Government stats for Japan are here[1]. While there is a stigma around suicide here (particularly families wanting a death to be 'accidental'), I don't think it's common enough to really affect the statistics.

To quote the source: "For men, the most common method is hanging (首つり, 69.3%), followed by jumping (飛降り, 8.8%), and suffocation by burning charcoal or a similar substance (練炭等, 7.3%), and for women the most common method is hanging (59.8%), followed by jumping (14.2%) and drowning (入水, 6.3%)."

For both sexes, jumping appears to be significantly more common for children under 19 than other groups. Train jumping (飛込み) is much less common than you might think, but is common for the "age undermined" (不詳) group (men 14.3%, women 42.9%), presumably because the remains are hard to identify.

[1] https://www.mhlw.go.jp/wp/hakusyo/jisatsu/18/dl/1-6.pdf (page 30)

Thanks for providing this. It's the sort of info that's virtually impossible to find as someone who doesn't speak Japanese. (I tried and only found sources that weren't official or were overly general like WHO stats.)

These all seem like pretty awful ways to die. I don't even know how you go about drowning yourself. I'm surprised medication isn't more common.

do you happen to know how the gender gap works in Japan?

is it still the case that women try more and men die more? By what ratios?

Wow that's an embarrassing typo. Thanks for catching that.

> I understand suicide statistics from there may be unreliable.

Why is that? I know suicide rates are high there, but isn't there information to glean from it?

My guess would be social stigma.