Japan
Every logged mystery in this country.
- Yamanashi Prefecture
Aokigahara
A forest grown over a lava flow laid down by Mount Fuji in 864, dense enough that it swallows sound. It has a reputation abroad that the prefecture has spent years trying to manage, including by no longer publishing its numbers.
- Nagasaki Prefecture
Hashima Island
About 5,259 people lived here in 1959, which made it the most densely populated place on earth. Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974 and the last residents were gone by April. In July 2021, the World Heritage Committee recorded its deep regret that Japan had not told the full history of the Koreans made to work here.
- Osaka Prefecture
Hōzen-ji Mizukake Fudō
On the night of March 13, 1945, an air raid burned all six halls of Hōzen-ji in Namba, and the temple's own history says one stone figure of Fudō Myōō was left standing. Soon after the war, people began throwing water on that statue as they made a wish, and the water has grown a coat of green moss over it from head to foot. It stands in a lantern-hung alcove a short walk from Dōtonbori, open at all hours.
- Hiroshima Prefecture
Okunoshima
For sixteen years, Japan erased this island from its own maps while a secret factory produced thousands of tons of poison gas there. Today it is overrun by tame rabbits, and the ruins still stand.
- Kyoto Prefecture
Yasui Konpira-gū
A stone 1.5 meters tall and 3 meters wide sits in the shrine grounds, papered so thickly with handwritten slips that the stone itself cannot be seen. People write the tie they want to end on a paper stand-in, crawl through the hole at its center from front to back to cut it, crawl back through to form a good one, and paste the slip on. The shrine's own list of ties it will cut runs from bad relationships to illness, alcohol, tobacco, and gambling.