KIYOKO MATSAMOTO

Suicides by contagion! Now that’s not merely bone-headed – that’s fatal too!

Suicides in the1930s were commonplace. When the Great Depression was wreaking havoc in the West, Japan’s timely economic primping stood her in good stead. Alas, it was not of much consolation to Kiyoko Matsumoto. “Bewildered to distraction by the perplexities of maturing womanhood”, as the college-going Kiyoko had confided to a friend, she found recourse in ending her life, which she managed by jumping right down the mouth of the gurgling-with-lava Mount Mihara in the volcanic Izu Islands of Japan. That was Feb 11, 1933. What followed in merely two years were “350 known suicides and 1,386 attempted suicides,” as highlighted in a January 1935 issue of Time magazine, in an article reporting yet another incident of three persons, out of the crowd of sightseers gathered, leaping into the crater that week. Like a suicidal herd-instinct gripping visitors as they entered the confounded site, apparently ‘normal’ tourists were reported to have lunged in, as though Death irresistibly called out from the broiling bowels of the earth! Even more bizarrely, the owner of the private steamship company that provided transport to the Point, not only created publicity campaigns around the idea of watching a deathly spectacle unfold, but also procured official sanction for issuing round-trip tickets to the site claiming to ensure visitors returned! How could the authorities not have seen through that one?