JapanForum.com - Girlfriend and I went to Aokigahara Forest (Jukai)

For those of you who don't know Aokigahara Forest, or the Jukai is known as the Suicide Forest where almost a hundred Japanese go into die every year. It started out as poor peasants brining their elderly and disabled family into the forest to die, as well as samurai who failed in battle to commit suicide. In Modern times people with debt, crushed love, meaningless saleryman work, hikkikomoris and elderly people travel there to hang themselves or take pills.

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

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.

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

I am never going back there again. EVER