“Let’s die together”

Chapter 2 moves on to explore the phenomena of online suicide pacts and suicide websites in South Korea and Japan. It takes as a starting point the canonical arguments by Durkheim and places them in light of recent empirical work on online suicide pacts in South Korea and Japan. Against prevailing Western, pathological views of suicide, the evidence suggests that this form of death is understood as the pursuit of sociality and communality in periods of ongoing social transformation, in particular the institutional changes specific to the “compressed modernity” of East Asia.