it's great to be back here at tedxtokyo
six years after I introduce my movie
saving 10,000 winning a war on suicide
in Japan at the time my efforts with the
movie weren't going very well I wasn't
getting a lot of interest in it at all
and maybe 3,000 views on YouTube and
Patrick kindly invited me to get to talk
that day as I walked home after
tedxtokyo 2013 I was in floods of tears
and because around 50 or 60 people had
shared their stories of loss of a friend
of a family member that they had had a
deeply missed and this was a trend that
I would see again and again as I did
basically over a hundred events around
Japan hearing amazing stories hearing
seeing inspirational people ladies out
in chiba over seventy years of age
answering the phone and you know chino
den ma every night so so to update
there's some good news but there's also
some bad news and the bad news is the
reason why i'm really here today and the
good news first the suicide rate in
japan is has now gone from 30,000 down
to 20,000 so it has reduced by 1/3 okay
thanks to the amazing efforts of many of
those people i feature in the movie like
like she gets on and told you mo Clift
who has now stopped six hundred people
jumping off that cliff okay this is
amazing thing so the suicide rate in
Japan is now at a 40-year low however
youth suicide was is now at a 40-year
high 599 children kill themselves last
year which is the highest since records
began this weekend ladies and gentlemen
this particular weekend over the last 20
years has been the worst
weekend for child suicide it's been the
peak every year for the last 20 years
why is that it's because children are
going back to school tomorrow so I
literally have one minute left so let me
give you two important statistics that
I'm starting to work on looking perhaps
for another project number one is that
there were four hundred and fourteen
thousand cases of bullying in schools
last year four hundred and fourteen
thousand for every school day two
thousand cases this is it's very hard to
kind of understand that figure but let
me give you a positive note on that is
that three hundred and seventeen
thousand of those cases were a primary
school level elementary school level and
why I say that's a positive is because
these six to twelve year olds don't
really know what bullying is so that's a
chance for us to define what they're
doing is wrong and under terrible damage
that it causes my final point on the
statistics is it's an even more
difficult topic to talk about which is
child abuse child abuse last year in
Japan was 159 thousand cases this if
we're looking to save children's lives
we have to detect and protect now
actually in child abuse detection is
going very well because this figure is
three hundred and forty percent up than
ten years ago which I'm sure it was
around the same level but we're just
detecting more but my final point today
is under protect for those children who
go to child welfare centers which
there's 200 in Japan and there's three
thousand four hundred amazing social
workers to help those children but
that's not enough and some of those
social workers are are handling 100
cases at the same time
so detect and protect because what is
more important than to protect the life
of a child thank you very much