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Are you normally a foreign correspondent, or do you do most of your work domestically?
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I love writing about America, in part because I am the first American-born member of my family...
After 9/11, when I watched the twin towers collapse twenty-five blocks from my apartment, I began to find myself pulled towards finding a language and stories that would help explain America to the world and the world to America. I think many first generation Americans felt the same way. We could see an approaching global train wreck whose real engine was not some kind of evil Bush-Cheney conspiracy but rather the same strengths that attracted our parents to come here, and which make it hard for Americans to understand how other people think.
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How did you get the idea for this piece?
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Oddly enough, I got the idea for my piece about group suicide in Japan after spending a few years off and on in Israel and the Palestinian territories reporting an archeological fraud piece for The New Yorker and a very long profile of Yasir Arafat for The Atlantic…
The deeper I got into the historical and political climate that produced Arafat, and in which he operated, the less I found myself attracted to the particularist explanations of Arab and Muslim politics that are currently so fashionable on the right and also on the left. The more I studied the Koran, the less I was convinced that it was a particular seat of evil thinking, when compared with the book of Deuteronomy or the Mormon Bible…
As I tried to isolate the specifics of the moral and tactical failure of the Palestinian national movement, I naturally became interested in the how and why of suicide bombings. I became interested in the Tamil Tigers and other guerrilla movements that had used similar tactics in other parts of the world where there aren't many Jews or Arabs. Then I stumbled across an English-language website in Japan that had posted a Reuters article about a series of incidents where young people had gassed themselves to death in cars outside Tokyo. What made these incidents newsworthy in Japan, where group suicide is not all that uncommon, is that the dead people were strangers who had met over the internet for the expressed purpose of killing themselves. As a fan of Japanese fiction, I found it easy to imagine the scenes that were being described in the article, and I began looking for more accounts of anonymous group suicides in Japan.
I soon began to see that the subject of anonymous group suicide might be an interesting way to think about suicide bombing in the Arab countries and the wider Muslim world. The moment you looked beneath the surface differences, it was easy to see some eerily similar elements translated into the culture of a peaceful island nation with no Jews and no Koran but with safe streets and the second-highest GNP in the world. You had groups of people who came together and strengthened their commitment to a moment of transcendent death, you had internet sites which distributed propaganda and facilitated meetings, you had a few central texts, you had the use of simple, readily available materials which turned a car into an instrument of mass murder, you had perpetrators from relatively advantaged backgrounds, most of whom were in their twenties. You have cultures that were stamped by the experience of catastrophic defeat, and in which young males can feel particularly alienated and powerless.
One of the most obvious differences, of course, is that the perpetrators of the group suicides were also the victims, while car bombers sought to kill as many strangers as possible—none of whom particularly wanted to die. Yet even that difference seemed less important to me when I considered the vast difference between the prevailing culture and politics in Gaza City and in Tokyo. The more reporting I did, the less even the specific technology of the internet seemed important to me. I began to see suicide bombing and anonymous group suicide as a deadly virus that infects individuals in particular cultures and which can be highly transmissible to vulnerable people—most often males—through a wide variety of means, including the internet and cassette tapes of speeches in mosques. The way these ideas operate seems very similar to the psychologies of political ideologies like Communism or Naziism that preached mass murder on a historical scale. I see all these movements as variations on a similar kind of nihilism whose ultimate end is the obliteration of the individual self in favor of an abstract collective. I think that the ostensible grievances and tactical political aims of these movements—what they say about themselves to reporters and in propaganda pamphlets—are largely irrelevant to their actual purpose, which is death.
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Was there anything unusual in the reporting process or any specific challenges?
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The main challenge of reporting the piece were the practical and psychological difficulties inherent in gaining access to secretive individuals who were involved in an illegal activity which is intended to result in the deaths of multiple people. Unlike the political leadership of Hamas, the people planning group suicides in Japan don't have business cards and hold regular press conferences, so the reporting process was more laborious than writing an article about suicide bombers from Nablus or Jenin. Because shame culture in Japan is so prevalent and so inward, it is very hard to get the families of suicides to talk about their children, while the mothers of suicide bombers are often made available for interviews. The articles about these cases in the Japanese press are uniquely opaque, and generally contain as few details as possible.
I felt empathy for my subjects and was horrified by the fact that my reporting was likely to be a factor in whether or not they ultimately chose to kill themselves or not. I decided that my role was to accurately record and portray their experience without trying to directly argue them out of killing themselves or reporting them to the police. At the same time, I did consistently make it clear to my subjects that I liked them, that I felt empathy for their painful circumstances, and that I wanted them to continue living.
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How long did you have to report and write the story?
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I was able to spend nearly three months in Japan researching my story, thanks to the incredible open-mindedness and generosity of the Japan Society in New York, which endorsed my gruesome and unflattering subject, paid for intensive Japanese lessons for me and my wife, found us an apartment and a nanny in Tokyo for our infant son, and otherwise made it possible for me to explore a story whose challenges and costs would have otherwise been prohibitive.
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What languages did your interviewees speak? Did you use a translator?
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My interviewees spoke Japanese. A number of experts I interviewed spoke English that was superior to my Japanese. I generally used two Japanese translators, an American-born Caucasian, who is a skilled professional translator, and his Japanese wife Shizu, whose English is not good enough for her to work as a professional translator but who is highly intelligent and incredibly self-possessed. I found that people who were actually intending to kill themselves were much more comfortable talking to a Japanese woman and me than to two alien-seeming white men. It probably also helped that Shizu is quite attractive, and many of the men I interviewed were incredibly lonely. I found that it was easier to speak to Japanese doctors, psychologists, government officials and other professionals through a Caucasian translator, since they could more easily talk out of turn or politely excuse the directness of some of my questions as the product of cultural ignorance from two Americans.
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