Surrounding Mt. Fuji is a vast and deep forest. On the northwest side of the mountain, the forest is called Aokigahara 青木ヶ原, which translate as the Blue Tree Meadow. It's also sometimes called the Sea of Trees. The forest had grown from the hardened lava rock of the last major eruption over 1000 years ago.
The forest has another name, too: the suicide forest.
Because of the magnetism from the lava rock, compasses often don't function correctly. And because of its remoteness, cellphone signal is sometimes disrupted. This often led to people hiking or wandering off in the forest and never being heard from again. This resulted in the local people considering the forest haunted. They would say that ghosts roam the forest and claim victims of anyone traveling alone.
By the mid-2000s, people started coming to the forest to get lost and die on purpose. In 2003, apparently 105 bodies were discovered in the forest. People would kill themselves by hanging or drug overdose. The forest was quite infamous for suicide because of this, and it was labeled the "most popular" place for suicide in Japan. Later in 2018, it would get even more acclaim when Logan Paul came here, and posted his video of finding a dead man hanged from a tree.
In order to prevent yourself from getting lost, hiking trails are lined with rope and markers to keep you on the trail and guide you back to the start. If you go off into the forest outside of the trail, you are supposed to bring your own flags to mark your trail.
My friends Fishy and Chaos came to visit me in Japan, and we went here as one of our last places on the vacation. We didn't bring any markers, but we also didn't really venture all that far into the forest. The forest was so huge, there really weren't any major trail heads. Everywhere looked identical.
As we drove along Route 71, eventually we found something that looked like a place to park and a cleared path into the woods.
I had a done a far amount of hiking in my 3 years of living in Takayama, but this forest had a much different atmosphere than those mountain woods. These forests don't really get a lot of snow or cold weather, so the moss and overgrowth completely covered anything on the ground. The trees shot up into the sky and created a near solid canopy that blocked out much of the sun. (As such, many of my photos are totally washed out.)
After moving into the forest far enough, it really did feel like an ocean of trees. Every direction felt the same. You could truly get lost without a sense of direction.
The trail we followed eventually led to a break in the canopy, and the sunlight shone down on a single carpet of grass.
We stayed for a moment, and then went back to the car. We found another trail down the road leading up into the mountain, but it had become late afternoon, and there was still a lot more driving left for the night.
Note: This post was made in Apr 2025 and back-dated to the time of the events
