Continuing our morbid topic...

I was reading Jeff Yang's piece about the rising popularity of death-themed anime and, coincidentally, the rising suicide rate in Japan, and came across this:

The reaction among parents and government to this suicide surge has so far been surprisingly minimal. "In Japan, people are expected to live with two realities — tatemae, which is what you show in public, and honne, which is who you really are in private," says Grady Hendrix, a senior programmer of the New York Asian Film Festival, which just hosted the North American premiere of the third live-action "Death Note" movie, "L: Change the World." "The two are separate things, and the two realities rarely cross over or comment on each other."

That tatemae-honne divide means that issues like depression, mental illness and self-destructive urges have largely been seen as inappropriate for public discourse. For troubled young people, the social expectation that suicidal thoughts should be locked within the vault of honne has meant that few channels have existed to explore, explain and defuse those feelings. "So sufferers just turn inward, sinking ever deeper, until the end," notes Yukio Saito, director of the 24-hour suicide helpline Inochi no Denwa ("Phones of Life"), which takes an estimated 720,000 calls a year at its 49 locations. "Even now, there are very few counseling or public awareness programs dealing with this problem. In fact, one strong fear among Japanese is that talking about suicide with youngsters might actually prompt them to be suicidal."

Granted, this is Asia and not Asian America, but still insightful.