“Americans raise awareness with grass-roots action, but Japanese just wait for the government to take care of them,” said Yoshitomo Takahashi, a professor of behavioral science who researches suicide at the National Defense Medical College in Tokorozawa, Japan.

Officials in Sakai, the small city in Fukui Prefecture, where Tojimbo is located, have installed outdoor lighting at the cliffs along with two pay phones and plenty of the 10-yen coins needed to dial up the national suicide hot line.

Nevertheless, city officials call this the grimmest year on record, with the police saying they know of more than 140 people who came here intending to commit suicide, twice the average in recent years. Most of them were stopped by the police or nearby tourists, or decided not to jump for other reasons, the police say.

The police figure does not include the 54 people this year whom Mr. Shige says he and his group have stopped. City officials credit Mr. Shige with helping keep the number of deaths here down to 13 so far this year, about the same as the 15 suicides last year.

Mr. Shige says his approach to stopping suicides is quite simple: when he finds a likely person, he walks up and gently begins a conversation. The person, usually a man, quickly breaks down in tears, happy to find someone to listen to his problems.

Image Tojimbo, in Fukui Prefecture, is a top tourist destination. Credit... The New York Times

“They are just sitting there, alone, hoping someone will talk to them,” Mr. Shige said.

As an officer stationed at Tojimbo at the end of his 42-year career, he said he was appalled by all the bodies he had to pluck out of the sea. He said he once stopped an elderly couple from Tokyo from jumping and turned them over to city officials who he said gave them money and told them to buy a ticket to the next town. Days later he received a letter from the couple, mailed just before they committed suicide in a neighboring prefecture.