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From the NY Times yesterday:
Strangers in Life Join Hands in Death as the Web Becomes a Tool for Suicide in Japan
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: October 18, 2004
TOKYO, Oct. 17 - On Sept. 22, a 34-year-old mother of two posted an Internet notice looking for companions for a group suicide. On Oct. 5, the police found her and three other women barely alive; they were sealing themselves into a tent with a burning charcoal stove, intending to succumb to carbon monoxide.
The next day, the woman posted a second recruiting notice on a Web site, saying, "I know the method and the process because I have an experience of failing to commit suicide."
By Monday night, her notice had drawn six volunteers from all over Japan. Four were 20-years-olds, including a university student from Aomori, 350 miles north of Tokyo; a part-time worker from Osaka, 250 miles to the west; and an unemployed woman from Saga, 600 miles west.
Strangers in life, the seven found a bond in death. Working methodically, they parked a rented van at dusk on a mountain park road west of Tokyo, wrote an e-mail message with their precise location and programmed a cellphone to send it after they were dead. They sealed the van from the inside, took sleeping pills, lit charcoal braziers, and tied their wrists and torsos together.
Several miles away, at the same time, the same method of self-asphyxiation was taking the lives of two women in their 20's. One had taken part in the failed attempt a week earlier with the organizer of the seven in the van. Apparently part of the same group, the two in the car had not traveled with the others in the van, probably because of Japan's strict seat-belt laws. The police found the victims inside the two vehicles on Tuesday morning.
What seems to have brought all nine together - just long enough to kill themselves - are "suicide sites" on the Internet.
For Japanese with high-speed Internet access, which a majority of homes now have, this suicide subculture is just a few key strokes away. On a recent day, typing the Japanese words for "suicide" and "manual" into the Japanese version of the Google search engine yielded 29,761 citations. Suicide sites have names like "Underground Suicide" and "Deadline.''
"Are you thinking of killing yourself?" asks one site as two cartoon skeletons bob up and down mocking an image of the Virgin Mary. Before blood red colors drip over the macabre scene, the site continues, "If you are sure, I will take you there."
Deeper in the site, there lies a slide show of "proper" places to commit suicide. Favored spots - online and in reality - are forests with views of Mt. Fuji, a revered national symbol.
Another section evaluates 10 methods of committing suicide, rating them for "pain," "chance of success" and "annoyance to other people." Unlike the excruciating pain of the disemboweling rite of the ancient samurai, hara-kiri, today's suicidal youth seem to prefer drifting off. Jumping in front of commuter trains, some sites note, can leave a family facing a railroad company bill of up to $65,000 in cleanup costs.
In chat rooms, morbid thoughts reign.
"Whoever wants to die, should die," begins one typically bleak posting. "Whoever wants to live, should live." Undoubtedly, much of the Internet traffic is confined to depressed people with a taste for the macabre. Strong, morbid undercurrents churn through Japanese society. A suicide manual became a bestseller in the late 1990's and a movie about high school suicide, "Suicide Club," became a minor hit last year.
But about once a month since January 2002, Japan has recorded a group suicide, successful or attempted, where the participants had linked up on the Internet.
Last year's toll of 34 Internet-related suicides was only a tiny fraction of 34,427 suicides recorded in Japan, a high rate relative to Western countries, but there are disturbing trends. For one, most Japanese suicide victims are middle-aged or elderly men. But the Internet suicide victims tend to be young adults, largely people in their 20's.
Free speech laws leave the police largely powerless to curb the sites. But psychiatrists and social workers are starting to speak out.
"Here is the convenience of the Internet: Anyone who wants to die can just sign on to such a site," Mafumi Usui, a professor of sociopsychology at Niigata Seiryo University, said in an interview. "If you are a real friend in a real life, you know your friend's family, job and life, and can stop him if he tries to kill himself. But on the Web site, these people bond to each other only on the point of committing suicide. They don't have any tools to stop others from dying."
Not only are suicidal people feeding off each other, but lonely people are joining a group, a social unit that often is paramount in Japan. Professor Usui added, "If you try to stop it, it means that you are getting out of the group."
With Japan an affluent society, young people are often without the overriding goals that drove their grandparents to fight World War II, and their parents to rebuild the devastated country afterward. Last year, almost one third of 100 Japanese teenagers polled by Aera, a magazine aimed at young adults, said they had considered suicide, largely for what they themselves acknowledged as "trivial reasons."
"When they come across a minor trouble, they get distressed," said Dr. Harufusa Higano, a psychiatrist who directs a clinic here. Recalling one young woman who had attempted suicide by cutting her wrists, he said: "She told me, 'I could not get a Gucci handbag and had to end up with a Japan-made. I want to die.' "
Last week's group suicide pact, apparently the largest in modern Japan, has rapidly jumped from somber national television coverage to the Internet underworld and BBS's, or bulletin boards.
Next, a larger group will try, "to make a record," Dr. Higano said. "That was actually written on a Web site BBS I found yesterday."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the NY Times yesterday:
Strangers in Life Join Hands in Death as the Web Becomes a Tool for Suicide in Japan
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: October 18, 2004
TOKYO, Oct. 17 - On Sept. 22, a 34-year-old mother of two posted an Internet notice looking for companions for a group suicide. On Oct. 5, the police found her and three other women barely alive; they were sealing themselves into a tent with a burning charcoal stove, intending to succumb to carbon monoxide.
The next day, the woman posted a second recruiting notice on a Web site, saying, "I know the method and the process because I have an experience of failing to commit suicide."
By Monday night, her notice had drawn six volunteers from all over Japan. Four were 20-years-olds, including a university student from Aomori, 350 miles north of Tokyo; a part-time worker from Osaka, 250 miles to the west; and an unemployed woman from Saga, 600 miles west.
Strangers in life, the seven found a bond in death. Working methodically, they parked a rented van at dusk on a mountain park road west of Tokyo, wrote an e-mail message with their precise location and programmed a cellphone to send it after they were dead. They sealed the van from the inside, took sleeping pills, lit charcoal braziers, and tied their wrists and torsos together.
Several miles away, at the same time, the same method of self-asphyxiation was taking the lives of two women in their 20's. One had taken part in the failed attempt a week earlier with the organizer of the seven in the van. Apparently part of the same group, the two in the car had not traveled with the others in the van, probably because of Japan's strict seat-belt laws. The police found the victims inside the two vehicles on Tuesday morning.
What seems to have brought all nine together - just long enough to kill themselves - are "suicide sites" on the Internet.
For Japanese with high-speed Internet access, which a majority of homes now have, this suicide subculture is just a few key strokes away. On a recent day, typing the Japanese words for "suicide" and "manual" into the Japanese version of the Google search engine yielded 29,761 citations. Suicide sites have names like "Underground Suicide" and "Deadline.''
"Are you thinking of killing yourself?" asks one site as two cartoon skeletons bob up and down mocking an image of the Virgin Mary. Before blood red colors drip over the macabre scene, the site continues, "If you are sure, I will take you there."
Deeper in the site, there lies a slide show of "proper" places to commit suicide. Favored spots - online and in reality - are forests with views of Mt. Fuji, a revered national symbol.
Another section evaluates 10 methods of committing suicide, rating them for "pain," "chance of success" and "annoyance to other people." Unlike the excruciating pain of the disemboweling rite of the ancient samurai, hara-kiri, today's suicidal youth seem to prefer drifting off. Jumping in front of commuter trains, some sites note, can leave a family facing a railroad company bill of up to $65,000 in cleanup costs.
In chat rooms, morbid thoughts reign.
"Whoever wants to die, should die," begins one typically bleak posting. "Whoever wants to live, should live." Undoubtedly, much of the Internet traffic is confined to depressed people with a taste for the macabre. Strong, morbid undercurrents churn through Japanese society. A suicide manual became a bestseller in the late 1990's and a movie about high school suicide, "Suicide Club," became a minor hit last year.
But about once a month since January 2002, Japan has recorded a group suicide, successful or attempted, where the participants had linked up on the Internet.
Last year's toll of 34 Internet-related suicides was only a tiny fraction of 34,427 suicides recorded in Japan, a high rate relative to Western countries, but there are disturbing trends. For one, most Japanese suicide victims are middle-aged or elderly men. But the Internet suicide victims tend to be young adults, largely people in their 20's.
Free speech laws leave the police largely powerless to curb the sites. But psychiatrists and social workers are starting to speak out.
"Here is the convenience of the Internet: Anyone who wants to die can just sign on to such a site," Mafumi Usui, a professor of sociopsychology at Niigata Seiryo University, said in an interview. "If you are a real friend in a real life, you know your friend's family, job and life, and can stop him if he tries to kill himself. But on the Web site, these people bond to each other only on the point of committing suicide. They don't have any tools to stop others from dying."
Not only are suicidal people feeding off each other, but lonely people are joining a group, a social unit that often is paramount in Japan. Professor Usui added, "If you try to stop it, it means that you are getting out of the group."
With Japan an affluent society, young people are often without the overriding goals that drove their grandparents to fight World War II, and their parents to rebuild the devastated country afterward. Last year, almost one third of 100 Japanese teenagers polled by Aera, a magazine aimed at young adults, said they had considered suicide, largely for what they themselves acknowledged as "trivial reasons."
"When they come across a minor trouble, they get distressed," said Dr. Harufusa Higano, a psychiatrist who directs a clinic here. Recalling one young woman who had attempted suicide by cutting her wrists, he said: "She told me, 'I could not get a Gucci handbag and had to end up with a Japan-made. I want to die.' "
Last week's group suicide pact, apparently the largest in modern Japan, has rapidly jumped from somber national television coverage to the Internet underworld and BBS's, or bulletin boards.
Next, a larger group will try, "to make a record," Dr. Higano said. "That was actually written on a Web site BBS I found yesterday."
