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Japan: Internet becomes a deadly
link
By Suvendrini Kakuchi
 TOKYO - The Japanese suicide website looks
eerily calm, what with little shooting stars
criss-crossing on an ink-black screen and falling on
pink cherry blossoms. Classical music plays in the
background.
The site says it is for people who
are feeling low or suicidal. It boasts an average of 232
hits per day and denies that there is any danger in its
contents. The site claims no responsibility for problems
caused to loggers.
But it is part of the reason
Japan, a suicide-prone country, is grappling with a new
trend - a spate of Internet-related suicides linked to
websites where young people, who are total strangers,
can contact one another to plan their deaths.
The latest incident was reported in May, when a
24-year-old man and two women, 23 and 20, met for the
first - and last - time at a train station, got into a
car together and drove to a wooded area where they
asphyxiated themselves.
The Japanese media
reported they had accessed a suicide website, and a
letter left by the man in the car revealed they had
become acquainted for only one reason - "just wanted to
die together, nothing else".
The National Police
Agency reported that over the past six months, 32 people
- men and women in their teens and 20s - have killed
themselves after meeting through the web.
Police
estimate that there are 8,000 sites that, while not
actively soliciting death, provide access to a variety
of how-to methods such as carbon monoxide poisoning or
taking sleeping pills. Some, however, invite people to
overdose together on camera.
Psychologists
explain that while suicide is not unfamiliar to Japan -
seppuku or ritual disembowelment is related to
nationalism and group loyalty - Internet-linked death
pacts are a new and baffling trend.
"Its hard to
explain," said professor Enosuke Hosokawa, who counsels
suicide-prone patients at Tokai University.
"'Net-related suicides have the distinct feature of
strangers dying in a group, which has not been the
typical pattern up to now."
Hosokawa explained
that depression plays a big role in suicides in Japan.
"We treat patients who need help because they
cannot deal with problems such as sicknesses,
unemployment or divorce. But meeting to die without a
concrete reason is something new," he said.
"Death pacts are a new problem here and we are
still researching the issue towards a comprehensive
suicide-prevention policy," an official at the Health
and Welfare Ministry said.
Japan's record
suicide rates drove the ministry in April to launch a
new study on suicide - the total number of people taking
their own lives has reached more than 30,000 annually
since 1998. That is a more than 50 percent increase in
the last five years.
Alarmed, the Health
Ministry is looking into new mental-care programs geared
specifically toward the early detection of depression,
and taking lessons from similar programs in Sweden and
the United States.
According to police
statistics, 31,042 people took their own lives in 2001,
slightly lower than the previous year, which reached a
record of 33,000. But this figure is still above the
number in the United States, a country that has 127
million people, twice the population of Japan.
At the top of the list of Japanese' reasons for
committing suicide were economic problems such as
unemployment or huge personal debt. Men in their 40s and
50s comprised the largest group. The rise in the number
of suicides appears to have grown parallel to recession
and economic woes, reflected in the 67 percent rise in
suicides among men in the last decade.
Education
expert Tamotsu Sengotsu contends that loneliness and a
lack of ability to adjust to society propel a fixation
on the Internet among young people, and this facilitates
access to the suicide websites.
"Today's
generation faces no crucial issues - young people are
affluent and are free to do whatever they want in
Japanese society. They are thus like pieces of drifting
wood with no strong alliance to anything," Sengotsu
explained.
"This leads them to turn to total
strangers to find a sense of belonging in anything, even
in death," he added.
Indeed, police probes into
Internet death pacts show that most of the victims were
people who had shunned society - they had no regular
jobs or family responsibilities.
Those who
undertook the May suicide pact, for example, were said
to have had friends but not close relationships with
anyone in particular.
Japan is also now dealing
with the rehabilitation of more than a million people,
mostly men, who experts say have withdrawn from society
altogether. They live with their parents who provide for
them but have no close social contact.
The
hikikomori, as they are known here, can lock
themselves up in their rooms without venturing out for
months or years on end.
But Yukio Saito,
director of Inochi no Denwa (Lifeline), one of Japan's
oldest counseling groups on suicide prevention, says the
solution lies not in closing down the Internet sites but
in turning the web into a positive experience for youth.
"Web-linked deaths is a 'cluster' phenomenon in
which young people kill themselves in groups to copy
others who have done the same," explained Saito, a
Methodist minister. "This is a trend that can be
countered by setting up sites that teach them about the
issue and provide a venue for hope through personal
communication."
Currently, the number of
adolescence accessing a site Saito started this year is
overwhelming.
"It is a start," he explained.
"With so many youth feeling isolated and not being able
to talk to their parents about their emotional
loneliness, the Internet plays a valuable role by
reaching out to them."
(Inter Press
Service)
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