A
thick forest thrives on hardened lava that once flowed down Mount
Fuji’s northwestern flank into lakes that reflect the volcano’s
snow-capped cone like rippling mirrors. Within it, the roots of hemlock
and cypress trees snake out over the ground through a blanket of moss,
and trails lead to deep caverns filled with ice.
The Aokigahara forest,
as this tangle of woods is called, was born on 12 square miles of lava
from an eruption in the year 864, the biggest in 3,500 years. The event
left Japan’s rulers awe-struck and its countrymen inspired to worship
the volcano as a god. A walk into this isolated place, where nature’s
power to rebound from cataclysm is so clearly on display, can be
intensely spiritual.
Perhaps
because of that, the woods inspire an almost reverential fear in Japan
and, increasingly, beyond it. In the past year alone, three North
American movies have opened with plots based on the woods’ reputation as
a suicide destination and warren of paranormal activity: “The Sea of
Trees” with Matthew McConaughey, “The Forest” and “The People Garden.”
Those films come six years after “Suicide Forest,”
a Vice documentary that has gotten more than 15 million views on
YouTube and has furthered the idea that the forest is a place where
people end their lives.
I
decided I would hike from Lake Shoji, the smallest of Fuji’s five
lakes, for about six miles to the site of the eruption that created
Aokigahara. But first, I hired a guide to take my wife and me to an area
on the forest’s western edge that is popular with tourists.
Continue reading the main story
A train painted with Mount Fuji cartoons took us on the last leg of the two-hour trip from Tokyo to Kawaguchiko Station
on a drizzly Friday last spring. From the station, a gateway to Fuji
and its lakes, we rode a bus for 30 minutes to the Fugaku Wind Cave
parking lot.
Takaaki
Abe waited for us at the trailhead in a baseball cap and hiking boots.
He told us he was 65 and had guided in the forest for 15 years, which
made me feel better about paying 12,000 yen (about $103) to a company
called Fuji Kanko Kogyo for a two-hour nature walk and visit to two caves.
Mr.
Abe pointed his trekking pole into the forest as we started on the
trail, which was crowded with families and children. The moss covering
the trees retained water, allowing them to thrive without traditional
soil. The ground we stood on certainly was anything but: In some places,
the lava is more than 440 feet deep. There were holes, caused by
violent emissions of steam, lurking in spaces between the hinoki trees,
or Japanese cypress, and goyo matsu, or five-needle pines.
At
the cave, we descended stairs into a broad hole that funneled into a
cavern. Backlit ice pillars glowed in hues of translucent purple, and
placards said the cave was once used to refrigerate seeds and silkworm
cocoons. As we left, crouching and ducking our heads, Mr. Abe clapped
his hands. Tiny holes in the lava absorbed the sound. “If you yell for
help, nobody will hear you,” he said.
That comment prompted me to ask Mr. Abe if he had ever seen a ghost.
“No,” he said with a chuckle. “But I want to.”
I
wanted to learn more about the forest, so on Wednesday I took a bus
from my wife’s hometown, Kofu, about 17 miles north of Aokigahara, to
the Fujisan Museum
in Fujiyoshida. Headphones told me in English that after the Jogan
eruption, the one that created Aokigahara, Japan’s imperial court
thought it had divined the cause. The court determined that “Shinto
priests’ negligence in performing religious rights” had angered the
volcano, and it ordered provinces nearest Mount Fuji to increase worship
of the volcano’s deity, Asama no Okami.
“It
was the biggest eruption on record, so it had the biggest impact on
people,” Takeru Shinohara, the museum’s curator, told me. Construction
of the Kawaguchi Asama Shrine northeast of the volcano, a site now part
of Fuji’s Unesco World Heritage designation, started in 865. Today there
are more than 1,000 such sacred places, known as Asama or Sengen
shrines.
I
told Mr. Shinohara that I planned to hike through the forest on the
route starting at Lake Shoji. He said most tourists didn’t know about
the path, which is part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, because
few traveled beyond the more developed banks of Lake Kawaguchi and Lake
Sai.
“It’s become a forgotten trail over time,” he said.
Two
days later I was on a bus from Kawaguchiko Station to the Akaike stop
at Lake Shoji. I crossed Route 139 and found the trailhead on a dead-end
road behind a fire station, then followed the paved path onto the lava.
Take
just one step into Aokigahara alone and you will understand how it got
its reputation. Once-molten terrain swells and dips into the distance
like a petrified ocean. Vines dangle from trees and moss partially hides
deep crevasses. Sadly, there is also evidence that it is a suicide
forest: I saw shiny blister packs that once held pills scattered amid
the leaves, and fluorescent ribbons tied to trees by either thrill
seekers or people who never returned. The Vice documentary followed
these ribbons to locate human remains.
I came upon a guided group at a junction after only a few minutes.
“Whoa, are you alone?” one of the men asked me in English. “Don’t get lost.”
I
told him not to worry, but I could understand his warning. The lava’s
mineral content has a reputation for making navigational devices go
haywire, and the forest looks the same in all directions. I had reached
out to two Japanese geologists, Masato Koyama at Shizuoka University and
Akira Takada of the Geological Survey of Japan, who said that holding a
compass to the lava could move the needle, but that the device should
work properly when held higher. My compasses worked fine, as did my
hand-held GPS device.
I
didn’t see anyone for the next hour, until the trail crossed a road and
a man wearing a helmet and kneepads stood by a red scooter. He said his
name was Yoshihide Yamazaki, he was 50 and he had come from Tokyo.
“My
hobby is taking pictures of insects,” Mr. Yamazaki said. He held out
laminated business cards with bug photos on them, and I took one. He
said he came to Aokigahara to photograph the kamikiri mushi, or
long-horned beetle.
I asked if he became scared wandering by himself.
“It’s
dangerous if you go off the trail,” he said, holding up a plastic bag
and an elastic band he wrapped around trees to avoid losing his way.
“You can get lost very quickly.”
I asked if he had ever seen a ghost. He shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing a good ghost.”
“What about an onryo?” I asked, using the Japanese word for a vengeful spirit.
“Dame,” he said. No way.
Mr.
Yamazaki packed his camera into a storage compartment. “Now it’s
light,” he said, looking into the forest. “But when it gets darker, it’s
very scary.”
As
I approached the site of the eruption, an area where magma oozed from
fissure vents near a cone on Fuji’s slope called Mount Nagaoyama, the
trail cut deeper into the lava flow. Black volcanic rock rose above my
head. Then the lava gradually grew sparse, grass began to line the
pathway and the twisted trees of Aokigahara faded into taller pines.
I
spent the next hour trying to find a more dramatic transition, a steep
drop from a lava flow or a fissure. But I never did. Aokigahara simply
blended into the mountain.
I later went to the Kawaguchi Asama Shrine.
I walked under the towering red gate and toward a group of ancient
cedar trees. A shrine worker handed me a pamphlet, which had a picture
of a waterfall inside of it. I asked him how to get there.
An
hour later, on a trail above the waterfall that continued on to the
summit of Mount Mitsutoge, the clouds pulled back like curtains and
Mount Fuji appeared across the valley. I had never seen the volcano like
that before, straight on and from an elevation, like a view from an
airplane, and it was breathtaking.
Beneath
the snow on the upper cone, the slopes broadened upon the land for
miles. I looked at the forest on the northwestern flank and tried to
imagine what the Shinto priests from the shrine below me would have seen
over 1,150 years ago, long before the moss and the trees and the
movies.
Incandescent rivers of lava lighting up the sky.
A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2017, on Page TR8 of the New York edition
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