Suicides Soar in Japan, Lost Souls Drawn to the Aokigahara Forest

HUNDREDS of police and volunteer firemen ventured into the Aokigahara forest in Japan last week, forming a human chain to look for the bodies of suicide victims.

They discovered four more to add to the 44 already found this year in what is now regarded as Japan's suicide centre - a dark, 3,500-hectare forest that covers the lower slopes of Mount Fuji.

So many people kill themselves there that local authorities are now running out of space to store their remains.

The number of people dying every year in Aokigahara has little to do with its dark and labyrinthine nature, however, and everything to do with its reputation. It's unclear exactly when it began to be associated with the dark side of life and death, but a great many folk takes and legends talk about the forest being home to various ghosts, goblins, demons, devils, wraiths, revenants and all of the innumerable ill-intentioned denizens of the collective unconscious. This is in itself nothing unusual; any ancient forest acquires an intense atmosphere and collects these kinds of stories. However, in this case they have grown into something more, a kind of feedback loop with dark places in the Japanese psyche. In the 19th century, it became a place where poor families abandoned those they could not afford to feed during the frequent famine times - usually the elderly and infirm, or very young children. Presumably not all of these died, and their presence in the forest may have contributed to tales of witches or the kind of evil children who frequently pop up in modern Japanese horror movies.

At some point, people began committing suicide in Aokigahara. No one knows how long this may have gone on, but in 1970 the police began an annual search for bodies. It had been known for some time that people were dying in the forest, as bodies and human remains would be found now and again by travellers - in fact, the annual search would usually turn up no more than a couple of bodies, with the rest (maybe 20 a year at first) being discovered accidentally over the rest of the year. In the 1990s, this number began to rise. In 1994, 57 bodies were found. In 1998, 73. In 2002, 78. Some people blame a novel by Seicho Matsumoto, called Kuroi Jukai (Black Sea of Trees). Published in 1978, it relates the story of two young lovers who commit suicide together inside Aokigahara, and although it may have contributed to the increase in the statistics, it is clearly not solely responsible. A novel published in the 1960s called The Pagoda of Waves, which was later turned into a television series, featured a woman who killed herself in Aokigahara, and it is likely that these writers were merely tapping into a common public feeling or even a hidden tradition.

Taro's story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the "suicide forest." The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.

Japan's suicide rate, already one of the world's highest, has increased with the recent economic downturn.

There were 2,645 suicides recorded in January 2009, a 15 percent increase from the 2,305 for January 2008, according to the Japanese government.

The Japanese government said suicide rates are a priority and pledged to cut the number of suicides by more than 20 percent by 2016. It plans to improve suicide awareness in schools and workplaces. But officials fear the toll will rise with unemployment and bankruptcies, matching suicide spikes in earlier tough economic times.

"Unemployment is leading to this," said Toyoki Yoshida, a suicide and credit counselor.

"Society and the government need to establish immediate countermeasures to prevent suicides. There should be more places where they can come and seek help."

However, recent events in Japan and some of the highest rates of suicide in the world among younger people have forced the Japanese government to take a more critical view of suicide as a "problem". As in China, suicide is traditionally viewed as a means of maintaining one's honor, perhaps more so - a ritual self-disembowelling known as Seppuku was in common use in Feudal Japan, and while this tradition largely faded out with the demise of the Samurai and the introduction of a western-style society, many young Japanese people of today still perceive suicide as an acceptable means to avoid bringing shame or dishonor upon their family. By 2008, an average of 30,000 Japanese had killed themselves every year for 10 years, according to the Yomiuri Shinbun; in 2007 274 Japanese school children took their own lives.

It is a common misconception that the act of kamikaze also belongs to Japanese culture. However, it was a tactic devised during the Second World War by the Japanese air force and was used neither prior to nor after the war. The term "Kamikaze" has no such connotation in Japanese, instead meaning "divine wind", which originated after not one, but two storms protected Japan from invasion by destroying the invading fleets of Kublai Khan from Mongolia in the 13th Century.