Photographer Taro Karibe is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From his project ‘i-shi: Suicide Forest‘. To see Taro’s body of work click on any image.
Every year, dozens of bodies are found in Aokigahara ‘sea of forest’ or ‘suicide forest’, located in the skirts of Mount Fuji.
If I step into the forest under the sunlight filtered by trees, I can easily find human trace marks.
Plastic ropes put for routing so that they can get out of the forest, camp fire site and white human bones.
I decided to photograph those things and the scenery of the forest to understand the mind process of those people who come in, stay for a while, and make irreversible decision in the forest.
The main way of suicide in the forest is hanging. It takes 10 seconds to get unconscious, after they hanged themselves. I exposed same time and tried to trace the image that they may see at the last moment.
After started shooting, little by little I felt like the border between life and death became a blur.
This project is finding the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘shi'(‘death’ in Japanese).
In Japanese, ‘ishi’ has several meanings: mind, remains of human, and death by hanging.
See also:
Mitori: Terminal Care in Japan
By Taro Karibe