There is in suicide, it is true, an element of outright rebellion against the society that has caused the individual’s failure. Lovers’ suicide protests class inequality or the conservatism of the marriage institution which prevents the consummation of the couple’s love. A student who fails protests, with suicide, against teachers, family, or friends; a corrupt employee, against employers; and parents who kill themselves along with their children, against the society that has not enabled them to live honorably. But though the act of suicide is by nature a protest, the Japanese tend to look upon it with a forgiving eye. Perhaps because suicide victims turn their anger not upon society, but upon themselves, they end up sanctioning, when all is said and done, the status quo.

>KYUTARO
>久太郎
>Died on the twentieth day of February, 1928
>at the age of thirty-six

>Tender winds above the snow
>melt many kinds
>of suffering.

Kyutaro started working as a messenger boy for a commercial firm at the age of twelve. A year later, on Emperor’s Day (February 11) he went out to play in the snow. The head clerk considered such behavior an affront to the nation and scolded him. The thirteen-year-old Kyutaro wrote this poem:

>In heavy snow
>I clean forgot
>to raise the nation’s flag.

In later years Kyutaro lived among workers and day laborers in Tokyo and became a radical anarchist. In 1923 he fired a gun at a government official and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He committed suicide in his cell, leaving his death poem behind him.

https://youtu.be/HVRAgQWL79I