In recent years, local authorities have implemented measures to try and reduce that toll, including siting security cameras at the main entrances to the forest and carrying out round-the-clock patrols.
挿入写真A figure bound to a tree where someone took their own life.
At the entrances there are also signs that read: "Think carefully about your children, your family." Below them is the phone number of a volunteer group headed by lawyers specializing in debt advice, as debt is a common suicide trigger.
The signs were erected by 38-year-old Toyoki Yoshida, who himself attempted suicide due to debt. He blames Japan's money-lending system, which the government has now reformed to a degree.
"As things stood," Yoshida said, "major banks would provide loans to loan sharks at 2 percent interest, and then the lsharks would loan to people like me at 29.2 percent. But despite the reform, it's still not hard to amass crippling debts in this country."
Vigilant shopkeepers also play a role in the prevention effort. Hideo Watanabe, 64, whose lakeside cafe faces an entrance to the forest, said that he has saved around 160 people over the past 30 years.
"Most people who come to this area for pleasure do so in groups," he said. "So, if I see someone on their own, I will go and talk to them. After a few basic questions, it's usually not so difficult to tell which ones might be here on a suicide mission."
On one occasion, he said a young woman who had tried to kill herself walked past his store. "She had tried to hang herself and failed. She had part of the rope around her neck and her eyes were almost popping out of their sockets. I took her inside, made her some tea, and called an ambulance. A few kind words can go a long way."
Showzen Yamashita, a priest who conducts Buddhist rites in the forest to pray for the repose of the thousands of people who have died there over the years, agreed, adding that the lack of support networks in Japan is a main cause of the ever-increasing suicide rate.
"They have no one to talk to, no one to share the pain, the suffering," he said. "So they think, 'If I take my life I can escape this misery.' We conduct these rites in order to ponder how we might help make a world that is free of such suffering."
Rob Gilhooly's photo-story "Suicide Forest" was awarded a special prize by jury in the 2011 Days Japan International Photojournalism Awards and an honorary mention in the OnAsia International Photojournalism Awards for 2010.
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