Messages of misfortune
It felt like deja vu when I heard recently about the vicious chain text messages popping up on the mobile phones of many Japanese teenagers. In the 1970s, we used to have chain letters, or cards, doing the rounds. We called them 'misfortune letters', because they predicted that disaster would afflict those who failed to forward them to several other people.
A typical one would read something like this: 'You are supposed to forward this letter to five people in five days, otherwise something terrible will happen to you. Miss Kazuko Tanaka in Meguro ward did not take the advice and she was killed in a car accident.' Another would go: 'I hate you for bullying me. I stabbed you many times and killed you in my dream. You have to send this e-mail to seven other people, or I will come and stab you again - this time not in a dream.'
These days, similar messages are scaring youngsters from elementary to secondary school. They hurriedly copy the text and send it on to their friends from their mobile phones. This, of course, spreads the anxiety for recipients more quickly and extensively than our old postcards could. And today's messages sometimes carry slander against individuals, citing their names.
Many parents and educators are concerned about the invisible, silent toll this is taking on young people. Japanese children today are accustomed to the anonymity of cyberspace, where they can play games with people they will never meet. This can foster an unconscious aggressiveness, because they can insult and attack others online with impunity - a trend plain to see on many internet bulletin boards. The victims can neither rebut the attacks nor prevent them.
Japanese children spend hours watching TV, surfing the Net and playing video games. This world of violent images and attacks may be promoting callousness during the formative years of their personalities, some observers say.
'We are afraid that our youngsters may be receiving [such text messages] or even sending them out at any time without our knowledge,' said a Tokyo mother of a 13-year-old boy. Unlike postcards arriving by regular mail, online messaging is hard for parents to keep an eye on.
The only way to break the chain cycle is to stop sending the messages, according to concerned specialists at the Nippon Information Communication Association. They keep 10 mobile phones available so people can call them and dump their chain messages - freeing themselves from anxiety. They have received nearly 35,000 such messages so far.
The association reports: 'We do not relay them to anyone, and none of us has been killed or injured in horrible ways.'
