At Japan’s cliffs, he's walked more than 600 people back from the edge (2018) | Hacker News Reader

At Japan’s cliffs, he's walked more than 600 people back from the edge (2018)

latimes.com

187 pointsjoshfraser59 comments

For anyone who's played Zelda, Breath of the Wild, there is a character who patrols a bridge to keep it safe from monster. If you jump on the edge of the bridge, he will talk you down and then offer to continue conversation.

I thought I read it was based on a japanese person, but it may have been based on an american cop who patrolled a bridge in san francisco.

Either way, it reminded me of this story. At the point at which you find this bridge character you are likely feeling quite down about the game world, and isolated. So it's a more poignant scene than I can describe in text.

https://checkpointorg.com/zelda-mental-health/

The cop, Kevin Briggs, you maybe thinking of did a TED talk for a person he saved on the Golden Gate bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CIq4mtiamY

The Zelda game character maybe based on the person, Chen Sah, who talks to people who are about to jump off a bridge in Naan-jing, China. You can listen to it here in Act One: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/407/the-bridge

While we are at it, I was reminded of this podcast as I was getting the above two links for you:https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i... The phone booth one brought me to tears. I think the link is related to the above two links i posted. Listen at your own risk.

There's also a similar story at cliff 'The Gap' in Sydney. The person known as 'Angel of the Gap' who lived near by often patrol around the area and talk people out of potential suicide [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gap_(Sydney)

This is wonderful. I posted the zelda link thinking "surely they modelled it after the man in this hacker news story"

But as it happens there are several such examples worldwide to serve as a potential model. A nice glimmer of hope and compassion.

Great article, thank you for sharing the link. I forgot what else prompted me to consider playing Zelda on the Switch. The last Zelda game I played was the free one that came with the black Gameboy Advance which was a Black Friday special about 15 years ago.

I don't even have a Switch (the Gameboy Advance was my last console), but I think I'll buy one just to play this game.

It's worth it. I recommend reading/watching nothing about the game, if you can help it. Including while playing.

Eventually you'll get the sense of it and likely want to look some stuff up, but I'm very happy I went into it with literally no idea what to expect. I got through 30-50 hours that way.

There's a patrol at Beachy Head in the UK too. https://bhct.org.uk/. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel a little resentful that they would seek to deny me peace in my final moments.

Just an interesting aside: whenever I see Japanese articles translated, the reported speech ascribed to older Japanese interviewees often includes such language as "I'm like, 'Hey, how are you doing?'".

I wonder if that's an indicator of the translator's age. The Japanese person in question is 73, and I wouldn't expect the average 73 year old English speaker to use that sort of language. 'Like' as a substitute for 'say' seems to be more recent, generationally-speaking.

I would be curious to know what the person would have said in Japanese.

The thing with japanese is that such translation is absolutely plausible in english. The language has nuances which are almost impossible to translate into concise english. Thus some completely mundane phrases (in japanese) might sound funny or weird in English so the closest english equivalent is used.

Anyhow in this context i’m quite sure it’s more descriptive of the author’s usage of english than anything.

Oh, I understand that it's plausible. It just seems idiomatic to the author or translator, that's all. Nothing wrong with that, no judgement here. :-)

I can't find this particular quote, but if you can read Japanese there's an interview with this guy here [1].

For this example in particular, the grammar for reported speech in Japanese is pretty much the same for a 70 year old and a 25 year old, so I agree that "I was like" is a weird choice for what was probably って言った. In [1] the guy has some pretty old-person vocabulary like "どうや", but basically talks like a normal person (of any age).

[1] https://plus-handicap.com/2016/03/7306/

The Japanese transcription in that link can be misleading because it seems to redact the manner he speaks. (They do this kind of editing a lot when they transcribe dialects.)

Here is a recording of how he speaks: https://youtu.be/zz3tuIbYvmY?t=60 - he has a grandpa-like way of speaking to some extent, but I don't think it's age as much as it's dialect. Many younger people with his dialect speak similarly. For example, どうや and 何や are perfectly normal for a 20 year old from the region to say.

USian English speakers have lots of filler noises they make that take the shape of words. We even make fun of some of them. 'Like' is one of those. 'K, so' is another., 'Um', 'Uh', 'Errr'.

In Japanese, 'Ehhhttoh' is common. But there are others. They are often just sounds. But just like in English where 'Errr' tells me something even though it's not really a word. It sets a tone for what's to follow differently than the tone set by 'K, so'.

In your quote above, though, I don't think 'like' is a filler noise in the original Japanese. It may have just been the article 'to (と)' marking the quote as the words that were spoken. The speaker may have even left off the verb "said" and just left the quote tagged with an assumed verb. If so, that would be an incomplete sentence, which is common but obviously less formal. So the translator might reach for more colloquial English.

As an aside: I used to hate “So, ...” and “Ok so, ...” until I realized they’re like TCP/IP or Aloha handshakes. You announce to the channel you’re about to send a message, if the channel seems clear, you proceed. If not, you wait until the channel is clear.

It’s a pretty neat solution to how distracted modern humans are. Good luck getting someone to look up from their phone without sending a string of buffer sounds to clear the channel first.

Personally I still prefer my conversations to be like UDP.

You yell at others and don’t check to see if they heard or understand you? :)

The absolute best is WireGuard-style: don't open your mouth if nobody is talking to you directly.

> 'Like' as a substitute for 'say' seems to be more recent, generationally-speaking.

It is indeed! Earliest academic mentions seem to be around 1980, and as of 1990 it was used mostly by people under 30: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455910.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_...

The "be like" quotative is popularly thought to have specifically originated in Southern California youth culture, but I'm not finding any good studies that address this (the one I linked mentions regional differences as a subject they didn't have the data to investigate).

This is also an editorial style of Japanese publications in general. You can see this in how some people write blogs too (titles for tech blogs will be “I tried out Rust!”). It’s an extremely conversational style that is easy to read.

I think the nearest equivalent is “oral history” articles that are the rage recently

As a non-native English speaker, I'd be curious of how an old person would say that in English. "I'm like..." is such a convenient phrase that I can't think of any other replacement that sounds equally natural and spontaneous.

As for the original Japanese phrase, I can imagine it's something along the line of "「おい、どうした」とか言って" or something like that, where "like" can be literally replaced with とか (alike, etc.) which has been a common phrase in Japanese for decades.

Older native English speakers usually just go with "I said", at all levels of formality. You might hear "I says" in the past tense too.

The increased separation of a "natural and spontaneous" register of English seems to have been mostly a function of 1970s-1990s youth culture - you can hear this in "candid microphone" radio shows before this period [1], where there's surprisingly little difference (to a young-ish native speaker like me) between the recorded colloquial usage and the formal standard English of speeches/literature/film. Lots mid-century film sounds stilted to us, but people actually spoke like that.

[1] A big chunk of recordings are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg

In my experience, most older people would be more literal: I told him/her, I said, I says (pronounced sez, informal). If it wasn't speech but another action, it would be similar. "I'm like" is probably from the 70's, so it is pretty common.

A simple "Hi, how are you?" can change a lot and doesn't cost anything more than a few seconds.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Did you mean to respond to me or someone else?

Dann want to say that asking someone who might be suicidal doesn't cost much. And if he is not suicidal he might just say that he/she is fine and move on.

I stated this because you said you usually don't speak to ppl who stand on the bridge, even though you should talk to them.

I didn't say any such thing. I think you might have meant to respond to a different comment.

Self worth is so fragile. I remember vividly being called a loser just one time in middle school. It has occurred to me at various times in life, even though I know the person who said it doesn't remember it, and they were also WRONG. Still, it gets me down.

I've not been seriously suicidal in life, but it occurs to me that thoughts of suicide maybe is not as difficult to reach as first appears.

I've had to adopt the "couldn't care less" approach when someone directs what I feel to be an unsubstantiated claim in my direction.

Of course when the moment has passed, I'll mull over it if the person is usually friendly and then work through the claim like a detached third party to figure out how I should really feel/think about or act on what they said.

It's the only approach that has successfully worked to keep my feelings from obliterating my psyche for the rest of the day/week if a confrontation like that does happen.

I keep them insulated and examine them later.

Another way of looking at it is the "do I respect this person" approach". More often than not, someone just calling you a loser probably isn't someone you look up to. They're a hater and weirdly enough, we often let their opinions influence us more than people we cherish.

I live in front of a bridge in Japan and every other weekend late at night I hear/see firetrucks and ambulances rushing to the river side.

I've never seen anyone jump but I know it's happening. Sometimes there are flowers near where the person jumped.

Whenever I cross the bridge and see someone standing by the edge I always wonder if they're there for that... I've never talked to anyone. I should.

Yes, you should if you have a chance, just like I should do the same.

Especially in Japan where people live secluded life and even a short encouraging conversation can change someone's life

Documentary on YouTube featuring Yukio Shige: https://youtu.be/Nj1QHZTokWE

Great article about a great human. I just wish they hadn't mentioned that piece of garbage youtube person as any press is good press for people like him.

YouTubes algorithm also put it as trending for quite a while. Having seen it the dude was literally out there to find a body and then played up how “crazy” it was. No empathy at all, very much a psychopath

Agreed. And the mention seemed so unnecessary to me. Like, it just brought up a touchy subject by someone who (IIRC) really was pretty unrepentant about it, despite "apologizing". It just wasn't needed at all in the article.

Exactly, the guy's irrelevant given the context of the article.

I used to think "people would just go somewhere else". This is wrong. In my mind, there is a demand, and the user would just find a new supply. With suicide from bridge jumps, this is not the case, and there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests intervention in these acute situations can save peoples lives, and they will go on to live 90% of the time. http://seattlefriends.org/files/seiden_study.pdf

God bless Yukio Shige.

It's pretty impossible to describe what depression is like. You just have to experience it for yourself. One book I read by Gary Paulsen (I think maybe "The Raft"?) when I was younger described "true hunger" as "not 'oh I missed a meal', or 'I will go hungry today', but 'I believe in my bones there will never be any food on this earth ever again'". That's kind of what depression is: a "true hunger" of some sort.

My first thought in response to you was "ah comeon it's not that bad". But then I thought back to when I was fired from my dumb corporate stooge job that burned me out. I literally had an existential crisis during the interview gauntlet where I couldn't see a place for myself in tech anymore. So actually I think you've pegged the feeling quite well. Though I wasn't remotely suicidal, the hopelessness of the job hunt amd my diminished interest in my field of expertise took a massive financial and emotional tole.

So there's a number of differences between burnout and depression (that I've noted in my personal experiences):

- Burnout has discrete reasons you can identify, whereas depression doesn't. Analysis paralysis occurs much more easily in depression because it permeates everything you do and everything you are. The fire is all around you. I've had to rebuild my sense of reality at times by trying to define what is true and what is not. Meditation is really helpful for this, because of the focus on your breathing and the here and now.

- You can still trust your mind during burnout, whereas in depression you cannot. The best analogy that comes to mind is something like Air France 447, where the plane crashes because the iced-over pitot tubes gave faulty readings to the pilot while navigating via IFR. Imagine that but planted in your brain, where your sense of self lives. Writing helps for me in this regard because you can play back what your mind is doing.

- You can become fully healed with burnout, whereas you can't ever get back to normal with depression. Depression is like alcoholism in that if/when you become sober again, one drink at any time afterwards can lead to a death spiral. You kind of have to be constantly on your guard, but not so much that life feels like a downer.

Can you point to a source for the last point? You say "you can't ever go back". I'd really like to see if that is true.

BTW, people commit suicide from burnout too. Doctors mostly.

I think the ingredient missing from your anecdote is pressure.

Idea of suicide comes when there is pressure to deliver. Like someone yelling at you to get a job. Or constantly calling you worthless because of some personality trait. Or when there is a scenario where if not something gets accomplished then disaster will follow.

Not necessarily the case. I'm a visibly transgender woman because of puberty and religious abuse when young preventing access to hormone blockers. I would say what encompasses me is to blame for suicidal ideation. The behaviour of people I have no control over and how they constantly invalidate me; possibly threaten or harm me. Furthermore, the cost of actually fixing what makes me visibly transgender is like putting a downpayment on a house and people refuse to consider it medical treatment. Reality can just hate a person and that's really what's to blame. I likely wouldn't be talked away from the cliff.

> Reality can just hate a person and that's really what's to blame.

No, that's externalizing. Reality doesn't hate you.

The nature of any dysphoria leads one to deny reality as it is though, and presume a lot about it that is objectively false-- your brain lies to you about the way you understand reality and convinces you that in order to correct it you so can understand it, you need to seek solutions that are unaffordable, harmful or otherwise impossible/out-of-reach.

Because humanity is generally retarded we celebrate or demonize things we don't understand instead of actually working to understand them. What gets lost in the zeitgeist of promoting "LGBTx uber alles" and tarring the skeptics as *phobes is that expensive surgery, a lifetime of HRT and a premature cancer death--getting everything you think you need to feel whole--won't necessarily steer you away from suicide either, because the fundamental problem has more to do with what's between your ears than what's between your legs. Post-ops are still something like 20x more likely to commit suicide than the general population; hardly counts as a success story when it comes to harm reduction or enacting effective medical prognoses.

I hope you find happiness through GRS or otherwise. I also hope it comes sooner rather than later so you don't suffer any longer than you have. But if you ever do find yourself on the edge of that cliff, at least consider for a second that you're so dissatisfied because you've been trying to address the wrong problem this whole time.

What a load of rubbish by someone that apparently is not able to understand what encompasses an object is the real source for where blame is fitting.

Reality can make one human suffer compared to another that doesn't suffer because of displacement rooted in nature and where the result was not equal experiences; when it came to evolution. Nobody has any control in their life at the fundamental level and because we're all just input/output by the forces exerted upon us.

I've been damaged by a reality that was shit for transgender kids when I was young and now reality has been changing for future kids that are lgbtq. You're labouring under delusions with the nonsense you wrote.

Another definition of pressure?

> behaviour of people and how they constantly invalidate me... Reality can just hate a person.

... That you can't escape.

> like putting a downpayment on a house and people refuse to consider it medical treatment.

What's your definition of pressure? I'm under the assumption you attach it to anything. Also I'm offended.

So you faced social pressure to be a certain person. And were exiled because you did not fit. And then your method of escaping that by using medicine was not good enough.

So you face this endless pain and don't have an escape.

I don’t agree with how you phrased it. It’s more that reality just despises some people if simplified to the root. Since none of us has any real control when it comes to anything.

You are clinically depressed, a persistent form of depression. That's like a force telling you to stay depressed. Because that has become your comfort zone. As another commenter pointed out, this is a problem that lies between your ears.

You can blame everyone from childhood to current trends for the situation you are in now. But for as long as you do not conform, you will feel like you don't belong. And so you will seek an escape, but there are none. So you will be tired. You won't have the energy to stay your own person, so you will be suicidal.

You are not trans as you like to believe. You are a human who wants to constantly fight your environment and not conform. Calling your self trans is just one way of doing that.

So stop fighting. Learn to live. Learn to love yourself. Just as you are. Without changing. Then learn to love those around you. Then the things around you. Then the ideas around you. Hate nothing. That is evil for you.

From the book 7 habits, proactive people love first and then feel love. No medicine or surgery can change that.

Finally, read Feeling Good by David Burns. I did. :)

I'm getting assisted suicide in less than a year in Switzerland.

You seem to be a very shallow person with no depth to write what you have. Seems like you're an evil force I've encountered by fate and similar as other forces i've experienced but I prefer that label for what's best described by the word faith.

People live through whatever is destined and some are just worse off than others because we live in a society under the illusion of free will by religion.

We are free to believe what we want to believe. We are free to do as we wish. We have that mercy from our Lord.

What happens to us is not of our wish. It is of his. How we react is in OUR hands.

Don't kill yourself. Just because you believe the world should be treating you a certain way but it is not, is not a good reason to die. It is selfish.

You took up resources in this world. In a first world nonetheless. You took away someone else's opportunity to have what you have. You need to give back. And giving up does not do that.

We live for others. We live for community. We live to bring others happiness. We live to protect others from the problems we faced. We live to rescue others from what we were rescued from.

From the beginning of your comments, you get offended. You don't like things being phrased a certain way. You don't like what you hear. True judgement is not embedded in your emotions. It is when you are free of it. But you are not. So it remains that your judgement is compromised.

You called me an evil force. When I only help you find reasons to live. You commit to suicide. And then instill in others reason to die. What is evil here?

A long time ago I made a comment here on HN. You should read it. Free yourself from ego, arrogance, entangled thoughts, and so on. Read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14439600

You writing all that is selfish.

The lord is giving me a death by having suicide in this reality as my natural death. :)

Your ignorance to face reality makes me assume the lord didn't choose to share it with you. All you have written are incorrect assumptions and compared to I; who can see the true intentions of fate.

You should be gracious the outcome of this conversation is me just offended at ignorance. I pity the few souls I've encountered for what I've shortly witnessed in reading these brief paragraphs and they've likely been of similar nature while communicated to others. Persons who cannot see reality for how it is and thus blamed people like you with thinking you all have free will. Evil isn't death. Evil is forcing good intentions upon others and as if you're from on high in judgement.

People will eventually lose their ego by not assuming they've become themselves by their own actions. People are forced into experiences until they die and for the purpose of the more privileged that are born later or the few that happen to be perfectly fated for the current system that's society.

I don't think I quite understand what you mean here, but I think it might be a good point. Is there any way you could rephrase this or clarify the connection to my anecdote?

Pressure means social pressure. Or financial pressure. Or environmental pressure. Something that is forcing your hand to do something you can't. And then to judge yourself when you can't deliver against it. It's what causes fight or flight moments or, in a sad state, you quit (life).

So if you don't have a job and can't find a job, and then you feel bad about yourself, the thought of suicide comes for example when you are about to lose everything you have worked hard for and/or will cause great pain to those around you and/or are judged by your peers as a complete loser and/or exiled from their community.

Can't explain better than that.

Timely article considering the suicide of popular Youtuber Etika. He jumped off a bridge in NYC almost a week ago i think.

#OpStopSuicide

A similar fate claimed a YouTube maker and old timer, aussie50. Rest his soul if such a thing exists.

The scary thing about some suicides is how "sudden" and "unexpected" they can be. I use scare quotes because I strongly believe the signs are there in advance... We owe it to our fellow humans to figure out how to detect them and provide compassionate support. It's not easy. At all.

Maybe even scarier is that in many cases of depression, basic cognition breaks down in the sufferer. Like trying to run a program with a faulty CPU. That's why a support network is so important. Sometimes you just have to offload the processing to someone else...

So very true.... Even when I think of LiLPeeP and his flagrant disregard for his own wellbeing, popping huge amounts of prescription pills and sharing vids of the same on his IG... to millions of adoring fans. No one took it seriously until he died.

Social Media is so invasive, mind-warping and a harmful drug in it's own right.

Thank you for your comment, will have to check out aussie50's story.

https://www.austech.info/showthread.php/116335-Ed-quot-Aussi...

NOOOOOO! :-(

Very sad and F*ked up bah even as an Aussie myself, I struggle so much seeing how many boys, teens and men here are suffering unto suicide.

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