Hello. Hello. I'm breaking the number one rule of podcasting. No headphones, because I sat on them with my giant fat ass and they broke. They're made to break, so we have to keep buying them.

You're probably not supposed to sit on them. That too. Probably not. That too. That too. But it doesn't matter that Hannah's not wearing headphones because we're going to give you a podcast all the same.

Exactly. Best practice or no-pass practice. Don't tell anyone.

They'll never have us back at the podcast awards now. Nope.

So this is Short Hand, a short show for your short brain. But we have a long show full fat red handed that goes out on Thursdays, which if you don't know about it, you should listen to it. And if you really, really, really, really like it, which I think you will do.

You should go to our website redhandedpockost.com and get yourself some tour tickets. We are coming to Dublin twice. That's how much we like it. Manchester, Edinburgh.

The London palladium. Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki. So please go and get your tickets and we will see you on the road. But for now, we have a sad yet interesting phenomena.

There's a place in Japan, a beautiful place that attracts travelers from all over the world. It's the Okigahara Forest, also known as Chikai, which translates to sea of trees.

It's a dense forest made up mostly of conifers that sits on the northwestern flank of Mt Fuji. And because of its composition of trees, the forest remains green and thick all year round.

So whenever you visit this 13.5 square mile patch of woodland is bathed in nothing more than a low gloomy glow.

The ground is made of volcanic rock, thanks to an eruption millennia ago. And this rock, along with the dense vegetation, makes this place almost otherworldly in its silence.

People come to these woods for a quiet place to hike and to be at one with nature. It's also here that you'll find the famous Fagaku Wind Cave, an amazing place filled with impressive stalactites and enormous ice pillars.

And since Okigahara is just a two-hour drive from Tokyo, it's also a perfect place to visit on a trip to Japan, though you might not find too many locals there.

If you go to Okigahara, you might notice ribbons of tape criss-crossing the forest. And while at first they may look like something religious, or some fond-bunting or whatever, in reality, this tape serves a far darker purpose.

In the dim light, and with the thick trees, it's incredibly easy to get lost in Junkai, and hikers are warned repeatedly to strictly stick to the trails and not to venture off track for fear that they may become disorientated.

But also, because they may end up finding something that later they might wish they hadn't.

Because for all of those who visit Okigahara each year, some never leave. And another name for the forest, other than Okigahara or Junkai, is the Suicide Forest.

In today's short hand, we're going to explore the ghostly Japanese folklore and dark realities of Okigahara.

And given today's topic, if Suicide is a particularly sensitive topic for you, then we recommend that you give this one a miss.

It's hard to know exactly how many people kill themselves in Junkai every year. And that's because, as we said, it's so deep and so thick that it makes finding and recovering remains incredibly hard.

On average, and these are just the best estimates that we could find, it seems that roughly a hundred bodies are found each year, with the belief that anywhere between 30 to 100 people take their own lives in the forest annually.

It is actually the second most popular place for suicides on the planet. And I guess I wasn't actually surprised by which one took the morbid top spot, because it is, of course, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

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