Thanaviewing, the Aokigahara Forest, and Orientalism: Rhetorical Separations Between the Self and the Other in The Forest

Bloomfield, Emma Frances

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_8

Thanaviewing, the Aokigahara Forest, and Orientalism: Rhetorical Separations Between the Self and the Other in The Forest

Emma Frances Bloomfield⁵

Chapter
First Online: 24 April 2018

951 Accesses
2 Citations

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

Abstract

The Forest depicts the journey of an American woman to Aokigahara Forest in Mount Fuji, Japan, Sara, who is searching for her lost twin sister, Jess. Known for its association with death, the real Aokigahara is used by the filmmakers as a horror film setting. The Forest provides a virtual lens through which audiences can experience a tourist site famous, in part, for the large number of people who commit suicide there. This chapter argues that the virtual representation of Sara’s journey through the forest constructs a narrative that exoticizes Asian culture and emphasizes entertainment and enjoyment at the cost of understanding and appreciation.

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Notes

1.
Yoshitomo Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai: Suicide and Amnesia in Mt. Fuji’s Black Forest,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 18, no. 2 (1988): 164–175.
2.
“Mount Fuji named World Heritage site,” The Japan Times, June 23, 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/23/national/mount-fuji-named-world-heritage-site/#.V73hfSgrLIU.
3.
Zachary Kussin, “A visit to Japan’s incredibly creepy ‘Suicide Forest,’” New York Post, January 7, 2016, para. 8.
4.
Masahiko Kitahara and Maki Watanabe, “Diversity and Rarity Hotspots and Conservation of Butterfly Communities in and around the Aokigahara Woodland of Mount Fuji, central Japan,” Ecological Research 18 (2003): 503–522.
5.
Ibid.; Rob Gilhooly, “Inside Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest,’” The Japan Times, June 26, 2011. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/06/26/general/inside-japans-suicide-forest/#.V3VJLWgrK03.
6.
Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai.”
7.
“Suicide in Japan: Deep in the Woods,” The Economist, January 30, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21689651-fewer-japanese-are-killing-themselves-deep-woods.
8.
Mary Picone, “Suicide and the Afterlife: Popular Religion and the Standardisation of ‘Culture’ in Japan,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 36 (2012): 391–408.
9.
Tony Mckenna, “The Suicide Forest: A Marxist Analysis of the High Suicide Rate in Japan,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, & Society 27, no. 2 (2015): 293–302.
10.
Emile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: The Free Press, A division of Simon and Schuster Inc., 1897); Sinead Roarty, “Death Wishing and Cultural Memory: A Walk through Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest,’” Retrieved from https://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/DeathWishingCulturalMemory.pdf.
11.
Mckenna, “The Suicide Forest.”
12.
Maurice Pinguet, Voluntary Death in Japan (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993).
13.
Mckenna, “The Suicide Forest.”
14.
Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai,” 166.
15.
Ibid.
16.
The Forest, directed by Jason Zada (2016; Lava Bear Films), Film.
17.
“Suicide in Japan;” Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai.”
18.
Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer, Transnational Horror across Visual Media (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1.
19.
JimmyO, “Exclusive Interview: David S. Goyer Talks The Forest, Fandom and Superheroes,” JoBlo. December 28, 2015, http://www.joblo.com/movie-news/exclusive-interview-david-s-goyer-talks-the-forest-fandom-and-superheroes-127, para. 8.
20.
Emma Willis, Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
21.
Karen Benardello, “Interview: Jason Zada Talks The Forest (Exclusive),” Shockya.com , January 4, 2016, http://www.shockya.com/news/2016/01/04/interview-jason-zada-talks-the-forest-exclusive/, para. 8.
22.
Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon, “Editorial: Heart of Darkness,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 195–197.
23.
Chris Rojeck and John Urry, “Transformations of Travel and Theory,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojeck and John Urry (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–22.
24.
Thomas Blom, “Morbid Tourism: A Postmodern Market Niche with an Example from Althorp,” Norwegian Journal of Geography 54 (2000): 29–36.
25.
A. V. Seaton, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (1996): 234–244.
26.
A. V. Seaton and J. John Lennon, “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century: Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Alterior Desires,” in New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices, ed. Tej Vir Singh (Cambridge: CABI Publishing, 2004), 63–82, 78.
27.
Philip R. Stone, “Dark Tourism Consumption—A Call for Research,” e-Review of Tourism Research 3, no. 5 (2005): 109–117, 112.
28.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship, 3.
29.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).
30.
Seaton and Lennon, “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century.”
31.
Britta Tim Knudsen, “Thanatourism: Witnessing Difficult Pasts,” Tourist Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 55–72.
32.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship, 40.
33.
Keith Hawton, Kate E. Saunders, and Rory C. O’Connor, “Self-harm and suicide in adolescents,” The Lancet 379, no. 9834 (2012): 2373–2382, 2375.
34.
Lois S. Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: the Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 12, no. 2 (1979): 130–145, 137.
35.
Ibid., 137.
36.
Stephen H. Browne, “Reading public memory in Daniel Webster’s Plymouth Rock Oration,” Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 4 (1993): 464–477.
37.
Peter E. Tarlow, “Dark Tourism: The Appealing ‘Dark’ Side of Tourism and More,” in Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases, ed. Marina Novelli (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 47–58, 57.
38.
Blom, “Morbid Tourism,” 35.
39.
Ibid., 30.
40.
George Gerbner, “Cultivation Analysis: An Overview,” Mass Communication & Society 1, no. 3/4 (1998): 175–194.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Seaton and Lennon, “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century,” 78.
43.
Blom, “Morbid Tourism,” 33.
44.
Jonathan Cohen and Gabriel Weimann, “Cultivation Revisited: Some Genres Have Some Effects on Some Viewers,” Communication Reports 13, no. 2 (2000): 99–114.
45.
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
46.
Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 2 (1984): 161–176.
47.
Jim Slotek, “Chicago Fire’s Taylor Kinney Gets Lost with Natalie Dormer in ‘The Forest,’” Toronto Sun, January 5, 2016, http://www.torontosun.com/2016/01/05/chicago-fires-taylor-kinney-gets-lost-with-natalie-dormer-in-the-forest.
48.
Ibid., para. 6.
49.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship, 17.
50.
Erik H. Cohen, “Educational Dark Tourism at an In Populo Site: The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem,” Annals of Tourism Research 38, no. 1 (2011): 193–209, 193.
51.
Katarzyna Marak, Japanese and American Horror: A Comparative Study of Film, Fiction, Graphic Novels and Video Games (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2015).
52.
Knudsen , “Thanatourism: Witnessing Difficult Pasts,” 40.
53.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship.
54.
Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai,” 172.
55.
Ibid., 173.
56.
Slotek, “Chicago Fire’s Taylor Kinney Gets Lost.”
57.
Marak, Japanese and American Horror, 11.
58.
Blom, “Morbid Tourism,” 35; Marak, Japanese and American Horror, 9.
59.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship, 21.
60.
Valerie Wee, Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes: Translating Fear, Adapting Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014), 58.
61.
Randall A. Lake, “Argumentation and Self: The Enactment of Identity in Dances with Wolves,” Argumentation and Advocacy 34, no. 2 (1997): 66–89.
62.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 22.
63.
Ibid.
64.
JimmyO, “Exclusive Interview,” para. 6.
65.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 22.
66.
Said , Orientalism.
67.
Ibid., 14.
68.
For advertising, see Charles R. Taylor and Barbara B. Stern, “Asian-Americans: Television Advertising and the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype,” The Journal of Advertising 26, no. 2 (1997): 47–61. For film, see Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril,” Howard Journal of Communication 16, no. 2 (2005): 109–130.
69.
Qin Zhang, “Asian Americans Beyond the Model Minority Stereotype: The Nerdy and the Left Out,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3, no. 1 (2010): 20–37, 21.
70.
Ibid., 32.
71.
Marak, Japanese and American Horror, 12–13.
72.
Jacquelyn H. Flaskerud, “Suicide Culture,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 35, no. 5 (2014): 403–405. Kussin, “A visit to Japan’s incredibly creepy ‘Suicide Forest.’”
73.
Ibid., 16.
74.
Andy Richards, Asian Horror (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2010).
75.
Ibid., 11.
76.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 60.
77.
Ibid., 46.
78.
Ibid., 60.
79.
Bernadello, “Interview,” 48.
80.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 65.
81.
Ibid., 58.
82.
Ibid., 69.
83.
Richards, Asian Horror, 15.
84.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 40.
85.
Ibid., 30.
86.
Richards, Asian Horror, 140.
87.
Gilhooly, “Inside Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest,’” para. 23
88.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 66.
89.
Willis , Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship, 29.
90.
Ibid.
91.
Ibid., 87.
92.
Ibid., 80.
93.
Takahasi, “Aokigahara-jukai,” 172.
94.
Wee, Japanese Horror Films, 22.

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University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA
Emma Frances Bloomfield

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Emma Frances Bloomfield
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Department of History, Marietta College, Marietta, OH, USA
Kathryn N. McDaniel

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Bloomfield, E.F. (2018). Thanaviewing, the Aokigahara Forest, and Orientalism: Rhetorical Separations Between the Self and the Other in The Forest. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_8
Published: 24 April 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74686-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74687-6
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