By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Sep 11 2003 (IPS)

The Japanese suicide website looks eerily calm, what with the little shooting stars criss-crossing on a 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 disclaims that there is any danger in its contents. The site claims no responsibility for any problems caused to loggers.

But it is part of why 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 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 used a suicide website. A letter left by the man in the car revealed they had become acquainted for one reason- "just wanted to die together, nothing else”.

The National Police Agency reports that over the last six months, 32 people, -men and women in their teens and twenties – have killed themselves after meeting through the web.

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," Prof Enosuke Hosokawa, who counsels suicide-prone patients at Tokai University, says in an interview. ”Net-related suicides have the distinct feature of strangers dying in a group, which has not been the typical pattern up to now."

Hosokawa explains 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 adds.

"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 says in an interview.

Japan’s record suicide rates drove the ministry in April to launch a new study on suicides – the total number of people killing themselves began reaching 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 programmes geared specially toward the early detection of depression, and looking into lessons from similar programmes 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 at a record of 33,000. But this is still above the number in the United States, which has twice Japan’s population of more than 127 million people.

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 fifties and forties comprised the highest group. The rise in the number 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 what ever they want in Japanese society. They are thus like pieces of drifting wood with no strong alliance to anything,” he explains in an interview.

”This leads them to turn to total strangers to find a sense of belonging in anything, even in death," he adds.

Indeed, police probes into Internet death pacts show that most of the victims are people who have 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 now also dealing with the rehabilitation of more than 1 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 up themselves in their rooms without venturing out for months on end, or years.

But Yukio Saito, director of Inochi no Denwa (Lifeline) one of Japan’s oldest counselling groups on suicide prevention, says the solution lies not in closing down the Internet sites but turning the web into a positive experience for the youth.

”Web-linked deaths is a "cluster" phenomenon in which young people kill themselves in groups to copy others who have done the same,” explains 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.”

Young people now access a site Saito started this year overwhelmingly. "It is a start," he explains. "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." (END/IPS/AP/PR/IC/DV/SK/JS/03)

Excerpt: