Photo/Illutration Students use on-loan computers at a junior high school in Tokyo in April 2022. (Pool)

The Japanese word shinitai, meaning “want to die,” was the most common keystroke related to psychological stress among schoolchildren in a special study.

The finding was made by a nonprofit organization that pioneered a specialized filter to home in on online search words that indicate the user is a troubled child plagued by suicidal thoughts.

It was based on data from 70,000 or so computers that were on loan from eight boards of education and other entities under the central government’s “one device for one student” program.

The result suggests that children are doing similar searches even more often on their own smartphones, said an official with Ova, which works through online counseling to prevent young people from committing suicides.

“So many children are suffering from serious distress that could lead to suicide,” the official added.

Ova provides services that use a browser extension to offer information on counseling hotlines and other tips to children who have conducted an online search on any of the 5,000 or so keywords related to psychological stress.

Analysis of data from the first three months of the year showed that about one in 58 elementary, junior high and senior high school students conducted searches related to deep-seated anguish. The most common search word was “want to die,” entered by 206 children, followed by “bullying” (200), “suicide” (178) and “overdose” (158).

‘LIKELY MORE SEARCHES ON OWN SMARTPHONES’

The distress-related search words were analyzed by category.

The most common search word category was mental disease, at 40.1 percent, followed by suicide (22.0 percent), personal relationships at school (19.0 percent), sexual victimhood (7.2 percent), self-harm (6.3 percent) and personal relationships at home (5.3 percent).

Ova also studied what forms of assistance were used by the children through the information it offered.

The most commonly used form of assistance was a cyberspace for those who are feeling distressed, at 20.3 percent, followed by a chat counseling hotline (14.7 percent) and a bulletin board for spilling out feelings (11.7 percent).

“Children who feel that they don’t belong anywhere at home or at school and have no means for letting out their sense of pain anywhere are entering this search word of ‘want to die,’” said Jiro Ito, Ova’s head. “That they are doing so already this often on their on-loan computers suggests they are doing similar searches even more often on their own smartphones.”

Provisional suicide statistics from the National Police Agency and the health ministry show that a record 527 elementary, junior high and senior high school students took their own lives in 2024.

“Child suicides are no longer rare,” Ito said. “They have become a day-to-day issue. Grown-ups should be engaging with children with a sense of alarm over the rising number of suicides.”

(This article was written by Kohei Kano and Mariko Sugiyama.)

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