In the Shadow of Fujisan

How is Ben spending his Halloween? He's exploring the suicide forest at the base of Mt. Fuji (photo just in from Ben's cell phone.) This location, Aokigahara, is a magnet for Japanese looking to end it all. Shades of the novel, You Only Live Twice! Here's an excerpt from Seek Japan's entry on Aokigahara:

Aokigahara is considered the most haunted location in all of Japan, a purgatory for yurei, the unsettled ghosts of Japan who have been torn unnaturally soon from their lives and who howl their suffering on the winds. Spiritualists say that the trees themselves are filled with a malevolent energy, accumulated from centuries of suicides. They don't want you to go back out.

On a marginally related note, I just watched a documentary on the introduction of anti -depressants into Japan. The filmmaker implies that prior to Glaxo Smith Klein marketing Paxil in Japan, depression was unknown there. However, he fails to mention that "wandering off into the woods to die" disease has been running rampant there for centuries!