Japan’s Favorite Suicide Forest

Japan’s Favorite Suicide Forest

One of the favored suicide methods is located at The Aokigahara Forest, at the foot of towering and beautiful Mount Fiji.

After the novel Kuroi Jukai (Sea of Trees) was published by Seicho Matsumoto, in which a young lover commits suicide in the Aokigahara forest, people started taking their own lives tin the at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. Bodies are often found after years or never at all. The Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses.

Seichō Matsumoto (1909 – 1992) was a prolific Japanese writer (more than 450 works in four decades) who created a new style Japanese crime fiction using human psychology and ordinary life vs. standard mystery formulas, investigating not just the crime, but the society in which the crime was committed.

This video walks you through dense vegetation at the foot of Fuji. Each year authorities remove as many as 100 bodies from Japan’s suicide hotspot. Many remain undiscovered for years or forever.

 

 

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