[kbenson]

> > In the aftermath of the incident, Hiroo Tominaga, a JAL maintenance manager, killed himself to atone for the incident, while Susumu Tajima, an engineer who had inspected and cleared the aircraft as flight-worthy, committed suicide due to difficulties at work.

That sucks. If ever there were two people that knew first-hand how important it was to get right and would have worked to make sure that accident, and likely others as well could never happen on their shift, those were them. Suicide as atonement is a stupid, counter-productive cultural norm (and hopefully it's much less of a norm in any modern society where it exists).

[wallace_f]

Interestingly, at the end of WWII, when Tojo was captured by the Americans, he shot himself in the abdomen--creating referencss fo seppuku--and apologized that "I am taking so long to die."

Not long after, he was tried for war cimes and executed by hanging.

I'm sure he would have rather have died from the gunshot.

Whether right in some cases and wrong in others, I think it's difficult to say cultural norms are simply and plainly wrong.

[kbenson]

I'm not sure comparing a case where the person has a high likelihood of dying anyway is necessarily appropriate based on what I was referring to. I don't fault the skydiver that failed to pack their parachute correctly and causes it to fail for committing suicide before hitting the ground, I do fault a system that would cause the person responsible for re-checking the parachutes to commit suicide because of the death.

I also didn't say the cultural norm was wrong, just that it was stupid and counter-productive. I meant stupid as an enhancement to counter-productive, and I meant counter-productive in relation to actually advancing a society to the point where the problem that caused the suicide in the first place is less common.

[marak830]

As someone who lives and works in Japan, it's absolutely shameful how people do this, when they are pressured so much from above to bot only work insane hours, but to take the entire responsibility upon themselves. It's as if there is a magical white line, where you can pass orders down through, but there is no responsibility for errors passing back through.