Tokyo (AsiaNews/SCMP) "Shall we die together?" If you write this on the internet in Japanese, many sites will pop up, about the desire to die and the best way to end it all. An increasing number of Japanese youth are getting to know each other on the internet this way, and they decide to commit suicide together.
At the end of March, six bodies were found five men and one woman aged between 20 and 30 years in a car in a forest area 80km north-east of Tokyo. They had killed themselves using a gas stove, they came from six different prefectures and police think they got to know each other through the internet.
Since the end of the nineties, suicide pacts via internet have increased, but Japan can lay claim to the sad record of the highest number. There were 91 in 2005, in 34 cases, and more than 54 suicides in 19 cases in 2004, according to police statistics. Just last March, 18 people died in five cases that the police suspect were suicide pacts organized via internet. Victims are usually aged between 20 and 30 years and they suffocate themselves in gas stoves, perhaps after sealing the windows.
"On the internet, youth can talk about the most intimate matters with perfect strangers," said Mafumi Usui, psychology professor at Niigata Seiryo university. "Many don't talk seriously [about committing suicide]. "But sometimes one chat participant star suggests how it can be done. That's how the internet could encourage suicides."
Police are concerned and say these websites should be censored or closed down. In October, police carried out an operation with the help of site managers, identifying possible suicides and intervening to stop them. In February, the police said the move prevented at least 14 suicides. But experts say similar interventions could only prompt suicide aspirants to use less well-known and foreign sites, where Japanese police would be unable to intervene.
There are even those who maintain that these websites give people space to let out their problems, thus helping to prevent more suicides than those they encourage.
In any case, this is a worldwide phenomenon. In South Korea, for example, in December 2000, a 26-year-old man was arrested for failing to prevent the suicide of two people who met on the web. The man was with them before they poisoned themselves in a motel in the eastern city of Kangnung.
