JAPAN: Emoto's Plan

In Japan, where 23,500 people killed themselves last year, and the suicide rate increases by 5% a year, Candy Salesman Akira Emoto, 31. was long regarded as a candidate for the statistics column. He brooded, he ate sleeping pills and last summer he tried to poison himself. "Just you wait." he told friends in the southern city of Kokonoe, "very soon I shall do something that will startle the nation."

To snap his son out of his despondency. Akira's father found him a bride. Though it was an arranged marriage, Akira seemed pleased with his pretty, 19-year-old Chieko, and she with him. They delayed their honeymoon because they did not have enough money. One day last week, Emoto announced gaily: "My uncle in Iwakuni wants us to go up there for our honeymoon, and he has sent me the tickets."

Emoto took his bride aboard an All Nippon Airways DC-3, put her in a front seat, himself took a seat beside the plane door. The stewardess noted that he watched carefully how she bolted the door, but thought nothing of it. After the takeoff. Emoto, clearly restless, went three times to the plane's toilet, each time taking a blue canvas bag with him. After the third trip, Emoto returned to his seat still carrying his bag. He looked ill and asked for a glass of water. Returning with it, the stewardess was just in time to see Emoto vanish out the plane door, to fall 2,300 ft. into the Inland Sea.

Luckily for Emoto's bride and the 25 other passengers and crew of the DC-3, Emoto's departure was not quite as spectacular as he intended. In his canvas bag were found two sticks of dynamite. In the plane's toilet were 25 more sticks, a burned fuse and a percussion cap that had failed to explode.