When he checked into one of Tokyo's newest and most luxurious hotels, there was nothing to indicate that the 47-year-old businessman was planning to kill himself. A few hours later, at about 1pm on April 25, guests reported a foul smell coming from Room 1019 and the management immediately called the police and fire brigade.
Entering the 10th floor room of the Peninsula Tokyo, police found a note propped against a chair that bore the warning: 'Please take care when entering the room because of suicide using hydrogen sulfide.'
The man, who has not been named, was found unconscious in the bath. Beside him was a concoction of home-use detergents and bath lotion that was still giving off lethal fumes. According to police, the man was still alive when he was admitted to hospital but died shortly afterwards, becoming the fourth person to kill themselves by inhaling chemicals in the space of 24 hours. Two days earlier, a girl aged 14 was found dead in the bathroom of her flat in the early evening. Her mother was admitted to hospital after finding a note - 'Gas is being generated - do not open' - and inhaling hydrogen sulfide as she tried to rescue her daughter. Some 120 people were evacuated from the complex.
For more than a decade, successive Japanese governments have struggled to come up with an effective way of reducing the national suicide rate, which accounts for well over 30,000 deaths a year, one of the highest rates per head in the world. But despite the money being spent on the problem, nobody appears to have been ready for a new suicide trend or to have devised a way to combat it.
'The internet is accessible to pretty much anyone now, young and old, and absolutely anything can be found on there,' says Yukio Saito, executive director of the Inochi no Denwa suicide hotline. 'For anyone who is contemplating suicide, it does not take long to find a way to do it.
'In the last month or so, we have heard of two or three cases every day of people killing themselves with ordinary chemicals that you can purchase at any supermarket or hardware store, and that is obviously a huge concern to us,' he says. 'But just as big a concern is the media's coverage of these deaths.'