Documentary on the Aokigahara Suicide Forest

Note: This video is not for the weak of heart. I warn you it will disturb many. It is a documentary on the suicide forest at the base of Mt. Fuji where on average a hundred suicides are discovered a year. It becomes a study in the existential nature of humanity, what Albert Camus considers the ultimate question. The geologist Azusa Hayano provides a deeper insight into this question. Insight that is perhaps more profound than much of western existentialism and the essentially annihilatory core of Being found in thinkers such as Sartre, Camus, and even Heidegger. We are not a singularity. We do not die alone. The act of suicide always brings others into the very act. Even in the depths of a forest. It affects more than just the self. The action is taken against the self in the context of a world of others. Others will always become affected. If care is the core of Being, of Dasein, as Heidegger claims, then Dasein, that is what it means to be human, must experience care as the core of how it interacts with others. Dasein is not a singularity but an ecology. This might take Heidegger out of context, but, I was never one for context. The point is we exist in a world with others. Our given Being is a being-in-the-world with others. We cannot exist apart from others. To exist is to be a part of a world of others. As the video is concluded the deeper question of life often interpreted by existentialists as the question of suicide loses its singularity and gains itself in an ecology of others and care for others. “You think that you die alone, but that’s not true. Nobody is alone in this world. We have to coexist and take care of each other.”