Off-line exchange

 From all the topics, I chose “suicide in Japan” and to start off this topic I used the suicide rates to tell the concreat facts. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. From the report created by ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2022、suicide is the leading cause of death in man(22 - 24 years old) and woman(15 -34 years old). I think that we have to stop people from killing themself. My question for everyone was What do you think is the cause or an incident leading people to commit suicide? How do you think suicide can be prevented or saved ? 

(Adding some informations)

I found an interesting article from Toyokeizai online, Among developed countries (G7), only in Japan is suicide the leading cause of death in the 15-34 age group. In addition, the suicide death rate (number of suicides per 100,000 population) for this generation is 16.3 in Japan, compared to 7.9 in France (less than half) and 7.5 in Germany. In this article it is saying that the suicide rate is related with self-esteem (confidence). I personally  thought that because the peer pressure is extremely strong, Japanese people are easy to feel and have low evaluation for themself. By leading to a negative solution suicide is sadly common in Japan.

I think my topic was pretty popular because I had all 7 replies to my topic. My discussion questions for everyone was “What do you think is the cause or an incident leading people to commit suicide?” “How do you think suicide can be prevented or saved ?” They said that the cause could be over working among students and adults, loneliness (e.g. they couldn’t blend in ) and depression, financial reasons, low wage and high cost of living, hard to get therapy sessions, bullying, is the way of thinking in Japan(peer pressure). They all had different reasons but the solution for all students was that there is a problem in the Japanese government and organizations so that they can do better than this to prevent suicide. I think my questions weren’t good enough to have a deep discussion. After having this discussion with others I have more questions I want to ask to make it more interesting. For example, Italy has the lowest suicide rate in G7. What kind of difference do you think there is between Japan and Italy? Do you think that self esteem is very much related to the numbers of people committing suicide? Do you think commiting suicide is always bad or making people unfortunate? etc…  Yes they did follow the rule  and it made it easy to understand what they are going to talk about. I think it was a controversial topic. People have different reasons and arguments across suicide rates. I didn’t have any disagreements. 

I think it won’t have that much difference in paper or online. If I am going to give one, I think it will be easier for people to type the answers. I think if we did it anonymously the way that I will receive their answers will be different. I think I will choose this as my topic because I think it will be an interesting topic. I will probably research more about the Japanese suicide rate and the reason why that is happening. Also, I want to look close to the suicide rates in other countries and compare. I want to look for a better solution that can lower the number of people who are committing suicide. I liked exchanging opinions because I could find some messages that I would never have on my own. It was nice to know that everyone had interests and had their own ideas on this topic. I think having it on paper made it easy for me to gather the information. On the other hand, I think I couldn’t create a deeper discussion on paper. It is because I can’t add any followup questions when I have it. I feel like having an oral discussion is better because we can go deep as we want and I can ask follow-up questions when I want to hear more from that person. I personally like to communicate with people so I felt like paper was a little boring and a loss of time. Yet, it was a very enjoyable experience which was fresh for me.