The Internet Way of Death

The message began as innocently as thousands of other singles ads that are routinely posted on the Internet in Japan. "Seeking companion," wrote the lonely male undergrad student from Tokyo. He wasn't looking for his dream date. "I have everything prepared except sleeping pills," the posting concluded. Two weeks later, on May 21, the college student was found dead in a car on a road running through a Gunma Prefecture forest. With him were the bodies of two other young men who, after evidently answering his online invitation, committed collective suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Many of the 30,000 Japanese who kill themselves every year no longer fit the stereotype of the jobless, middle-aged salaryman. Suicides are on the rise among young men and women and with the shift in demographics comes a new style of self destruction. Youth are using a bizarre Internet aberration—the suicide site—to hook up with desperate soulmates willing to share their bleak journey. In February, two women and a man, all in their 20s, met on a suicide site and killed themselves in a Saitama apartment. Since then there have been seven similar incidents and 14 deaths.

The website where the Saitama victims met—Shinju Keijiban (Suicide Pact bulletin board service)—has closed, but many others remain. "The method used by youths to construct human relationships has changed," says Takehiko Kikkawa, a psychiatry professor at Chubu Gakuin University—even in cases where the relationship is necessarily short-lived. Some victims never even meet face to face until the fateful day. Nevertheless, they all share a powerful bond: the fear of dying alone.