Note: Since this piece was published, Krys Suzuki has written a fuller article on the history, myth, and cultural import of Aokihagara. Please give it a read.
I’m writing this on a day off that’s full of errands, so apologies for this being off the cuff and rambling.
I’ll admit that, while I greatly admire the advent of YouTubers and other DIY content stars on the Internet, I’m not that up on the flavors of the moment. So I had to learn about the case of Logan Paul from my teenage daughter. Once I read it, it stimulated some thinking I’ve had for a while regarding the notion of “weird Japan.”
For those who haven’t heard, Logan Paul decided recently to take a video in Aokigahara [English], Japan’s so-called “suicide forest” where over 200 people are known to take their lives every year. Paul not only filmed what seems to be the body of someone recently deceased — he had the audacity to post it on his YouTube channel. (The video has since been yanked.)
The Logan Paul “Suicide Forest” Video Should Be a Reckoning For YouTube
By the time Logan Paul arrived at Aokigahara forest, colloquially known as Japan’s “suicide forest,” the YouTube star had already confused Mount Fuji with the country Fiji. His over 15 million (mostly underage) subscribers like this sort of comedic aloofness-it serves to make Paul more relatable.
As someone whose good friend’s husband took his own life just six days before Christmas this year, I also find my stomach churning at this appalling lack of common decency. But I also see this as a contrast to the “Cool Japan” movement which the Japanese government’s tourism bureau has fostered to promote the wonderful, rich culture of the country. I call it “Weird Japan”, and it consists of the pointing out (and largely mocking of) things in Japanese culture that seem offbeat, odd, or just plain gross to people who grew up in a Western culture. Usually, this is seemingly innocuous; the poster is posting pictures or videos of one of Japan’s (admittedly…special) game shows where people are flung from catapults, or models compete against other in events like “no-pants curling” and “no-handed masturbation”. (And if you think I’m making that up, then you’ve never seen Darake!.)
While all of this is all intended to be fun, it has the effect of “othering” Japan and Japanese people. They’re the strange people over there, with the suicide forest, and idol groups like Babymetal, and the weird game shows that exhibit not a whiff of Protestant puritanism. (And why should they? Japan is a predominantly Buddhist and Shintou nation governed by Confucian ethics where a mere 1% of the population attests to faith in Christ.)
The Wired article reports that Paul, upon arriving in Aokigahara, “had already confused Mount Fuji with the country Fiji.” That’s not shocking. Learning another nation’s language, culture, history, customs and way of thinking — a little thing I like to call respect — takes time. It takes patience. It takes putting yourself into a culture and attempting to understand it from the inside out, rather than pointing at it from the outside and laughing in the hopes that it’ll boost your views.
To understand Japan’s suicide rates, for example, it helps to understand that Japan, unlike the relatively egalitarian society of the US (no, we’re not all really equal — but we like to pretend we are) is a 縦社会 (tateshakai), or hierarchical society. It’s a society where young people feel immense pressure to pass crushing high school examinations to land good careers. It’s a society where, as my wife describes it, you are taught from a very early age to think of others above yourself, and to be cognizant of where you stand in relation to other people at all times. It’s a society where mental illness is still not as widely recognized or treated as in the US, and where excessive alcohol consumption is culturally encouraged. All of these are factors that, when life takes a wrong turn, can easily lead people to feeling isolated, alone, and abandoned.
Paul’s actions are a kind of casual racism more concerned with one’s own profit than other peoples’ joy and suffering. He had an opportunity to educate people about what the forest was, why it exists, and to provide insight into a serious social problem in Japan. Instead, he showed up with nothing but a camera and an inability to pronounce basic place names. It should be a lesson to anyone who wants to talk about “Weird Japan” that everything exists in a context — and that context, when properly elucidated and understood, can promote greater mutual understanding between people, no matter how differently we all may have been raised.
