The Perfect Manual of Suicide

The Japanese believe there’s a right way to live, to love, to induce female orgasm, to chop off your pinkie, to take off your shoes, to swing a bat, to write an article about homicide, to die—even to kill yourself. There’s a right way—a perfect way—to do everything.

The reverence for “the way”—the ideography is the tao of Chinese philosophy—is an integral part of Japanese society, a society that loves manuals, loves doing things by the book, literally. In ancient times, before the advent of mass-market publishing, manuals were written on scrolls. The people believed that kotodama—the soul or spirit of language—resided in every word; that in uttering a thought one gives life to it; that words hold a spiritual power. This belief gave the written and spoken language a near-mystical status and encouraged a reverence for the written word beyond that in the West.

Today the Japanese obsession with manuals is unabated. A few years ago, the term manual ningen (“manual humans”) was in vogue to describe a generation of younger Japanese who seemed incapable of independent thought. The term is now part of the vernacular, used for someone who can only follow instructions and can’t think outside the box. A synonym for manual ningen is shijimachi ningen (“the waiting-for-instructions people”), which, as you can imagine, refers to passive employees with no initiative.

I have never found a really good translation for manual ningen, so I prefer to use “manualoid” when discussing this trend in English. It’s not as great a made-up word as “truthiness,” but I like it.

It’s not uncommon for books labeled as manuals to spend weeks on the best-seller rankings. Amazon Japan (www.amazon.co.jp) listed 9,994 manuals on its Web site at the time I first wrote this chapter, and both the sales rankings and the books themselves are a microcosm of Japanese society.

The number one–selling book was a manual for how to argue with Koreans (whether in Japan or South Korea—I can’t speak for North Korea) who don’t have nice things to say about Japan. Koreans keep moaning about the fact that Japan invaded Korea, enslaved their people, raped their women, forbade their language and culture, performed biological experiments on POWs, and kidnapped thousands of Koreans, shipping them off to Japan to work in sweatshops of industry. The thrust of the book is this: Tell those miserable Koreans to stop exaggerating and shut up.

The book has had one unexpected side effect: by disdaining Koreans’ complaints, it actually touches upon Japan’s less-than-noble history with Korea, which is something the Ministry of Education has worked hard to keep out of the public school system. Apparently, not knowing history means never having to say you’re sorry.

Number two on the best-seller list, Kabu no zeikin, was a manual for preparing your tax returns if you own or sell stocks. The popularity of this title, one assumes, is indicative of the significant flow of cash into and out of the Japanese stock market.

Number three was a manual for aspiring landlords. When land is scarce and housing is expensive, becoming a landlord is the high road to fortune and luxury. Japan, however, has very strong tenant rights embedded in the law that have been known to gum up the works. I assume that’s where the manual comes in, to keep that cash flowing. It was also a sign that the decadelong real estate slump might be coming to an end.

Number four was the perennially listed Perfect Manual of Suicide. The title is self-explanatory, to be taken literally. More on that later.

Number five: The Manual of Superorgasmic Fellatio and Cunnilingus—with over 400 Photos. I’m not making this one up. The Japanese are very sexually driven and they’re perfectionists, so this book fills an important niche, and it’s available almost anywhere in Japan. I’ve even seen it on the shelves of a 7-Eleven and a mom-and-pop bookstore in central Tokyo—not far, as a matter of fact, from the U.S. Embassy in Toranomon. That this book sells so well should tell you a little about the Japanese attitude toward sex and sexuality: enthusiastic, accepting, condoning, clinical, and earnest. And from the targeting of the book, it’s clear that both men and women are interested in improving their technique or, at the very least, using textbooks to supplement the oral tradition. The book itself is very well researched and not without some practical value.

Number six was The Advanced Cardiac Life Support Provider Manual by the American Heart Association, translated into Japanese. My guess is that a lot of people buying number five are also buying number six.

Number seven was Sex: A Foreplay Manual. The fact that this book is number seven instead of number five suggests that most Japanese already have the basics of sexual intercourse down before they go book shopping.

Number eight was a book for engineers wanting to pass a really difficult test. Just the title gives me a headache, so I won’t even mention it here. I’ll be brief and just point out that there are lots of Japanese into learning and making a living doing really technical, brainy kinds of stuff.

Number nine: The Sought-After Guy (How to Get Chicks): A Manual of 40 [Techniques]—What Women, in Their Heart of Hearts, Really Want from Men. Originally published in 2003, with a price tag of 500 yen, this manual is a proven long and big seller, although it is now on sale for half price. You might think it’s odd that books about giving women better orgasms sell more than books about getting women in the first place—a case, perhaps, of putting the cart before the horse. Note, however, that numbers five and seven are aimed at men and women both, which explains the ranking. But maybe it doesn’t.

Number ten: The Indispensable Manual for the National Center Test for University Admissions. In Japan, the college you get into determines the rest of your natural life. Graduating from college isn’t usually so critical, although dropping out will tip the balance. If you can pass the entrance exams for a reputable university, 90 percent of the battle for good employment is won. Therefore, the most important rite of passage most Japanese have in their lives is taking this test; the fact that this manual isn’t higher on the list reflects the gentrification of Japan and the sharp decline in the birthrate. It may also reflect the general stupidification (made-up word) of Japanese youths. If the title were revised to, say, The Indispensable Manga Manual for the National Center Test for University Admissions, sales of this self-improvement tome could go through the roof.

So those were the big ten sellers about three years ago: three involve sex, two involve life and death. Not bad for balance.

My second year on the job, I got a firsthand look at one of these manuals in action. A message came in on my beeper to call Takagi, the medical examiner for the Urawa homicide squad.

“Hey, Jake, you want to see something really weird?”

“Absolutely.”

“No pictures.”

“Okay.”

“No names either.”

“No names?”

“It’s a kid. Juvenile. So no names. You know the drill.”

He gave me the address and told me to get there fast. “The homicide guys aren’t here yet, but if they see your big-nosed gaijin face at the scene, we’re both going to be in deep shit.”

“Gotcha.”

Generally speaking, one rarely gets to visit a crime scene in Japan. The police radio broadcasts went digital early in the nineties, which made it impossible for us to listen to the police scanners. Unless you had someone in the communication department on your side, there was a several-hour delay between the time the police arrived at the scene and the time they informed the press that a crime had taken place. Usually by the time we got to a crime scene, the police had cordoned off a huge area with that familiar yellow tape.

I’m not sure why Takagi called me. It could have been my winning personality, or it could have been the tickets I’d gotten him to a Yomiuri Giants baseball game. It was probably the tickets.

Takagi and I had a good working relationship. He was assigned to the Violent Crime Division of the Urawa Police Department. He’d had a little medical training, which apparently qualified him to do simple, on-the-spot medical examiner work. He also had a voice as raspy as sandpaper from smoking Peace cigarettes at a machine-gun pace from morning until dusk.

I pulled up to the appointed soon-to-be-designated crime scene exactly fifteen minutes later. It was a five-story apartment building: a typical nondescript condominium complex, clothes hanging out to dry on the balconies. Takagi greeted me perfunctorily and took me up to the fourth floor. He led me down the hall and opened the metal door of the apartment at issue.

I was met with a faint salty smell and what I can only describe as the aroma of hot dogs combined with burned chocolate chip cookies. The living room was packed with boxes, as if someone had just moved in or was in the process of moving out.

Takagi led me to the back bedroom, which looked as if it belonged to an adolescent male: posters on the wall of Japanese teen idols with bad teeth, manga stacked up in the corner, instant ramen packs on the floor. The kid was lying on the top of a bunk bed, facing the wall, his naked back toward us.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was about to tap the kid on his shoulder when Takagi stuck out his foot and tripped me.

“What the—?”

“You’re not paying attention, Jake-san. You almost got yourself killed. You can read Japanese. Take a look, you idiot.”

With his arm on my shoulder, he led me closer to the kid, and upon closer inspection I saw, attached to the kid’s back, a piece of paper with small writing that said, “Do not touch me, please. Imminent danger of electrocution.” I leaned over and saw wires taped to his chest and nipples that ran along the wall and down directly to the electrical outlet.

My mouth must have been hanging wide open. Takagi laughed at my shock. “You have to be careful, Jake-san.”

“What happened?”

“This happened,” Takagi said, picking up a book from the desk next the bed. It was The Perfect Manual of Suicide. “He’d studied up on electrocution, followed the instructions perfectly. Here, I’ll hold it, you read it. Just keep your hands off it.”

According to the manual, electrocution was painless, pretty much. Only a prick of pain when the first shock hits, but immediately you stop breathing, your heart short-circuits, and in seconds you’ll be dead. A clean death. There is very little damage to the body, so it’s possible to hold an open-casket funeral. The author pointed out that very few people actually choose to kill themselves this way, but self-electrocution is cheap and painless and fast; if you want to die, it deserves reevaluation.

“You should write about this,” Takagi said to me. “We aren’t going to announce the kid’s suicide, but I think this book should be written up. It is an evil book. Parents should know about it, and if they see this book in their kid’s room, they should be worried. It doesn’t just aid suicide, it encourages it.”

“Why’d he kill himself?”

“His family just moved here from Osaka. Maybe someone made fun of his accent. Maybe he didn’t want to move. Who knows? He didn’t leave a note—just the warning label on his back.”

“That was thoughtful, actually.”

“It’s a damn shame. But that warning was thoughtful—and polite too. He even said ‘please.’ And he did it without making some horrible mess. I’ve seen a lot of teen suicides, and some kids have absolutely no consideration for their family.”

I wrote the article that day. I had some reservations about writing it. In a way, I felt as if I were promoting the book, but making more people aware of its insidious nature was probably a good thing.

Aside from killing oneself, improving one’s sex life, or increasing one’s finances, how else are manuals integral to everyday Japanese life? Well, remember, the first thing I was handed when I started as a police reporter was a manual: A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter.

The police reporter manual is a riveting read, to be sure, but allow me to sketch out the Japanese police system in simple, de facto terms. The way the Japanese police system is supposed to be and the way it really works are two different things.

Police in Japan are organized in pyramidal fashion. At the top is the National Public Security Council, which is under the prime minister’s cabinet. Under the National Public Security Council is the National Police Agency.

The NPA is a political and administrative bureaucracy that does no investigation on its own but may coordinate investigations crossing prefectural lines. It gives general guidance to all police organizations in Japan. Think of the FBI with all of the bureaucracy and none of the investigative powers, and you have a good sense of what the National Police Agency is like. Many who rise to the top of the NPA signed up after passing a national exam and had little or no real police experience before being put on the career fast track.

Below the NPA are the forty-seven prefectural police bureaus that investigate crimes in their region. The most prestigious of these is the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which functions a little like the FBI in that it often takes on cases more national than local in nature.

Each prefectural police department governs local police stations and neighborhood outposts called koban. The NPA appoints its own bureaucrats to high administrative posts in local police headquarters, ensuring the NPA’s grasp on power while also ensuring that no one who knows the turf and is truly competent to run a large police organization is actually ever appointed to the job. The local police do all the nitty-gritty police work, investigations, and traffic control.

Each police station usually consists of the following divisions: violent crime, fraud, white-collar crime, traffic, juvenile crime, crime prevention, and lifestyle crime (including vice), plus an organized crime control division. Drugs, credit card fraud, and the flesh trade fall under organized crime (or anti–organized crime, I should say) in some prefectures, but the turf has not yet been delineated clearly.

In most major cases, the detectives from police headquarters take charge and the detectives at the local police station function as subordinates, doing the footwork, driving the limousine for the chief of homicide, buying bento box lunches for the senior detectives, and generally functioning at the whim and will of the honbu (headquarters). When the TMPD works a joint investigation with other prefectural police, the TMPD functions like the honbu and expects everyone else to function like low-ranking police station minions.

Even within a news organization covering the police beat, there is a hierarchy. In Tokyo, the TMPD press club reporters handle the headquarters detectives and announcements; the district reporters handle assigned areas of Tokyo.

As a cub police reporter, your job is to make friends with low-level detectives and pick up an interesting case before headquarters gets its teeth into it. If you’re really good, you can get a scoop from the bottom of the food chain. This usually means getting knowledge of an arrest before it’s officially announced.

The police make regular announcements of cases, written out in short press releases, which the reporter is expected to augment by asking questions over the telephone or by actually going to the crime scene himself.

Each major case is announced in advance, and a lecture is given in addition to a flimsy press release. This takes place in what is called a press club, which is housed in the actual building of each prefectural police headquarters. Large police stations may also have a pressroom.

But, of course, not any old reporter has entrance to these press clubs.

What you won’t see in a reporter’s manual is how to get along with the cops, which is probably the most important thing on the police beat. I once heard the job of a police reporter characterized as being a “male geisha.” That’s actually a fair approximation of what was necessary to get a story—at least for some of us. “Male prostitute” might also be another way of putting it, but I don’t think it accurately captures the subtleties of the task involved. Some heavy entertaining is involved, but there’s a little more foreplay than a quick getting off “up against the wall.” Personally, I prefer to gather my own data and bargain with the police rather than beg for a tidbit, but that was simply my style. I was just as guilty of being a male geisha as most of my peers, except sometimes I managed to put myself into a better bargaining position: on top.

The following is a memo that a former supervisor once wrote to us reporters on the police beat. It offers great insight into the amount of schmoozing and massaging involved in our job. I will say that the guy who wrote it is an excellent reporter who is willing to do real work to get a story rather than rely on the kindness of cops he’d done favors for. Be that as it may, the man is also a brownnoser without equal.

If you think this system creates a very cop-friendly, biased reporting style, you are absolutely correct. The Japanese police are extremely adept at manipulating the press, and we were extremely willing to submit to this manipulation for the possibility of getting a scoop.