Into the Rising Sun 10

Since 2003, Japan has also seen a proliferation of Internet suicide clubs, and an alarmingly increasing number of temporary members. The technology has been further strengthened by the change in choice if inhaled fumes, which have gone from charcoal, to hydrogen sulfide. The Japanese like to do things in groups.
The most pernicious cult of all, of course, may have come from abroad. Tom Cruise, an American adherent, and the Last Samurai, had been gone for eight years when, immediately after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster, the Church of Scientology sent Volunteer Ministers to provide ‘Scientology assist’ touch-healing, a ‘spiritual first aid’ groping of 48,000 homeless tsunami victims. A Hashikami City Councillor thanked the practitioners, saying ‘theirs is a service the Japanese people can find nowhere else.’ Absolutely, nowhere else.
The act of quitting as a salaryman, escaping corporate life to find more fulfilling work, is known as datsusara. Childhood dreams or momentary inspirations can lead to a new entrepreneurial rebirth as a farmer, fisherman, artisan, writer, restauranteur, shopkeeper, plumber, or other self-employed independence. But there are dangers in taking up a profession without proper knowledge and, for the Japanese salaryman, this is not an easy, or viable option. The shelter of the big tree casts a broad shadow.
So they carry on, in their fatigue fugue states. Falling asleep on the job, inemuri, is admired, because it demonstrates how hard they work for their company. Like everything Japanese, there are rules to follow. It is only respectable if done upright, to show that they are still socially engaged, even if they’re not. The nicest thing you can say to a colleague as you leave the office late at night is otsukaresama deshita. You're tired.
The West may have helped do this to them. World War II hit the reset button on Japan’s economy. In 1950, an American statistician named W. Edwards Deming brought a unique style of company management that focused on perpetual cyclical improvement and dissatisfaction. If your employees have worked their fingers to the bone, have them to grind those bones down to a fine powder, and after that, have them go door to door selling the powder as an aphrodisiac. The Deming cycle was a natural fit with ingrained Japanese tradition. Their deep respect for seniority makes it unthinkable to go home before your boss. And your boss might just stay at the office until after midnight because he's such a hard worker, or because he hates his wife, or because he's already home.
Salarymen work twelve or more hours a day, all-night and late-night and holidays, six or seven days a week, year after year, often with the furoshiki cloaked overtime unpaid. Physical and mental stress from overwork, especially since the Bubble Economy burst in the late 1980s, have caused an epidemic of occupational sudden death. The Ministry of Labor tracks these karōshi deaths, some insurance companies pay them out, and some companies get sued, for the young heart attacks and strokes that are the collateral damage of the Denning cycle. 
The liberty part was a non-starter. The honour part was implicit. But the religious part, for the salaryman, was a problem.







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