In the country where the world’s first internet suicide pact was forged, the battle to save lives is a desperate one.

Cyberpatrols, web whistle-blowers and a special online suicide-watch police division have become the new front line in Japan’s half-decade battle with a scourge that first came to light on its shores.

Despite Japan’s dismal record coping with its overall suicide rate, the fight with suicide chat rooms is – slowly – being won. Dozens of online forums where strangers met and pledged to end their lives together have been shut down.

Internet service providers have become sentinels of their unhappiest clients. Software has been designed that trawls Japanese cyberspace for keywords that suggest that a suicide is in the offing.

The effect of all this has been startling. A pandemic of web suicides that began in 2003 has ended almost as quickly as it began and the biggest forums have lost all their former potency. It is, police say, a situation that has gone from badly out of control to manageable.

There was a time when victory seemed remote.

In 2003 police in a deeply rural spot of northern Japan discovered a mini-van parked on the verge of a deserted mountain road. The windows were sealed with black duct tape and inside was a burnt-out charcoal stove.

Around it lay the bodies of three young people, the loneliest of souls who had found companionship in life only for the terrible act of death.

Nobody realised it at the time, but it was Japan’s – and the world’s – first internet suicide pact among total strangers.

As the months wore on, chillingly similar reports began to appear in local papers in remote corners of the country. Each time police were confronted with the same baffling scene: the three or four victims were always young, usually in their late teens to mid-twenties, and had no apparent connection with one another before that first and fatal meeting.

Often they had travelled hundreds of miles by train to die together from carbon monoxide poisoning on the edges of quiet country roads. The last text messages sent from their mobile phones were always to numbers that they had never dialled before and contained the matter-of-fact practicalities of group death: “I’ll bring the charcoal”, “We can split the rental of the minivan”.

With the highest rate of suicide among developed nations, the deaths barely registered among the 30,000 Japanese who took their lives that year. It was only late in 2004 that the role of the internet became clear. Investigators discovered an extraordinarily complex secret culture of suicide websites.

By 2005 the internet suicide pacts had become an epidemic. Nearly 100 young people – some as young as 15, others as old as 45 – are thought to have died in such pacts that year. On one notorious Bank Holiday weekend 19 people took their lives in five different locations in a series of pacts involving people from a dozen different cities. That same year there was a worrying 11 per cent rise in the number of suicides by Japanese schoolchildren.

The Government stepped in finally, vowing that even if Japan’s underlying suicide problem could not be solved, the web would not make it easier.

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