Aokigahara - When a Place Becomes Its Reputation

A walk through Aokigahara became an encounter with silence, myth, and the weight of everything I already knew about the place. This field note explores the uneasy space between cultural reputation and physical reality, where dense forest, volcanic caves, solitude, and memory begin to blur into something almost mythical.

Kirill Oleshkevich

9/14/20268 min read

Before I ever entered Aokigahara, I already thought I knew something about it. I had read about a mysterious forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. A place supposedly avoided by locals. A place associated with ghosts, disappearances, and, above all, suicide. The name had accumulated so many stories that the real forest almost seemed secondary.

Then, this summer, I spent several hours walking through it. I did not meet a single person. And slowly, as the sound of roads and civilization disappeared behind me, the reputation I had brought with me began to interact with the physical place in a very strange way. Nothing dramatic happened. There were trees. Moss. Volcanic rock. Light breaking through a dense canopy. And silence. Yet the longer I walked, the more uneasy I became.

That experience made me think about a question that interests me far beyond Aokigahara: What happens when a real place becomes so culturally mediated that we can no longer encounter it without first encountering its mythology?

Aokigahara lies on the northwestern side of Mount Fuji and covers roughly 30 square kilometers. It grew over hardened lava left by the great Jōgan eruption of 864 CE. That volcanic foundation is fundamental to the character of the forest: tree roots spread across black rock, moss covers fractured lava, and the porous ground absorbs sound unusually well. Official Yamanashi tourism information specifically notes that this geology may explain the remarkable quiet visitors experience there. That silence was probably the first thing I noticed.

Not absolute silence, forests are never literally silent, but a strange suppression of distance. Sounds did not seem to travel very far. And because I encountered no other visitors for several hours, there was nothing to establish a normal human scale. No conversations in the distance. No footsteps approaching. No voices around the next corner. Just forest.

Official tourism material also corrects one of Aokigahara's most persistent myths: despite stories about volcanic iron making compasses useless, a normal compass held conventionally works there. The more realistic danger is simply leaving the marked paths in extremely dense, repetitive terrain. That detail interested me. The real Aokigahara is already unusual enough. It does not really need the mythology we have added to it.

Aokigahara has been associated with the supernatural for a long time. Japanese folklore connects the forest with yūrei - restless spirits of the dead. Another story often attached to Aokigahara is ubasute, the supposed abandonment of elderly or infirm relatives in remote mountains or forests. The connection is better understood as folklore than securely documented history, but it became part of the cultural vocabulary surrounding the forest. Even Japan's official tourism organization acknowledges its reputation as a place associated with yūrei.

And then modern media amplified everything. Seichō Matsumoto's Nami no Tō (The Tower of Waves), serialized around 1959-60, famously connected Aokigahara with a tragic death and helped strengthen the forest's modern cultural association with suicide. Decades later, Wataru Tsurumi's controversial 1993 book (The Complete Manual of Suicide) on suicide further reinforced that reputation. Cinema then exported the image internationally.

Gus Van Sant's The Sea of Trees (2015), starring Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe, places Aokigahara at the center of a story about grief, death, and the rediscovery of a desire to live. A year later, The Forest (2016) transformed the location into full supernatural horror, explicitly presenting Aokigahara as a landscape inhabited by tormented spirits. The forest also appears in Japanese popular culture. An episode of the anime Cuticle Detective Inaba uses Aokigahara and explicitly draws on its reputation for isolation and haunting; other anime and manga have similarly borrowed its visual and supernatural associations.

In music, Jhené Aiko's “Jukai” was directly inspired by Aokigahara after she watched a documentary about the forest; the song became part of her meditation on loss, death, and recovery.

And in 2019, four poets who had actually travelled into the forest produced the bilingual collection Sea of Trees: Poetic Gateways to Aokigahara, explicitly asking what happens when writers encounter the physical place behind the sensationalized image. That last example particularly interests me. Because it asks essentially the same question I found myself asking while walking there: What remains when you remove the story and stand inside the place itself?

It is impossible to write responsibly about Aokigahara without acknowledging that its association with suicide is not simply an invention of horror films. But the statistics require care. Older reports cite 105 confirmed deaths in 2003, after which authorities stopped routinely publicizing precise forest-specific totals, partly out of concern that constant reporting might reinforce the location's notoriety.

More useful are official figures published by Yamanashi Prefecture. The prefecture reports the number of suicides discovered in Fujikawaguchiko and Narusawa - the two municipalities containing Aokigahara. These are not identical to “deaths inside the forest,” so they should not be presented that way. For 2015 through 2022, the annual figures were 24, 29, 40, 34, 37, 26, 32, and 38, respectively. The same official document reveals another, less frequently reported side of the story: prevention.

In 2022 alone, the local fureai koegake outreach program recorded 721 contacts with people, 89 protective interventions, and 118 notifications to police. Yamanashi has maintained a regional suicide-prevention network since 2008, involving municipalities, local organizations, and outreach workers; more recently, the prefecture has even introduced drone patrols around Aokigahara as part of prevention efforts. This gave new meaning to something I noticed during my own visit.

I expected the place to advertise its reputation somehow. It did not. There were no theatrical warnings announcing that I had entered the famous “suicide forest.” Nothing seemed designed for dark tourism. Instead, I encountered much subtler messages. Near the entrance were notices essentially asking visitors to pay attention to people travelling alone: speak with them, ask whether everything is all right, and contact volunteers or authorities if something seems wrong. That struck me as profoundly different from the image sold by international media.

The message was not: Look how frightening this place is.

It was: Look after another human being.

The other warnings were considerably more ordinary. Bears. And, somehow, seeing warnings about Asian black bears did not exactly reduce the atmosphere of tension. Japan's national tourism organization confirms that black bears inhabit the area, alongside wild boar and other wildlife. So now the imagination had multiple options. Ghosts. Bears. Or simply getting lost.

This was perhaps the strangest discovery. I saw no evidence of the stories that had made Aokigahara internationally famous. No people. No dramatic scenes. Only occasionally were there artifacts reminiscent of the tragedy. For long stretches, it really was simply a beautiful, unusually dense forest. And yet knowing its history changed how I interpreted everything. A dark area between the trees seemed slightly darker. A sound attracted more attention than it normally would. Silence lasted too long. When the path curved and disappeared, I was more conscious of what I could not see.

The forest itself was not necessarily creating all of that anxiety. My cultural knowledge was. That distinction fascinates me. Because experience is never created solely by a physical environment. We also experience what we already know about it.

There is another story here that is almost completely overshadowed by the forest's darker reputation. Aokigahara is an extraordinary volcanic landscape. During my visit, I also explored two of its best-known lava caves: Narusawa Ice Cave and Fugaku Wind Cave. Both are products of the same volcanic history that created the ground beneath the forest.

The Narusawa Ice Cave formed after lava from the 864 eruption created a system of underground tunnels. It was designated a natural monument in 1929. Parts of the route are remarkably confined: one lava tunnel has a ceiling only 91 centimeters high, which explains why moving through it sometimes feels closer to crawling than walking. Natural ice forms inside and can remain well into the warmer months. That physical experience was memorable. Outside, summer. Then stairs descending downward. The temperature drops. The space contracts. You bend lower. Then lower again. Suddenly the mythology of Aokigahara is no longer the most unusual thing around you. You are moving through the geological interior of Mount Fuji's history.

Fugaku Wind Cave is a lateral lava tube approximately 201 meters long. Its average temperature is only about 3°C, even during summer. Before modern refrigeration, people used the naturally cold environment to store silkworm eggs and seeds. Its basaltic walls also absorb sound so effectively that the cave produces little audible echo. Again - silence. But this time underground. There was something almost theatrical about the transition. From a dim green forest into a dark volcanic opening. From comfortable summer air into sudden cold. From upright walking into narrow passages and lowered ceilings. From trees growing on lava to actually entering the lava formations themselves. I had gone to Aokigahara partly because of its cultural reputation. Yet some of the most memorable moments had nothing to do with that reputation at all. They were geological.

Did I experience Aokigahara as mystical? Yes. But probably not in the way I expected. I did not see anything supernatural. I did not suddenly become convinced that ghosts inhabit the forest. And after visiting it, I would not claim that locals universally “avoid” Aokigahara; that is clearly contradicted by the existence of official hiking routes, guided nature tours, protected natural monuments, and tourist caves promoted by Yamanashi itself.

But the atmosphere is unusual. A dense forest grown directly on ancient lava. Little human presence. Filtered sunlight. A surprisingly cool environment beneath the trees. Sound swallowed by volcanic ground. Caves extending underneath it. And, inevitably, the knowledge of what has happened there. Put those things together, and the imagination begins doing its own work. Perhaps that is enough to create a ghost.

From the perspective of cultural studies, and also from the perspective of a producer, Aokigahara is a remarkable case. Nobody centrally designed its brand. There was no marketing department that decided: This should become one of the world's most famous dark landscapes.

Instead, its image accumulated. Geology created the environment. Folklore supplied ghosts. Literature supplied narratives. The news media supplied statistics. Films supplied visual language. Internet culture amplified everything internationally. Tourists arrived already knowing the story. And then each visitor potentially became another storyteller. This is how cultural meaning sometimes develops. Not through a single author or institution, but through layer after layer of representation. Eventually the representation can become more famous than the physical place.

There is a fine line between studying the cultural reputation of Aokigahara and turning human suffering into entertainment. The forest has repeatedly crossed that line in international media. Perhaps the most notorious example came in 2017, when a YouTube creator filmed a deceased person in the forest and uploaded the footage, generating widespread condemnation.

That episode demonstrated the danger of dark tourism becoming a spectacle. Once a place has acquired a dramatic cultural label, visitors may begin searching for evidence that confirms the label. The forest becomes a set. Real tragedy becomes content. And real people disappear behind the mythology. The prevention signs I saw in Aokigahara offered almost the opposite philosophy. Do not search for spectacle. Notice the person. That distinction stayed with me.

After several hours, my answer was surprisingly simple. A forest. A very unusual forest, certainly. Beautiful. Dense. Quiet. At times unsettling. But still a forest.

I understand why its reputation persists. Walking completely alone beneath that canopy, with very little light reaching parts of the ground, it was easy to feel that there was something beyond what I could see. The anxiety did build. And knowing the history made it impossible to experience the landscape neutrally. But perhaps that is precisely the point. I did not enter Aokigahara alone. I brought Matsumoto. The films. The legends. The news stories. The statistics. The ghosts. Even if none of them were physically there.

When I think about the forest now, I do not first remember its notorious nickname. I see something much simpler. A dense, empty forest. The canopy is thick. Thin shafts of sunlight reach through the trees. The ground is dark with lava, roots and moss. Nobody is walking toward me. Nobody is walking behind me. There is no conversation in the distance. And for a few moments, almost nothing moves. That is the image that stayed. Perhaps Aokigahara taught me something important about cultural experience.

We rarely encounter famous places for the first time. We encounter them once through stories. Then through photographs. Films. Books. Other people's fears. Other people's expectations. And only eventually through our own bodies. Sometimes reality destroys the myth. Sometimes it confirms it.

Aokigahara did neither for me. The forest was far more ordinary than its reputation. And at the same time, walking alone through it, it felt exactly mysterious enough to understand how that reputation could have begun. The place and the story were not the same thing. But after so many years, separating them may no longer be possible.