Blog Input for Term I- Teenage and Social Issues

I have placed a hyperlink to the actual webpage under the "Links" section of a blog. However, I will still "copy and paste" the article here, right in front of your eyes, so as to save you the trouble of moving your somewhat cumbersome hands. :-)

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Land of the online death pact fights to save lives from the web
Leo Lewis in Tokyo

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< search thoroughly> 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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A simple article, but it reveals a lot of truth about the vulnerability of human minds. Different people adopt different attitudes towards life and it's evident that in this article in which suicide is being discussed, that the teenagers adopt very bleak and depressive outlooks towards life. However, the main focus of this article is the way Japanese authorities have very successfully curbed their country's underlying suicide problem . Note that I have used the word " curbed", instead of "resolved" or "ended". This is because the article mentions the fact that the Japanese investigators found out one avenue in which people seeked suicide, which is through the use of Internet and suicide forums/ websites. Therefore, after realising that there was actually such a "complex secret culture" happening beneath the vast Internet ocean, authorities put an end to it through the usage of highly effective and stringent measures.

After reading this article, I was inevitably shocked and spooked. Cross-referencing to another article based on this issue( " Glamour of Death"), I finally understood why these teenagers destroyed their valued lives upon no logical basis. The other article explicitly mentions that within suicide websites, there were internet “memorial” sites by which even public eulogies described the victim as courageous, or elevated the status of the "willing sacrificer" by commentating that flags were flown at half-mast. In that particular article, a professor of psychiatry made this statement that forged a great impression in my highly innocent psyche, " If they haven’t had much recognition in life, it can be seen as a way to get the adulation and attention that they have missed . . . through death." Then, naturally, the next question I asked myself was whether it was " worth it or not".

The fame derived from killing oneself may be appreciated by "birds of the same flock", but in what aspect can it be considered fame and getting attention for oneself? The only thing that is going through my mind will be the emotional and psychological blow of the people who truly loved the "emo-teens", who let a moment of folly control their voice of reason. These teenagers, on a basis of excitement and recognition, took their own lives without thinking about the consequences that might arise from it all.

Furthermore, we are talking about human lives here, which make the entire issue exponentially spooky. When I skimmed through the portion about the sadistical way the teengers took their lives, my heart squirmed with absolute terror and I just could not believe what I was seeing. As teenagers, we face constant pressure from many external and internal factors, but death is never a way to solve problems. Only when we face up to the problems bravely and overcome them with a sense of dignity and pride can we be considered a rational human being. The way the teenagers toyed around and freely mainpulated their fates reminded me of how blessed and complete I am physically and psychologically.

Nevertheless, I must commend the efforts undertaken by the Japanese authorities. From what I learnt from human geography last year, I faintly recall that Japan is facing the problem of an aging population, in which there is a higher proportion of elderly above the younger generation. This signifies that the Japanese government has to ensure that the younger generation is kept intact and receive an all-rounded education, such that when they immerse into the working community, they are not only able to support the elderly but also have the capability to maintain the stability and development of the economy. Considering the social context as mentioned above , we can fully comprehend why the Japanese gov. saw the preservation of the younger generation as an issue of serious consequence.

However, I personally believe that the efforts undertaken on the part of the government are not sufficient enough, due to the fact that the governmental body only sets the general rules and regulations. Delving deeper into a typical family, it's the parents who restrict the actions of their children and consistently interact with their kids. Therefore, it's not only responsible of any parent to be aware of the doings of their children but in the capacity of an adult, to guide them down the correct moral path instead of letting them "appreciate the vastness of the Net." A combined taskforce encompassing the three vital characters in a child's life, who are the PARENT, the TEACHER AND the GOVERNMENT namely, would be much more effective and powerful.

All-in-all, it's utterly flabbergasting to see fellow teenagers indulge in the "pleasures of suicide". I can't possibly laugh when I am falling off a boulder with no safety equipment at all; shouting "death is all I seek for, I can't wait to bask in the fires of Hell!"

It is wrong, isn't it?

- Yours truly,

Sher Yin