Suicide pacts a grim and growing trend for Japan

"Everything's horrible, I want to die," read the message in the Japanese Internet chat room. "Who will die with me?"

In a grim new problem for officials tackling the nation's alarmingly high suicide rate, rising numbers of Japanese are dying each year in group suicides after meeting online at sites like this.

On Thursday, four people - two in their 30s, a 22-year-old and a 19-year-old - were found dead in a car by a riverbank in the northernmost island of Hokkaido, the latest of a series of group suicides over the past few months.

In February alone, at least 16 people have taken their lives this way.

As with the other cases, police found several charcoal stoves in the car, which had its windows sealed from inside. The three men and one woman, who had met through the Internet, died by inhaling carbon monoxide from the charcoal.

Group suicides make up just a small fraction of the over 30,000 Japanese who take their lives each year, but more involve pacts between strangers who got in touch via suicide web sites and that has experts worried.

"The idea of dying together is somehow reassuring," said Yukio Saito, who heads the "Inochi no Denwa" - Phone of Life - suicide hotline. "Dying alone is lonely and takes more courage.

"The way these suicides are carried out is very sensational for the media, and very suggestive for people who may be thinking of taking their lives."

RISING NUMBERS

According to police, a record 34,427 Japanese took their own lives in 2003, more than a quarter of them because of debt or economic woes.

Of the total, only 34 died in Internet-linked group suicides. But the number rose to 54 in 2004 and police say the real number was probably even higher.

No religious prohibitions exist against suicide in Japan and it was long seen as a way to escape failure, or of saving loved ones from embarrassment or financial loss.

Experts warn that pinning suicide to a single cause is simplistic, but all agree that Japan's economic downturn since the late 1990s has had an especially disastrous effect.

In 2000, according to the World Health Organization, Japan's suicide rate was 35.2 per 100,000 for men and 13.4 per 100,000 for women. The rate in the United States that same year was 17.1 per 100,000 for men and 4.0 per 100,000 for women.

Experts say the Internet cannot be blamed for promoting suicide, but that the intensity of some of the chat rooms may worsen the psychological state of some of those involved.

"Some people say to each other 'I want to die, I want to die,' and this may lead to their actually doing it," said Takeshi Tamura, an associate professor at Tokyo Gakugei University.