Amid corona depression and rising suicide rate, a college student sets up chat site

Japan, it’s very often said, is a lonely country – crowded, certainly, and friendly too, in its own quiet way; famous for a unique brand of hospitality known as omotenashi, and yet lonely all the same, unforgiving of failure and despair, indifferent to appeals for help. The more desperate the appeal, the more pronounced the indifference. It’s a fact reflected in a chronically high suicide rate, which after a slow but steady decline after peaking in 2003 at 34,000 is now rising again, 2020’s  20,919 recorded suicides representing the first year-on-year increase in 11 years.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a lot to do with it, but Keio University student Koki Ozora discerns a deeper cause: loneliness. If only people could talk to one another, he thought – talk openly, candidly, without shame. They need, first of all, a platform, a place. Ozora, 22, created one – an online chat site called Anata no Ibasho (A Place for You). It’s free, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and anonymous. Volunteer experts help, but the main idea is non-expert talking and listening.

Clearly it fills a need. In its first eight months of operation – from April through December 2020 – it hosted 42,000 “consultations,” sometimes as many as 350 a day.

Writing in President (June 4), Ozora distinguishes between two “solitudes” – good and bad, chosen and endured. Humans are hybrids – social up to a point and solitary up to a point. We need company, Ozora says, as we need food and drink – as sustenance. But just as you can eat and drink your fill, you can also socialize to a point at which you must withdraw and be alone. To be alone when you need solitude is fundamental to well-being. To be alone when you need company – or help – is loneliness. In its most acute form, it can be deadly.

Ozora cites a 2018 international survey which suggests something of the quality of life in Japan. Twenty-three percent of respondents in the U.S., and 11 percent in the UK, see loneliness as a purely personal problem. Crudely put, if you’re lonely it’s your own fault and your responsibility to do something about it. Among Japanese respondents, 44 percent feel that way. Japan, apparently, prides itself on self-reliance. Conversely, it has little tolerance for those who fail to help themselves.

That’s ironic in view of a growing recognition around the world that personal problems are in fact not purely personal but at least partly social, even political. Japan shares that recognition. In February, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga appointed Tetsushi Sakamoto  “loneliness minister” – more formally: Minister for Promoting Dynamic Engagement of All Citizens.  Sakamoto claims to know a thing or two about loneliness. A politician who loses an election is cast into a wilderness whose depths you maybe have to be a politician to know.

Ozora, too, claims to have learned loneliness first-hand. He sketches in President a troubled childhood which traumatized him to the point of wanting to die. A sympathetic senior high school teacher saved him, he says, simply by taking an interest. “Here, I thought, was someone I could depend on.” It made all the difference.

It’s what he tries to do via Anata no Ibasho. “The important thing,” he writes, “is not so much providing information or advice. It’s listening. Sympathetic listening.”

It sounds so simple – and maybe is, once we get over the “self-reliance” hurdle. His ultimate goal? “To build a society in which it’s no stigma for a person to call out for help.”

© Japan Today