayao's criticism of the army's “recreation” policy, see his other studies in Senjō shinri no kenkyū; Kempei, p. 47.
52 Yasuo Okada, ‘Hayao Torao shōden - kaisetsu o kanete,‘ in Senjō shinri no kenkyū, Volume 1, p. 13.
53 Hayao Torao chūi, “Senjō shinkeishō narabi ni hanzai nit suite,” April 1938, in Takasaki Ryūji, ed., Gunikan no senjō hōkoku ikenshū (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1990), Pp. 35-36; Haruko Taya Cook, “The ‘Fall of Nankin’ and the Suppression of a Japanese Literary ‘Memory’ of the Nature of a War,” in Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabela, and
David Lu, eds., Nanking, 1937: Memory and Healing (Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 131-2.
54 “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” pp. 19-20, p. 5, pp. 22-23.
55 “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” pp. 50-54.
56 Hans Pol and Stephanie Oak provide the example of U.S military officials being especially intent on detecting and excluding homosexuals as a danger to morale. Pols and Oak, pp. 2133-34.
57 Sakurai, pp. 939-42; “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” p. 97.
58 “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” pp. 97-98.
59 Junko Kitanaka, “Society in Distress: The Psychiatric Construction of Depression in Contemporary Japan.” Ph.D thesis, McGill University. May 2006, Footnote, p. 94, p. 98.
60 “Senjō ni okeru jisatsu kito ni tsuite,” pp. 5-10.
61 Fujii, p. 605, p. 608.
62 Shimizu Hiroshi, “Tennō no guntai to shōgaisha—kokka sōryoku sentaiseika no chōhei kensa to rikugun kyōkatai,” Shōgaisha mondai kenkyū, Vol. 63, 1990, p. 27, p. 29; Debun Shigenobu, “Maker of Soldiers,” in Japan at War: An Oral History, ed. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 126-27; Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japan and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
63 Pols and Oak, pp. 2133-34; Simon Wessely, “Risk, psychiatry and the military,” British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 186, 2005, pp. 461-62.
64 Peter T. Suzuki, “Suicide Prevention in the Pacific War (WWII),” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1991, pp. 291-92, p. 296, p. 294, p. 293.
65 There are different estimates of Japanese military personnel taken prisoner. Niall Ferguson provides the figure of 42,543 prisoners of war held by American and Australian forces between 1942 and 1945, which amounts to 0.5% of a total of 8,100,000 troops mobilized. He also notes a drop in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 in July 1945. Niall Ferguson, “Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War,” War in History, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2004, pp. 190-92, p. 164.
66 James Dao and Andrew W. Lehren, “Baffling Rise in Suicides Plagues the U.S. Military,” New York Times, May 15, 2013. (accessed August 12, 2013).
67 Alan Fontana and Robert Rosenheck, “Traumatic war stressors and psychiatric symptoms among World War II, Korean, and Vietnam War veterans,” Psychology and Aging, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1994, pp. 30-31; p. 27.
68 James R. Marshall, “Political Integration and the Effect of War on Suicide: United States, 1933-76,” Social Forces, Vol. 59, No. 3, 1981, p. 776.
69 Marshall, p. 775, p. 782.
70 Yessler, pp. 243-44.
71 “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics.” The Navy Department Library. (accessed August 12, 2013).
72 Yessler, p. 244.
73 Thomas Childers, Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
74 For example, Lizette Alvarez, “Home from the war, many veterans battle substance abuse,” New York Times, July 8, 2008; Lizette Alvarez and Deborah Sontag, “When Strains on Military Families turn Deadly,” New York Times, February 15, 2008.;Erik Eckholm, “Surge in Number of Homeless Veterans,” New York Times, November 8, 2007. (accessed August 12, 2013).
75 Aaron Glantz, “Suicide Rates Soar among WWII Vets, Records Show,” The Bay Citizen, November 11, 2010. (accessed August 12, 2013).
76 Briggs.
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