Researcher’s death shocks Japan | Hacker News Reader

Researcher’s death shocks Japan

blogs.nature.com

163 pointsdanso36 comments

Open articleView on HN

I think posts like that should be accompanied with some tools that help to deal with grief or suicidal thinking.

Here is an online grief support group:

http://www.onlinegriefsupport.com/

Here is a phone number to a grief counseling group for those in US:

1-800-260-0094

Here is online suicide support group:

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineCha...

Here is a suicide prevention lifeline for those in US:

1-800-273-8255

[EDIT: suicide is a very complex disease that is far from being understood. I'm sure that prof. Yoshiki Sasai had to deal with much, much more than just two retracted articles.]

Relatedly, if a friend approaches you with suicidal feelings, never ever ever try to talk them straight out of it. It is quite likely that they will consider you as simply not understanding them, and shut you out - possibly pretending that all is fine, when it really isn't.

Always try to genuinely understand their feelings and reasoning. Treating suicide as something that is always and inherently wrong, is more likely to hurt them than to help them.

Make sure that they understand that you're willing to listen without judging, even if you might not always immediately understand their reasoning, and even if you might not agree with them.

In a few cases I knew, it seemed the warning signs were that the person mentioned things like "yeah I would never kill myself" seemingly out of the blue. And then one went and registered to buy a gun. (Which was eventually used for the act). You are right that these are described more as "feelings" not just direct verbal statements of the intent to commit suicide.

http://www.cqaimh.org/pdf/tool_suicide_risklevl.pdf

(PDF sorry)

Key screening questions are basically:

* ever thought about harming yourself?

* recently?

* have you thought of a plan for how you would do it?

* have you taken any actions on that plan?

The farther down they get that list, the more concerned you should be. emergency intervention if they Yes all four.

Many people have dark thoughts but have a fear/preservation instincts that protects them from rash inclinations. But once someone starts acting on their thoughts, they need close attention from someone quick and strong enough to intervene. As noted, though, knowing someone's state requires their willingness to honestly share it, so caregivers need to be trustworthy and be trusted.

Giving someone hope and a way forward can help them walk back from the edge, but being manipulative or deceptive or coercive can push them over.

I took an emergency suicide first aid course a couple years back, and to this day still carry around the pocket-sized "workflow" in the wallet in the hopes I never need it.

That been said, one of the most important things I took from the course was the need to have the person with the experimental thoughts to agree to stay safe. That is, to agree not to harm themselves for a pre-allotted timeframe. You’re not convincing them not to do it, but instead delaying their feeling of having to do it now. This time gives you both the ability to seek resources to help each other through the crisis.

As said above, be supportive of the person. Hear them out. Pushing them away or making light of the situation is not something that that will benefit anyone. You may not agree with them, but you must understand in order to help them through this period in their lives.

Be honest and tell them you don't know how to help - but agree to seek out help with them. Perhaps they just need someone to show that they are cared for...

tl;dr get the individual who is experiencing suicidal thoughts to agree not to harm themselves for six hours (a completely arbitrary number) so that you both can seek resources for help. DO NOT try intervention unless you are trained to do so - you could make things much much worse...

This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made.

First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some of the most ambitious and amazing directed differentiation of stem cells into neural tissues including the retina (see an old news story here [1]). Whether or not he was deeply involved in this latest STAP cell controversy is immaterial to the tremendous contributions his lab has made to the field.

Second, we should be more careful on how we as a scientific community react to scientific scandal. Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley DevBio Prof, HHMI, Founder of PLoS), who's father committed suicide in a similar incident many years ago, had some poignant comments [2].

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker...

[2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619

If you didn't see it last week, the "A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture" post from last week is a really great read. [1] There's a portion in the article where it speaks to different cultural norms around suicide.

"By [Japanese] tradition, suicide can absolve guilt and cancel debt, can restore honor and prove loyalty. 'The heirs of Cain can never escape the eyes of God, even less in the next world than in this,' Maurice Pinguet wrote in his study 'Voluntary Death in Japan.' 'But in Japan you can hide in death, disappear into it entirely and mend the fault as you go' In Japan, suicide can be a gesture of moral integrity and freedom, or an act of beauty."

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/last-call-3

I dont think your quote is entirely relevant here. We are talking about someone who was under huge media pressure following the Obokata case. The Obokata case was heavily featured in the media here in Japan, and you can imagine the people involved must have been under tremendous stress. This scientist may have had some level of guilt because of his involvment with Obokata but that was nothing worth dying for to clear his name. This is much more about media exposure and pressure, and in that sense a more regular kind of suicide.

No, I think this falls entirely in line with the Japanese idea of accepting responsibility through suicide. Sasai was Obokata's mentor, he was instrumental in getting her papers published, and now he's caused a massive loss of face for not just himself, but the generally very well regarded institution he works for (Riken).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he should have committed suicide, I'm just saying that I can entirely see why he would have considered it a valid option to discharge his guilt.

I live and work in Tokyo. People are intensely shocked and saddened by this turn of events. Like, stop working and walk around with hand on head stunned reactions when it first came out.

This is not something respected or expected. Trust me, Japanese people love to point out they "saw it coming" or claim something is typical and aligns with their worldview - this is not one of those times.

That's just how YOU read it. You probably missed the fact that he mentioned in his suicide letters he was not killing himself because of her and this case. He was obviously under emotional stress and that's enough to push many people to suicide if you are in a fragile state, no matter if you are guilty or not.

Sauce of letter content? I found one news article [1] that says "Police and Riken said Sasai left what appeared to be suicide notes, but refused to disclose their contents."

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2716540/Japanese-sci...

That's what was reported on Japanese news (about the contents of the letters). I can't find a link right now but I will check it later.

>This scientist may have had some level of guilt because of his involvment with Obokata but that was nothing worth dying for to clear his name.

Japan is shame society. Shame is weighing heavily even if when person is not guilty and drive people to suicide.

Look, there are tons of scandals in Japan which get large media attention every single week, yet we don't see high profile, shamed people jumping off cliffs or hanging themselves every two minutes. Let's dispell this myth that Japanese kill themselves every single time they are publicly shamed. This is far from the norm. Most of the time they do dogeza (bowing on their knees for apology) in public, accept the blame and that's it, nobody talks about it anymore. Let's not exaggerate the situation, shall we.

Why do you think this particular case "shocked Japan" ? Because it's not the norm, precisely.

There's a speculation that he was suffering from mental fatigue, and I think it is right. More than anything like keeping the honor/face, this seems the most likely cause that killed him.

A thing that people outside Japan often don't understand is how harsh and concerted a media frenzy is. Unlike the U.S., things quickly get very personal here. And there's not much protection. He was already a heavy target of the gossip media, and I can imagine all kinds of nasty treatments he got from people around him, formally and informally, including a nasty look or verbal harassment in a public place. They're usually subtle but once you're a target it's very consistent and ubiquitous. It's pretty much how kids are bullied here, but this time it happened at a national level. I think that could be too much to handle for a sheltered scholar who dedicated his life for science.

The irony is that, this kind of media frenzy is what they initially sought until the debacle happened. Now the untamed beast, which is the Japanese media, bit them back and they're still in rampage. I don't like how the media handled the whole thing at all, but this is how it is here. (edit: also this is how smart kids learn not to stand out in Japan)

FWIW, Obokata would never have made Nature without Sasai's help, and there's plenty of scurrilous scuttlebutt on the Japanese Internets about Obokata and Sasai possibly being romantically involved. There's a slightly more informed that unusual discussion about the suicide on r/japan, from which I'll quote the first comment in part:

Not surprised, actually. Within the last week there was an NHK show on this whole thing, in which it was pointed out how key Sasai was to Obokata's paper. According to the show, the paper had already been rejected by two different outlets for shoddy writing and presentation, and Sasai was called in to clean it up - he did, Nature accepted the paper for publication, and the rest is history.

But several scientists NHK got to sit down on camera and read over the Nature article all said basically the same thing: "Sasai sure knows how to write an attractive paper, but the contents are garbage." Things like possible flaws with the samples or data would be defacto admitted, but glossed over with a simple "We checked the STAP cells to see if they were not another kind of man-made stem cell" - but then never stated what the results of that check were (and it seems to have turned out the "STAP" cells were stem cells that for some reason Obokata had stocks of in her office).

These same scientists on the show were saying that if Obokata's results could not be independently duplicated, Sasai had just destroyed his entire career and Riken itself was going to be in a world of hurt as Sasai was instrumental in getting grants and funding for them.

I feel bad for Sasai's family. As for Sasai himself, I hope Obokata was worth it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/2cnjq8/obokatas_super...

This is terrible. I was just in Tokyo last month. I don't know what it is about Japanese culture but you should never take your own life. Humans are the only mammals that do this.

While I do agree it is horrible, humans are definitely not the only mammals that commit suicide.

It's insane how much faked results and allegations thereof are in stem cell research. It must be a really stressful environment to work in.

It is weird. There's lots of money and fame, along with even more potential, so I understand the stress and the temptation.

On the other hand, when these papers came out in January, I didn't understand how they could be released without much more backup than they had---it was clearly on the "extraordinary evidence" side of the fence. It was like everyone involved in the papers and the subsequent media frenzy set this sort of result up.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/01/stem-cell-sci...

I thought it would be a crazy story about mutations or something. Turns out the scientific misconduct is less "freaky" and more "we falsified the data". RIP to a great scientist though, he was involved very lightly in that case as it seems. I admire the Japanese honor though..

I do not admire a society in which highly regarded scientists are drawn to commit suicide after being cleared of any wrongdoing, according to the original article. The loss of Sansai is truly saddening.

There's much to admire about Japanese society. Just not that aspect of the society.

> admire the Japanese honor though..

This is not about honor, this is about having your reputation flushed down the toilet by media who have no idea wwhat they talk about and you having not much of a future carreer anymore in what you used to love doing, no matter what.

> I admire the Japanese honor though

huh?

> I admire the Japanese honor though..

There's no honor in making a quick exit instead of facing the music.

This is looking at a foreign society through Western glasses. I recommend you to travel there sometime for an extended period to understand these people better. The way I see it, being a member of Japanese society is an honour in the conservative sense - an honour for which members feel they have to keep earning it throughout their lives by doing what's best for the society. In extreme cases some feel that they're not worthy of that anymore or that they've become a burden to society, so they take their lives. This is not to say that this is the most common cause of suicide in Japan - many Western societies have suicide rates that are not that far off. However in this case here I can very well imagine that this is what happened. Suicide doesn't mean they're 'cowards' necessarily, they're imposing the highest possible punishment on to themselves. Just like American society still thinks that the death sentence is the highest possible punishment.

> This is looking at a foreign society through Western glasses.

Who gives a damn? "My culture/society says I should" is never a good-enough reason to do something and suicide is no exception.

You can't excuse people for doing stupid shit because of their upbringing. We're not robots.

> they're imposing the highest possible punishment on to themselves

That's the problem right there: death is not the highest possible punishment, regardless of culture.

As very recently discussed right here on HN, that's not how the Japanese necessarily view things.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/last-call-3

> I admire the Japanese honor though..

Hahah you're that guy at work, huh?

Weeaboo?

Now, if only the Chinese started doing the same: http://io9.com/academic-fraud-in-china-is-getting-out-of-han...

I don't like how whenever there is a suicide, the possibility of being suicided (somebody else making it look like a suicide with the intent to discredit and kill) is never suggested, considered, and is even looked at as conspiratorial paranoia. Of course in this case there are 3 letters left on the scene, which (if convincingly written by him) would be good evidence pointing toward legitimate suicide. I would like to see video/witness evidence, more investigation into events leading up to the death, etc.

The only reason I suggest it as a possibility is the fact that he was highly passionate about important, controversial research. I would think that he wouldn't want to commit suicide because of this and that other people would be out to get him. His work is now being dismantled and he is dead, which is a big win for people that did not like what he was doing, and clearly a tragic loss for everything that he believed in.

Putting words into the mouth of the dead? Oh, the letter says it's from 7/2 and even the url shows that! It must be!

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.riken.jp/~/media/ri...

As of now it says it was crawled 8/6 at 00:57 (current time is 8/5 18:00 pst) so I suppose it was crawled when I typed it in to the search? But that wouldn't match up with any time zone (maybe 1:57 London time).

I also suppose that it is legitimate and they just had it lying around and decided to post it up today.

Originally found linked in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26001-stem-cell-scient...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com