A Sociological Investigation on "Group Suicides through the Internet" in Japan

Abstract

Since October 2003, suicides through the Internet, known as "Netto Jisatu (Internet suicide)" or "Netto Sinjyu," have occurred repeatedly in Japan. In this form of suicide, people who are mainly in their twenties or thirties find other suicidal people on the Internet and commit suicide as a group. By December 2005. 69 cases of this type of suicide had been reported, and 204 people had reportedly participated in such incidents of suicide. The main characteristic of such suicides is that people do not share any fantasy or ideology, which is typically the case in mass religious suicides and double suicides committed by lovers. In other words, in this form of suicide, death is assumed to be experienced independently and "privately" in the midst of a group. Therefore, this death is different from a "tabooed death," which is one form of an alienated death that has been presupposed in modern society with strong taboos or norms. This suicidal death also does not conform to the patterns of "egoistic suicide" and "anomic suicide" that Emile Durkheim proposed in "Suicide." This is because suicide committed through the Internet is not attempted in the absence of society but in its presence. Therefore, in what sociological configuration can we understand this private death? According to the author's analysis, contemporary society relativizes the boundary between life and death, and it is this contemporary society that causes Internet suicides by affirming unlimited social arbitrariness. Based on this perspective, cases of Internet suicide necessitate a reexamination of contemporary society that does not exclude suicide and death as negative elements. Adapted from the source document.