Aokigahara ("Plain of Green Trees"), also known as Jukai ("Sea of Trees"), is a forest at the foot of Mount Fuji on the Japanese island of Honshu.
The forest, stretching right at the foot of the volcano itself, is the complete opposite of the beauty and majestic tranquility of these places.
In 864, there was a violent eruption of Mount Fuji. An indestructible lava flow descending along the northwestern slope formed a huge lava plateau with an area of 40 square meters. km, on which a very unusual forest took root. The soil is dug, as if someone was trying to uproot age-old trunks.
The roots of the trees, unable to penetrate the hard lava rock, go up, intricately intertwining over the rocky debris once thrown out of the volcano's mouth.
The relief of the forest is riddled with fractures and numerous caves, some of which extend underground for several hundred meters, and in some of them the ice never melts.
With the onset of dusk, they begin to talk about this place only in whispers. Disappearances and frequent suicides are the real face of Aokigahara. Tourists are strictly instructed not to turn off the main trails into the depths of the forest because it is easy to get lost here. The magnetic anomaly makes the compass a completely useless item, and similar terrain does not allow finding a way out from memory.
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There have been legends about the numerous ghosts that live in the forest. This place gained notorious fame back in the Middle Ages, when, in years of famine, the poor, driven to despair, brought their elderly and infirm relatives to the forest and left them to die. The groans of these unfortunates could not break through the dense wall of trees, and no one heard the groans of those doomed to painful death. The Japanese say that their ghosts lie in wait for lonely travelers in the forest, wanting to avenge their suffering.
Rumor has it that here, between the trees, you can see the white ghostly outlines of the yurei. According to Shintoism, the souls of those who died a natural death connect with the spirits of their ancestors. Those who took a violent death or committed suicide become wandering ghosts - yurei. Finding no solace, they come to our world in the form of legless ghostly figures with long arms and eyes burning in the dark. And the oppressive deathly silence of the forest is broken at night by their groans and heavy breathing.
Those who decide to visit Aokigahara must have strong nerves. It happens that a branch crunching underfoot turns out to be a human bone, and the strange outline of a person in the distance is the corpse of another gallows.
A surge in the pilgrimage of suicides to the Aokigahara forest was caused by the work of the writer Wataru Tsurumi "The Complete Guide to Suicide", published in 1993 and immediately became a bestseller: more than 1.2 million copies were sold in Japan. This book provides a detailed description of the various methods of suicide, and the author described Aokigaharu as "a great place to die." Copies of Tsurumi's book were found near the bodies of some of Aokigahara's suicides.
Local authorities, alarmed by the endless wave of suicides, placed signs on the forest paths that read: “Your life is an invaluable gift from your parents. Think about them and your family. You don't have to suffer alone. Call us. 22-0110"
It is impossible to say unequivocally how much these words reduce the number of victims, but every year dozens of new bodies are found in the forest. Of course, not everyone is found: there are those who take their own lives in a completely unsociable wilderness. There, the remains of the weak in spirit are taken away by predatory animals forever making them part of this forest.