NINE Japanese men and women took their lives yesterday as part of an epidemic of suicide pacts forged over the internet.

Seven of the dead, who were in their late teens and early 20s and are believed never to have met each other before yesterday, were found together in the same rented car in Japan’s biggest cyber mass suicide.

As police in Saitama discovered the macabre scene, two women were found dead in front of a rural shrine in the neighbouring prefecture of Kanagawa, apparently after a similar pact. Their car was parked two km (just over a mile) down the same mountain road where, a fortnight ago, four people who were previously strangers killed themselves in a car.

All three groups drove their vehicles to remote areas of countryside before sealing the windows with the same type of duct tape and lighting charcoal briquettes on small cooking stoves to produce deadly fumes.

It is no coincidence that both groups chose the same path to oblivion: police in Japan have seen it with disturbing regularity. Nearly 20 Japanese aged between 16 and 30 have used this method of suicide this year, and the total in 2003 was nearly twice that. Dozens of websites are devoted to discussion of suicide, and their chat rooms have become the forum of an online “suicide community” whose members are nearly always in the prime of life.

The community’s unhappy constituents have decided that carbon monoxide poisoning is, according to one of the largest sites, the “most peaceful way for the like-minded and lonely to die together”. The first incident of this sort took place in February last year, and since then, 20 separate groups of young people have selected the same method.

As well as allowing members to agree on their type of death, the websites provide a national message board for those contemplating suicide but who cannot bear the thought of dying alone. The long tradition of suicide in Japan has been shaped to suit a new internet-literate generation which sees suicide not as a private matter, but as a group activity.

Many of those who have died in group suicides have been found with long lists of e-mail addresses. Their mobile phone records frequently show that the victims have only ever made one call to the people they were eventually found dead with.

Comments posted in the “suicide applicant” chat rooms show individuals actively seeking partners. The sites frequently find people initially asking for advice on taking their lives but then coming across people ready to carry out the act immediately. In one interchange, a man offers the services of his car but asks whether anyone has the briquettes and stove. The discussion is joined by two others who mull over the best locations for a suicide attempt.

Last month the World Health Organisation found that since its previous report in 1999, Japan had jumped 13 places to having the tenth- highest suicide rate in the world and the highest among G8 nations.

In what they agreed was an under-analysed conclusion, WHO experts cited the effects of Japan’s extended economic downturn as the trigger for its rise in suicides. While that assessment explains the rise in suicides among unemployed men in their 50s, the Government is still in the dark about the sudden surge in suicide pacts involving the young.

According to Denwa Inochi, Japan’s equivalent of the Samaritans, the group suicides reveal much about the generation carrying them out. A spokesperson said that it was clear from the content of most of the internet chat rooms that loneliness and feelings of isolation from society emerge as the predominant motive for suicides among the young.

By its very existence, the online “suicide community” gives those people an opportunity to be part of a group, but “because of the reason why they have come together, they never benefit from those feelings”, the spokesperson said.

DEATH WATCH

Scandal, shame and failure have all produced high-profile suicides in Japan, though the most memorable in recent memory was perhaps the ritual self-disemboweling, or seppuku, of the author Yukio Mishima. He used the public event to promote his extreme views on Japanese nationalism.

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