Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck. Jerry's here, Dave's here, you know how Dave's
Speaker 1: here and this is short stuff.
Speaker 2: That's right. This is a shorty from Dave Bruce, still
Speaker 2: a contributor to houstie works dot com, which is great.
Speaker 2: And this one everyone, we want to issue a big
Speaker 2: trigger warning. It is about the Aoki Gahara Forest in Japan.
Speaker 2: It has another name that people have called it the
Speaker 2: suicide forest, and we're going to be talking about that
Speaker 2: in this episode. And obviously that's a very touchy subject.
Speaker 2: We don't want anyone to be unnecessarily triggered by it,
Speaker 2: So don't listen if it's not your jam. And obviously,
Speaker 2: if you have some deep seated issues going on in
Speaker 2: your life and you've had these kinds of thoughts, you
Speaker 2: should call nine to eight eight, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good, good call, Chuck, get a good call.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: So one of the other names for the Aoki Gahara
Speaker 1: Forest is the Jukai, which means the sea of trees,
Speaker 1: and it's because it's a huge swath of forest just
Speaker 1: in the uniformous forest. Yeah, that's that flanks Mount Fuji,
Speaker 1: has beautiful views of Mount Fuji. It's about a couple
Speaker 1: hours drive from Tokyo, and I think it built up
Speaker 1: over like a lava flow, that from an eruption in
Speaker 1: eight sixty four. And one of the reasons that it's
Speaker 1: it's famous not just for its views of Mount Fuji,
Speaker 1: but because, like you said, it's come to be known
Speaker 1: as the suicide Forest, because so many people travel to
Speaker 1: Aoki Gihara and never come out on purpose.
Speaker 2: That's right. There are no statistics anymore, and I think
Speaker 2: this is great that the government of Japan has stopped.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they stopped counting, but they at
Speaker 2: the very least stopped listing out statistic sticks on the
Speaker 2: number of suicides there. I think there were. They stopped
Speaker 2: that in sort of the mid twenty teens, but needless
Speaker 2: to say, it had happened a lot, and so they said,
Speaker 2: we're not going to, you know, publish these numbers anymore,
Speaker 2: which is I think the right thing to do. But
Speaker 2: where this all came from is sort of an interesting
Speaker 2: story because no one knows exactly what it is. We
Speaker 2: have some decent ideas. It's probably from these two books.
Speaker 2: That came along much later. But for a while people
Speaker 2: said it might have been this practice from like when
Speaker 2: was this actually.
Speaker 1: The show kusimbutsu.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Adka had a date on that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Chuck, but it said that it's been
Speaker 1: going on for at least a thousand years, or that
Speaker 1: it went on for a thousand years, so it went
Speaker 1: back quite quite a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but what we're talking about is a certain sect
Speaker 2: of Buddhist monks, aescetic Buddhist monks who would go to
Speaker 2: forrests to meditate eventually until they died. They would supposedly
Speaker 2: go for like a thousand days. They would subsist on
Speaker 2: leaves and bark, and then they would bury themselves alive
Speaker 2: and scare quotes to continue that meditation in an underground
Speaker 2: crypt in order to sort of mummify themselves while still alive.
Speaker 2: And this is something that really happened. They have some
Speaker 2: of these mummies on display around Japan, even though scientists
Speaker 2: now think that they were mummified after they had passed away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it wasn't just a process of I'm going
Speaker 1: to go bury myself in an underground crypt and stop
Speaker 1: eating and drinking like this went on like you said,
Speaker 1: for a thousand days, like almost three years. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they would purposely, like eat very little amounts and drink
Speaker 1: very little amounts to mummify themselves, right, rather than just die.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so this idea, some people for a while said,
Speaker 2: maybe is where people got the idea that this forest
Speaker 2: is where you might want to go to do this.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's probably true, but maybe we should
Speaker 2: take a break and we'll talk about these couple of
Speaker 2: books that are probably where this idea came from. All right,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty there's a short story written by a gentleman name.
Speaker 2: How would you pronounce that first name? Say, Echo Matsumoto, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, and it was called Tower of Waves. Always
Speaker 2: depend on you for Japanese pronunciation.
Speaker 1: Well, then technically it's Matsumoto. What I say, I'm just
Speaker 1: saying if you're depending No, I don't want to misguide you.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, that's fine. Why are you hitting me with
Speaker 2: the ruler right now? It was called Tower of Waves,
Speaker 2: and it's basically like a Romeo and Juliet esque plot,
Speaker 2: and that there are these young kids in love who
Speaker 2: are kept apart by something they can't control, and in
Speaker 2: the last scene, the woman writes a farewell letter it's
Speaker 2: very clearly Romeo and Juliet and takes a bottle of
Speaker 2: pills and goes into that very forest to die. And
Speaker 2: so a lot of people say, well, this is the
Speaker 2: actual you know, for the first time that forest has
Speaker 2: been linked to a suicide, at least in literature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's probably part of it for sure. But
Speaker 1: I mean in the same way that the so kushimbutsu
Speaker 1: maybe gave people the idea of going off to the
Speaker 1: woods to die, and this story gave them the idea
Speaker 1: of going specifically the Aokigahara forest to die. There was
Speaker 1: so we just have to say real quick, the West,
Speaker 1: in particular uses the Japanese approach to suicide is kind
Speaker 1: of like a Pureian lens to like look through and
Speaker 1: be like, wow, this is like, can we can shed
Speaker 1: our own baggage or morality about suicide, because to us,
Speaker 1: Japanese people are like, sure, kill yourself, that's your own
Speaker 1: that's your jam, right, and that's not fair. That's not
Speaker 1: how Japanese culture actually views suicide, and in particular, modern
Speaker 1: Japanese culture abhors suicide and takes pains to prevent it's
Speaker 1: it's a scar on the national psyche. But back in
Speaker 1: the day, we would kind of look in on Japan
Speaker 1: and see that they had like actual rashes of like
Speaker 1: mass hysteria that would lead teenage girls to go jump
Speaker 1: in volcanoes, which happened from the twenties to the thirties.
Speaker 1: There was one girl in particular whose name was Kiyoko,
Speaker 1: and she threw herself into a volcano, an active volcan
Speaker 1: know Mount Mahara that wasn't in Ioka Gahara forests, but
Speaker 1: it was another example of people going to nature to
Speaker 1: take their own lives. And there was an article in
Speaker 1: Time from nineteen thirty five that basically almost tongue in cheek,
Speaker 1: covered this strange phenomenon in Japan. It really it's not
Speaker 1: very kind at all, especially if you step back and
Speaker 1: consider the material. But it's a good example of how
Speaker 1: we just kind of misunderstand the Japanese approach to suicide.
Speaker 1: They care about people taking their lives, there's just there's
Speaker 1: not the like religious morality attached to it. It's still tragic,
Speaker 1: it's just not you know, a slap in the face
Speaker 1: of God if you do that.
Speaker 2: In their culture, Yeah, and the government has really come
Speaker 2: a long way and messaging this stuff out. They have
Speaker 2: their own, of course, prevention in crisis hotlines and things
Speaker 2: like that. In this forest. They have trained the employees
Speaker 2: that work there and the volunteers who work there to
Speaker 2: look out for people who maybe be by themselves or
Speaker 2: look troubled. They have security cameras and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: They have messages in this park which we'll get to
Speaker 2: at the end, like the sign at the end. But
Speaker 2: another book that came along that probably had a lot
Speaker 2: to do with it as well, was written in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three in Japanese only called The Complete Suicide Manual
Speaker 2: by Wataru Serami Sarumimi Sarumimi.
Speaker 1: When I'm not doing very well, well, it's like su
Speaker 1: right yeah, but that are really trips you up, so
Speaker 1: you're like tou rumy, but you have to say it
Speaker 1: like suui, and it just comes out like you're like
Speaker 1: blowing a raspberry.
Speaker 2: Right, I gotcha. This is from nineteen ninety three, like
Speaker 2: I said, and it is, you know, there's no other
Speaker 2: way to say it than it is a sort of
Speaker 2: step by step ins and out manual of suicide. Whether
Speaker 2: it has merit what the drawbacks might be, different ways
Speaker 2: that that can happen in order to be successful. And
Speaker 2: there is a portion of that book that talks about
Speaker 2: this forest and as the perfect place to die, and
Speaker 2: some of these manuals apparently have been found with people
Speaker 2: who have gone to this forest to do just that.
Speaker 2: And you know, like, here's this beautiful, quiet forest. Your
Speaker 2: family's not going to stumble upon you, right, You'll just
Speaker 2: go on this trip and not come back.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing. I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: who do this consider like they're considering their families or
Speaker 1: their friends. They're sparing them having to find them. But
Speaker 1: somebody else is going to probably find you, and they're
Speaker 1: going to be scarred by it. So it's not like
Speaker 1: this is this doesn't affect anybody, you know, Like it
Speaker 1: definitely affects the people who live near the forest, the
Speaker 1: people who volunteer to go clean up the forest, and
Speaker 1: the police who have to process these bodies too.
Speaker 2: So you know, that's sort of the long and short
Speaker 2: of it. There we mentioned a sign because they've taken
Speaker 2: great measures now to have more awareness on suicide in
Speaker 2: Japan and especially around the forest, but there are signs
Speaker 2: in the forest and as you enter the forests that
Speaker 2: say your life is a precious gift from your parents.
Speaker 2: Please think about your parents, siblings and children. Don't keep
Speaker 2: it to yourself, talk about your troubles, and then has
Speaker 2: their suicide helpline number included, which.
Speaker 1: Is great, It really is. So. Yeah, that's the Ioki
Speaker 1: Gahada Forest, one of the most unusual places in Japan
Speaker 1: and also one of the most beautiful I've heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the pictures are amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I guess that's it, right, That's right, okay, everybody, Well,
Speaker 1: then short stuff is out.
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