New gas suicides also harm those left behind

Manga artist Shigeru Mizuki once visited a temple in Aomori Prefecture dedicated to jizo, the guardian deity of all creatures as well as children who died before their parents.

There, he found many bizarre-looking stone statues of the deity wearing military caps and students' uniforms. Mizuki, an expert on monsters and supernatural beings in the manga world, felt a subtle sadness that belongs to neither the living nor the dead. It was like "a sort of spiritual gas," Mizuki recalls in his book "Yokai Gadan" published by Iwanami Shoten Publishers.

Kitaro, one of Mizuki's best-known characters in the manga series "Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro," can use his hair as an antenna to detect looming evil spirit activity. The uncanny "spirits," in the form of invisible gas, provide settings for stories only when they choose when and where to waft. If they were to gush out at anytime or anywhere, it would spoil the atmosphere.

Suicides using poisonous hydrogen sulfide have occurred one after another recently. Since the gas is invisible and can leak from tiny holes, it can easily cause collateral damage to people who happen to be nearby. In the municipal housing complex in Konan, Kochi Prefecture, where a junior high school girl died Wednesday in an apparent hydrogen sulfide suicide, 80 people were taken to hospital.

Such suicides have rapidly grown this spring. Explanations on how to produce the gas using household products are circulating on the Internet and apparently spread among young people seized with the desire to kill themselves.

In preparation of producing the gas, many people also put up a sign outside their doors to warn neighbors, as instructed on the Internet. The sign reads "poisonous gas in production."

Before hydrogen sulfide, explanations on how to use briquette coal to produce carbon monoxide as a means of committing suicide spread through the Internet. All that has changed are the materials used and the kind of gas being produced.

Meanwhile, the urge to take one's life is spreading among copycats and the trend is giving rise to more new jizo statues. People consult the Internet to learn ways to commit suicide and put up signs of warning to neighbors. Can they not change their desire to "connect" with others and to take their painstaking efforts to end their lives, thereby keeping the will to live?

It is sad to think that the last thing that links suicide victims with this world is poison gas. Using gas to kill themselves is the worst thing they can do to their neighbors and the people who rush to their rescue having read the signs. Such horrible deeds only double the grief of those left behind.

--The Asahi Shimbun, April 25(IHT/Asahi: April 26,2008)