Pressure to be perfect turns deadly for celebrities in Japan

TOKYO • From the outside, Japanese actress Yuko Takeuchi seemed to have a golden life.

She had won Japan's top acting award three times and had recently given birth to her second child. She also appeared in a box-office favourite last year and advertisements for a top ramen brand.

Takeuchi, 40, died late last month, apparently in a suicide.

No one can fully know what private torment lurked beneath the surface, but in a Japanese society that values "gaman" - endurance or self-denial - many feel pressure to hide their personal struggles. The burden is compounded for celebrities, whose professional success depends on projecting a flawless ideal.

Takeuchi is the latest Japanese film and television star to die by suicide this year.

Her death came less than two weeks after the suicide of actress Sei Ashina, 36, and two months after Haruma Miura, 30, a popular television actor, was found dead in his home, leaving a suicide note.

In May this year, Hana Kimura, a 22-year-old professional wrestler and star of reality show Terrace House, took her own life after relentless bullying on social media.

Aside from Kimura, none of the other celebrities who died in suicides had shown public signs of emotional distress.

Their deaths have been echoed by an alarming rise in the suicide rates within Japan's public during the coronavirus pandemic, after a decade of hard-won decline from some of the highest such rates in the world.

The authorities reported a nearly 16 per cent increase in suicides in August compared with a year earlier, with the number spiking by 74 per cent among teenage girls and women in their 20s and 30s.

"As a society, we feel like we cannot show our weaknesses, that we must hold all of it in," said Mr Yasuyuki Shimizu, director of the Japan Suicide Countermeasures Promotion Centre.

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"It's not just that people feel like they can't go to a counsellor or a therapist, but many feel like they cannot even show their weaknesses to the people they are close to."

The reasons for suicide are complex. Many of the strains felt by the Japanese are universal: They, like many others, feel the ruthless demands of social media, where people feel they must cultivate a narrative of eternal success and happiness.

"This can definitely be a cause for spiralling into a depression" if a person's reality does not match someone else's curated portrait, Mr Shimizu said.

Even away from social media, the Japanese tend to project a positive public front. There is a strict division between "uchi" (the home or inside) and "soto" (outside), with emotions - particularly messy ones - restricted to the private sphere.

People also feel they must conform to rules and not stand out in ways that could be perceived as burdening others.

For celebrities, normal societal pressures can be magnified by the expectations of millions of fans.

And unlike in the United States, where celebrities now talk more openly about seeking psychological help, such behaviour is largely taboo in Japan, which has been slower to develop mental health services, despite some improvement.

"If you are a person in the spotlight and the media finds out that you are receiving mental health support, that would play badly for you and your career," said Ms Tamaki Tsuda, a TV producer.

"If you go out once for mental illness, that's the image that will be tacked on to your brand forever. And when that happens, fewer and fewer job offers will come in."

The pandemic has been particularly tough for those in show business, as TV and film production has been suspended or altered due to virus protection protocols.

"People in the entertainment industry lost their gigs in an instant when the coronavirus hit, so it's been an extreme blow," Ms Tsuda said. "A lot of these actors were given blank schedules over the past few months from their management companies."

At a news conference the day after Takeuchi's death, Mr Katsunobu Kato, chief Cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, said he was concerned that reports of the celebrity suicides might prompt others to take their own lives.

"In order for people not to feel isolated with their own worries, we must work together to build a society where we can warmly support and watch over each other," he said.

Experts said they were wary of vague government promises.

"They say we should create a society where nobody feels lonely," said Dr Michiko Ueda, a professor of political science at Waseda University in Tokyo who has researched suicide. "But, as is typical with any Japanese government plan, there is no concrete plan."

She added: "We can't change society in one day."

NYTIMES