Cool post about Aokigahara, @Yohan, thank you!Yohan wrote: ↑February 12th, 2023, 9:26 pmAokigahara is indeed a very special forest in Japan, it is located next to Mount Fuji and a part of it is located on the soil of the former volcanic eruption of this now not active vulcano. Mt. Fuji has strong religious meaning for the Japanese Shinto religion and around that area there are many Shinto Shrines and also Buddhist temples.
There are various horror stories, some of them several hundreds of years old, about ghosts walking around, as their human body could not get a proper funeral and these ghosts invite visitors to commit suicide or even attack and kill them etc.
The hardened lava of a part of Aokigahara forest is metallic and magnetic. This means when you are going there using a compass it will show you a wrong direction, a mobile phone or GPS near to ground, when sitting down for example, might not work - and the forest is very dense and you see only green and many people got lost walking in a circle for some hours to find out again.
Many Japanese people since centuries had the wish to die near to Mt. Fuji, and suicide and assistance to suicide are not really seen as something bad or wrong in Japanese society.
About 15 years ago the local administration of this province decided to do something to discourage people to commit suicide in this forest, but to close this forest to the public was not an option.
A parking area next to the entrance to this forest was created, connected to electricity, street lights, landline phone with emergency call numbers, vending machines, restrooms etc. and from there through the forest a hiking path was constructed - off limit for private cars - but wide enough for service cars to enter. Some maps, information, also Buddhist scripts about the value of life etc. are now everywhere and as long as you stay with this hiking path you cannot miss your way. Other areas were declared as off-limit, marked with fences and ropes and forest rangers were searching the entire forest, cleaning it up to make it less dense and of course they removed everything they found which was related to suicide, like human bones, skulls, ropes, messages and items of these persons who killed themselves.
Activities related to this forest will not be longer published. However every year it is said, but not confirmed, about 70 people still commit suicide in Aokigahara. During the first clean-up the remains of more than 500 people were found.
Now many people visit this forest just for hiking around and not for suicide. Some are looking for adventures and walking around even during night, looking for ghosts - but there are no ghosts there....LOL
Aokigahara is not so silent and not so remote anymore and can approached easily by car. - If people are found to enter off-limit areas and going into hiding in the forest, police has the right to consider it as trespassing and to remove them immediately for questioning.
It looks now like that...
Actually this ties to some common points of interest about paranormal phenomena that @Pixel--dude and I have talked about, and will get to later in the Ancient Astronauts / Ancient Aliens thread!
That is very true about the weird mettalurgic and magnetic dynamics due to the proximity to Mt Fuji, and I have observed and read in some detail about very similar phenomenon, in particular around Mount Shasta in California (tons of similarity and paranormal phenomena reported there), and also Crater Lake, Oregon. Surrounding areas also have similar phenomena about weird magnetic readings and paranormal phenomena being reported around there.
There's some interesting parallels between the conical volcanoes like Mt Fuji and Mt Shasta (among many others), and the theories about "pyramid power" (including the theories about the Great Pyramids having potential functions as some sort of power-generation plants, which I'm confident Yohan will dismiss in advance as "nonsense" if some perceived authority or other told him so... but his post was still awesome and full of points of interest!)
I would contest that there are "no ghosts" in and around Aokigahara (since they're widely reported by people who actually observe them, vs those with a pre-set conviction they can't exist since they're not in accord with their own views), but other than that, very cool.
At some point we should make a thread focusing 100% only on positive and fascinating things about Japan and its many beautiful places and the "lore of the land." I am beyond sick of addressing Outcasts's squealing delusional hysteria that Japanese women are supposedly genetically-based bastions of sexual conservatism, and stuff like this is far more fun.
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