Japan's Suicide Forest is IRL scarier than anything that has ever come out of Japan

Insano Steve sent me this little Vice documentary on YouTube during work hours which I watched in it's entirety in one sitting. Truly fascinating stuff in a weird, morbid way. I had heard about Japan's infamous Aokigahara forest and did a bit of research myself and found the most disturbing pictures which you can find here. There are more graphic photos just by Googling.

The documentary is fascinating in it's tale. According to the description via Vice:

The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses.

Clearly this must have been the inspiration for Ryûhei Kitamura's Versus as convicts escape to a forest full of Yakuza zombies and do battle.

Other Japanese movies (some by Takashi Miike) have shown bullying in Japan is catastrophic more than it is in America. What's baffling is the men and women who've taken their lives were inspired by a the novel Kuroi Jukai, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest which resulted in people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year.

We'll never know why one does the unthinkable but the remnants of these lives in haunting pictures will without a doubt leave a lasting impact.

In the doc, they visit the forest in the day and I must admit, I'd be scared shitless to do that. What's more scarier are the ribbon trails so people wouldn't get lost. Would you follow a ribbon to the end?

If I ever visit Japan, I know one place where I'm NOT GOING. Such a peaceful place to have a horrible reputation.

You can watch entire documentary below.






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Categories: documentary, japanese, japanese bullying, japanese horror, suicide, suicide circle