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06-09-2011, 09:17 PM

There is something about this story that just doesn't seem right.

I gotta say I was NOT aware of its dark dark history until we arrived at the town of Kawaguchiko. We had read that theres great natural beauty by Mt Fuji so we went with a camera and some hiking stuff.

What threw me off first is, you don't say WHEN you and your girlfriend supposedly took this trip. Usually with a factual story one would start with "Last week..." or "Last summer..." naturally to help give it context. Here it sounds more like "Once upon a time..."

The towns people we met at the local inn told us all about what happens in the Jukai....

This is another line that sounds more appropriate out of a fairy tale than out of a factual story. What "inn" were you hanging out at, and why were there townspeople hanging out there? Saying "towns people" is so unspecific. If you had said "The owner of the inn we stayed at told us..." but the non-specific "towns people" sounds vague for a story that us supposed to be true. How many of them were there? Were you all sitting in the same room? What was the situation that got this group of people to tell you this story?

one of the workers even thought we were going in there to commit suicide! OMG she thought we had like a forbidden love thing going on and our parents wouldnt accept our relationship (I am surprised that this still goes on in this day and age).

How did the topic of you committing suicide come up? This is not a topic most would bring up, and since you supposedly went there without knowing anything about the area, you obviously didn't bring it up. The forbidden love aspect also seems suspicious to me. Considering you are mixed race, why would your parents be against you race-mixing (to be blunt)?

anyway I was looking for a thrill and wanted to hike so we went into Aokigahara the day after....and boy oh boy.....it was the CREEPIEST place ever. I didn't actually expect to find anything....we went pretty far into the forest taking pictures of the awesome wildlife there. However, we reached a place with rock formations and found a lot of disturbing things....ripped up pictures of familes, something that looked like a suicide note nailed to a tree and clothes. There was rope lying around and lots of yellow tape.

Here we get to the pictures. You don't include any pictures of wildlife, much less yellow tape, ripped up pictures, (how do you know they were picture of families if they were ripped up?) etc. You say that is out of respect... but you also don't include a picture even of you or your girlfriend. Didn't you take any pictures in front of the inn, or of your girlfriend in the forest, the rock formations?

At this point my girlfriend felt very uncomfortable and wanted to leave so we backtracked....and thats when I stumbled on some bones. I freaked out, it was still wearing decaying jeans and Nikes. I f***ing started running.

You said "I", not "we". I wonder how happy your girlfriend was when you start running away from some old clothes.

The more we ran the more the forest seemed to envelop us....I started freaking out some more thinking paranoid thoughts about how we might die in the forst. we ran around desperately I started to see things. No straight up ghostly apparitions....but a few times I could have sworn I saw somebody standing next to a tree but when I looked back there was nothing. That freaked me out somemore and in turn my girlfriend got really really really scared and looked like a crazy person (eyes wide, darting left and right).

She shrieked and scared the living hell outta me. I turned around and saw something orange moving thru the trees and brush.....my blood froze and all the hair on my body stood up. I was like, F**K THIS! and started to back up when I saw a figure emerge from the brush. It looked like a Buddhist monk in robes and I was just speechless.


This reads more like a script from "Blair Witch Project".

I just stood there...my girlfriend went running the other direction crying ... she left me there...but I realized that it was an actual human being and not a ghost. He came shuffling along and spoke in very deliberate Japanese, "Nani ni shi ni kita no?" (why are you here) . I said, "asobi ni, oretachi wa america kara kimashita, gomen na sai gomen!" (To play, we're from American im sorry!). I dont know why I was apologizing but I did. The man looked me over carefully and asked, "ja anata to ano gaijin wa shinu tsumori wa nainn da ne?" (so you and that foreigner have no intention of dying then?)

I really don't see a Buddhist monk using that sort of language, especially referring to your girlfriend as "ano gaijin". If the line you said to him is really what you said, then he would know you are a "gaijin" as well, but chances are that isn't a word a monk would use, regardless.

At a time like that I noticed that he still viewed my girlfriend as a foreigner and not me, even though I'm American....

Trust me, if this story is true, he saw you as a foreigner. This is partially why it is suspect to me.

goes to show that Japanese people are indeed somewhat xenophobic....anyway.... i said no no no we're here to hike and take pictures. He told me to NOT take pictures and pointed me in the direction to an exit.

I don't need to repeat what Nyororin said about xenophobia, but if you were in this area, then you were off limits and out of bounds. There are no "exits".

I said thanks really fast and ran off mind racing and adrenaline pumping. I wanted to get the fk out of there. I called out my girlfriends name a few times and she came running back from somewhere nearby luckily

Yes, that is lucky. Where was she, where did she go, and why were you talking to a monk when your girlfriend was screaming and running away crying?

....but she was pretty sure the man in the robes was a ghost and she was bawling cus she was so scared. The monk gave me good directions because we emerged by a parking lot where there were people.

A mountain rangers came running towards us looking all serious. He pulled out a phone and called somebody. He said, 'daijoubu da, mo daijoubu da, antara atama tsukatte tadashii koto oh shita" (its gonna be alright, you used your head and did the right thing).

So there was a search party looking for you?

Apprently he saw how scared we looked and my girlfriend was still crying, he thought we tried to commit suicide but decided against it at the last moment and came back out. I explained the best I could that thats not what we were doing...I told him about all the stuff we found and the monk. Some of the other people were gathering around us whispering , ' oh poor things! must be forbidden love! so sad!"

Again, why would two foreigners dating be considered "forbidden love"? This is another reason something about this story smells funny. Who were these people? Why were they in the parking lot?

But i told them we wernt there to die, we looked the way we did because we were scared and running. They were like "OMG YOU SAW YUREI!?!?! AND YOU TALKED TO IT!?!?!?? GO TO THE NEAREST TEMPLE NOW!" Others said they heard rumors of a Buddist Monk who lives in the forest who tries to prevent suicides and to pray for the dead....apparently thats who I encountered. What is not known is if he was real or a yurei. Either way, real or not he did help so I wasnt very disturbed by it but we went to a Jinja anyway and talked to a priest.

Who are these "others"? How many people are we talking about? This reads like a fairy tale.

Where was the jinja, and what did the priest say?

You then include more pictures to accentuate your story, but don't state that these are not your pictures, but you found them on the Internet. If no one had said anything, would you have volunteered that information?
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06-09-2011, 09:52 PM

To be perfectly honest, this story pegged my "bullshit meter" pretty hard, but I wasn't gonna say anything. @TangoMike, please don't be offended, feel free to elaborate.


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tangomike (Offline)
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06-09-2011, 09:58 PM

lol dude really? do you really want me to describe what the ryokan master lady looked like, what color her clothes were, and how should I know how many and where they were. DO you remember the number of people that walk into your place of employment last week? What color tie your boss worr last Monday? I'm a decent writer this is like a summary, so sounding like a story is exactly what i wanted it to sound like. if you want an in depth book about everything i'm not willing to put in every little description on how many left turns I took by a tree (and a through description of the tree) or the name of an obscure Jinja in a town i've never even been to before? I dont know the people in the parking lot were probably going to go thru the forest on the official trail. i'm assuming theres always a ranger or two at the starting point of the trail. they were not a search party, just people there. The ranger probably got worried cus people were running out of a dense and random part of the woods. nobody except our parents back in America knew were there....and we didnt have cell phones in the forest so they couldnt have known.

hah yeah im not going to lie. I'm afraid of ghost and the macabre, I lost a lot of man points to my girl that day..... I get into fist fights with people sometimes and dont take sh*t from anyone but I've always been afraid of ghosts and stuff like that.

i dont get your race mixing question. Yes i am mixed ethnicities, i never said our parents had any problems with us together. It was the Japanese who ASSUMED that just by looking at us. As i wrote, i had to explain the situation a few times.

the convo in the ryokan was with a teenager who worked there in the kitchen. she came out with us for a drink after she got off and was askin about what brought us to kawaguchiko. we just said we wanted to see the so called natural beauty of mt fuji and the surroundin area...she was worried about us because I guess she saw me looking really really depressed with my face in my hands at the inn. I had lost a considerable amount of cash somwhere between Kanamachi where my grandma lives and Kawaguichiko and noticed that when I got there. Thats why I entertained the idea of taking money from the wallet we found in the forest, as i would normally never touch something that belonged to dead person. Again as i said, if u wanted me to include every freakin detail like that this could be pages and pages long.

Also there are always exits from anywhere theres an entrance LOL. all you need to do is point in a direction and eventually you wil emerge from a forest.

yeah i do give you the monk part though, he wasn't very teinei and he used informal speech. But then again, he lives in a suicide forest so hes probably not a normal person by any means. its not like all Christian pastors speak like, 'come here children of God, for thine has blessed us with is divine light blah blah blah". ive seen Pastors go to work on motor cycles or shred waves at the beach....so i dont seee why Buddhist monks would be an exception.

please ask me anything, id be happy to answer in depth if you want but like I said for the sake of clarity and story telling I cut it down. Honestly i dont think anybody on a forum wants to scroll through pages and pages of anything. I dont, I get really bored with it and most of the time dont even attempt to read really long and tedious pages of posts.

Last edited by tangomike : 06-09-2011 at 10:01 PM.
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06-09-2011, 10:10 PM

I've heard older monks in Japan can be a little more harsh than ones from other countries. Even to the extent where younger monks get hit.


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tokusatsufan (Offline)
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06-09-2011, 11:01 PM

No,I don't think it's a lie just because you wrote in internet terms,I do that sometimes.
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tangomike (Offline)
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06-09-2011, 11:05 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by dosu View Post
I've heard older monks in Japan can be a little more harsh than ones from other countries. Even to the extent where younger monks get hit.

yeah, dont they have to meditate and the older ones smack the younger ones with a meter stick or something?
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MMM (Offline)
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06-09-2011, 11:15 PM

I am not trying to attack you, I am just saying something about the story sounds funny and why. Please don't take my comments personally. You have to admit, you are telling a ghost story, essentially, so you have to understand people are going to be suspicious and doubtful. Don't be offended. That being said, I will respond to your response.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
lol dude really? do you really want me to describe what the ryokan master lady looked like, what color her clothes were, and how should I know how many and where they were.
I did not ask you to describe the innkeeper's clothes. I am just trying to paint a realistic picture, and in my experience, the local ryokan is not the hangout for the local townpeople. Were there three people? Thirty people? And you were the one talking to them. Were they in your room? In the lobby? Standing outside? I am having a hard time seeing your story in my head.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
DO you remember the number of people that walk into your place of employment last week? What color tie your boss worr last Monday? I'm a decent writer this is like a summary, so sounding like a story is exactly what i wanted it to sound like.
If you intended to make it sound like a "story" than I think you did a good job. So you can understand why at least I think it sounds just like that: a story.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
if you want an in depth book about everything i'm not willing to put in every little description on how many left turns I took by a tree (and a through description of the tree) or the name of an obscure Jinja in a town i've never
even been to before?
I didn't ask for a turn by turn map of your path, but I don't think it is unrealistic to ask what the monk at the jinja said to you when you told him you talked to a monk in the forest. That seems like an important part of the story.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
I dont know the people in the parking lot were probably going to go thru the forest on the official trail. i'm assuming theres always a ranger or two at the starting point of the trail. they were not a search party, just people there. The ranger probably got worried cus people were running out of a dense and random part of the woods. nobody except our parents back in America knew were there....and we didnt have cell phones in the forest so they couldnt have known.
So the monk didn't point you out to the path out, but through a dense part of the forest?

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
hah yeah im not going to lie. I'm afraid of ghost and the macabre, I lost a lot of man points to my girl that day..... I get into fist fights with people sometimes and dont take sh*t from anyone but I've always been afraid of ghosts and stuff like that.
So your girl thinks less of you for being afraid in the woods that day, but she was the one crying uncontrollably the whole time?

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
i dont get your race mixing question. Yes i am mixed ethnicities, i never said our parents had any problems with us together. It was the Japanese who ASSUMED that just by looking at us. As i wrote, i had to explain the situation a few times.
I don't want to get deep into this, but you keep talking like all Japanese assume you are a native Japanese, even after talking to you and you telling them you are from America, and I would say that sounds quite different from my experience. What I mean is, why would a Japanese assume there is a problem between two Americans dating each other?

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
the convo in the ryokan was with a teenager who worked there in the kitchen. she came out with us for a drink after she got off and was askin about what brought us to kawaguchiko. we just said we wanted to see the so called natural beauty of mt fuji and the surroundin area...she was worried about us because I guess she saw me looking really really depressed with my face in my hands at the inn. I had lost a considerable amount of cash somwhere between Kanamachi where my grandma lives and Kawaguichiko and noticed that when I got there. Thats why I entertained the idea of taking money from the wallet we found in the forest, as i would normally never touch something that belonged to dead person. Again as i said, if u wanted me to include every freakin detail like that this could be pages and pages long.
I guess if you want it to sound like a story, then that's fine. If you want it to sound convincing, then these details help.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
Also there are always exits from anywhere theres an entrance LOL. all you need to do is point in a direction and eventually you wil emerge from a forest.

yeah i do give you the monk part though, he wasn't very teinei and he used informal speech. But then again, he lives in a suicide forest so hes probably not a normal person by any means. its not like all Christian pastors speak like, 'come here children of God, for thine has blessed us with is divine light blah blah blah". ive seen Pastors go to work on motor cycles or shred waves at the beach....so i dont seee why Buddhist monks would be an exception.
Because in his eyes, you would both be foreigners.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
please ask me anything, id be happy to answer in depth if you want but like I said for the sake of clarity and story telling I cut it down. Honestly i dont think anybody on a forum wants to scroll through pages and pages of anything. I dont, I get really bored with it and most of the time dont even attempt to read really long and tedious pages of posts.
1) When did this happen?

2) Where are the pictures of you or your girlfriend in Kawaguchiko?
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06-09-2011, 11:36 PM

I`ve stood back a bit and waited, but there is one really huge thing that throws up flags for me.

The forest is FULL of tape tags - they put them up every sweep they do. You have to walk hours off the path just to get away from them. Everyone I have talked to who has actually been there has always mentioned the tags. Once you get in there far enough to get away from them, cell phones do not work, and it`s VERY hard to find your way back out. We`re talking a good 6+ hour hike through dense forest - not somewhere you can park the car and casually walk in and back out of.

The sweeps, by the way, are only done once a year in the deepest parts. No offense, but I find it very hard to imagine you just casually walking 6 hours into (and then 6 hours back out of) the forest with your girlfriend. This is something pretty hard to picture, and why your story seems so doubtful. When locals do go around pretty intensively in there, you stumbling on a body is pretty unbelievable. Did you not think to, umm, tell anyone about it? Police maybe?

Something modding here has shown - it is not at all uncommon for people to come up with stories of their lives and adventures that have no basis in reality. It is VERY easy to prove true - say, pictures that weren`t just picked up around the net and then rehosted... And things that make a story look VERY suspicious - like pictures picked up around the net and reposted as if they`re your own. Had no one asked, I have no doubt you`d have happily passed those pics off as your own, and the one of jeans and shoes as the bones you saw.


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06-10-2011, 12:00 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangomike View Post
yeah, dont they have to meditate and the older ones smack the younger ones with a meter stick or something?
Maybe. I heard of a new monk who wasn't unpacking fast enough so he was hit. After ww2 a lot of men became monks. They brought their military discipline and the ways they teach with them, although I've only heard stuff like this happen in the zen branch of buddhism in Japan, but of course all monks in Japan aren't like that.


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Last edited by dosu : 06-10-2011 at 12:03 AM.
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06-10-2011, 11:22 AM

Calm down calm down.
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