It happened at the end of last August. A 17-year-old student jumped from the building of a busy shopping center in the Japanese city of Yokohama. In the fall, she hit Chikako Chiba, a 32-year-old woman who was walking on a pedestrian street accompanied by three friends. Both women were taken to the hospital and declared dead a few hours later.
In the Asian country, this incident in Yokohama once again brought media attention to the increasing suicide rates among young people. Japan is the only major economy among the G-7 where suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers.
This week, the Yokohama case has returned to Japanese newspapers, but this time because the city authorities have decided to prosecute the teenager whose suicide caused Chiba's death. This measure has sparked a great controversy nationally because it is not very well understood why a legal case is being opened against a person who is deceased.
This is not the first time this has happened in Japan. Four years ago, in Osaka, another 17-year-old jumped from the roof of a shopping center and killed a 19-year-old university student. The teenager was also posthumously charged with homicide, leading to his family having to compensate the parents of the other victim. Similar to what is happening these days, there was a lot of uproar in Osaka over this process, heavily criticized by the press and lawmakers. Eventually, the charges were dropped.
"Prosecuting a deceased girl is the height of governmental absurdity: bureaucrats so obsessed with following their rigid and outdated rules that they have completely lost touch with common sense and human decency," reads one of the criticisms of the Yokohama case, which occurred on August 31, published in the Japan Today newspaper.
The Japanese police, as reported by the public broadcaster NHK, filed the charge of "gross negligence resulting in death" last Monday and referred the case to the Prosecutor's Office, arguing that the minor, who was studying at a school in the city of Kimitsu, near Yokohama, was old enough to understand that her actions could cause harm to others.
"The suspect is accused of jumping from the 12th-floor terrace of a commercial facility around 5:55 p.m. on August 31 and hitting 32-year-old Chikako Chiba, who was walking down the street," the police charge document states.
Some legal experts argue that moving forward with these processes, along with a civil lawsuit filed by Chiba's family, can serve as a deterrent for individuals endangering pedestrians while attempting to take their own lives.
In 2023, 513 minors committed suicide in Japan, one less than the previous year, when the number exceeded 500 for the first time since 1980, the year these records began. Regarding the most recent figures, the Ministry of Welfare broke down the data to explain that the majority of cases, 354, were high school students, mainly aged between 15 and 18 years old.
On the rooftop of the Yokohama shopping center, from where the 17-year-old girl jumped in August, a 2.5-meter-high glass barrier had been installed a couple of years earlier to prevent any suicide attempts after another young man threatened to jump in 2022.
"Among male high school students, school-related issues such as academic performance, pressure for future career paths, and university entrance exams were common motives for suicide. Among female students, health issues such as depression were the main reasons, as well as other interpersonal relationship problems involving conflicts with friends," states the latest report from the Japanese government on suicide prevention measures.