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‘Their cries, their wishes, their hopes… I feel a sense of duty towards them.’
With about 70 suicides per day in 2015, Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. At Tojinbo in Fukui Prefecture – notorious for its ‘suicide cliffs’, where numerous people have ended their lives – the retired policeman Yukio Shige has taken a hands-on approach to addressing the social issue. Alongside volunteers at his Tojinbo Nonprofit Organisation Support Center, Shige patrols the cliffs for anyone who looks distraught, and invites them to his nearby café, where he offers food, an opportunity to talk over their problems and longer-term support if necessary. Over the past 12 years, Shige’s organisation has been credited with saving some 550 lives, even as more and more people have flocked to the cliffs, which have become something of a morbid tourist attraction.
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
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Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
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