Janguru
Japan is a country of fantastic contrasts: ancient temples and futuristic cities, hills swathed in fog and modern high-speed trains, straw thatched roofs on village houses and neon-drenched urban jungles. While the Japanese are undoubted masters of development and application of modern technology, they live in a deep, immediate contact with nature and the four seasons. Young and old, modernity and tradition coexist harmoniously in the land of the rising sun. It is a country of opportunity that is open to discovery, able to skillfully balance tradition and advancement. The Japanese are both masters of the future and bearers of tradition.
This project does not try to understand Japan. Instead, it is guided by my own personal, visual impressions. My attention leads me from the concrete, big-city jungles of megalopolises to the Aokigahara Jukai Forest, the Sea of Trees, on the flank of Japan’s most famous volcano, the holy Mount Fuji, venerated as a stairway to heaven. I become aware of correlations and parallels, transported through the country’s urban jungles, with their fascinating, menacing, mysterious, impenetrable atmospheres and the Aokigahara Sea of Trees, a huge and thick forest in the Yamaneshi Prefecture.
The daily routine of the crowds in Tokyo appears anonymous and conformed. Japan is a solitary country, if one wants it to be: it is unobtrusive and gentle. The Japanese seem to seldom show their deeper feelings. In particular, negative emotions such as wrath, sorrow, and disappointment are, depending on age, traditionally only revealed within the close family circle. To avoid attracting attention, many Japanese do not display their real face in public.
Only three hours from Tokyo, at the foot of Mount Fuji, I penetrate the dense foliage of the Sea of Trees. The moss and ferns that cover the overgrown forest floor as well as the hanging moss contribute to the forest’s primeval appearance. The spectacle that reveals itself is prosaic. A few steps into the forest and the hiker is surrounded by the apparent infinity of nature. Only an eruption of Mount Fuji could momentarily interrupt this endless cycle of growth and decay. Known both in the country and in Western media as a place deemed perfect for dying, the Aokigahara forest is notoriously referred to as Suicide Forest.
Janguru is the Japanese word for jungle, undergrowth. Both Tokyo, the urban jungle, and the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji exert an incredibly strong attraction on me; at the same time they also carry a certain feeling of isolation and loneliness.
