JAN IJÄSTwo Forests 23.3.2024 – 14.4.2024

Jan Ijäs explores modern folklore, anecdotes, rumours, beliefs and various phenomena in his essay films. In the Waste series, the stories relate, one way or another, to things going wrong, becoming dysfunctional and, consequently, useless. Something that used to be valuable can degrade into waste that needs be disposed of.

Two Forests reflects on the end of human life and the final disposal: aging and death. This time, the setting is the aging and ailing Japan and its forest-related death myths. Two Forests also takes two approaches to death. Although people normally die of an illness or accident, in extreme cases individuals can decide for themselves when it is time to go – or the decision may be made for them by someone else.

The first forest is Aokigahara on the northwestern flank of Mount Fuji, the quiet and idyllic ‘Sea of Trees’, where Japanese people have gone to end their lives for thousands of years. Like so many other things, the perfect suicide spot recommended by Wataru Tsurumi in his cult book The Complete Manual of Suicide (1993) has now been ruined: it has turned into a morbid tourist attraction, and anyone planning to commit suicide there will find it difficult to find a peaceful corner.

The other forest is Obasute, a mountain where, according to legend, elderly people who had become a burden were taken and left to die. In modern Tokyo, elderly people can also be dumped using a specialist service: relatives no longer need to climb all the way up a mountain. But if senior citizens are swept off the streets, who will be left? Elderly people do make up a significant part of society. They have time to gather in karaoke dens to enjoy themselves. Yet a lonely life dedicated to work is often followed by a lonely death.

There is a grim counterpart to all the elements of an active life in the Japanese culture of death, as exemplified by the service culture that has developed around abandonment. People get weird satisfaction from cleaning videos, and after-death cleaners can also become a phenomenon, as shown by Two Forests. Although Ijäs’s assortment of stories includes a Twitter killer, death is at first more typically so mundane and inconspicuous that it is only discovered when neighbours notice the by-products of decomposition: smells, fluids and insects. Oblivion is a fate more tragic than death.

Tokyo evokes images of a promise of the future and progress, but Ijäs points out that this vision of the future is actually stuck in a time capsule and mummified in the aesthetics of 40 years ago. It has become retrofuturism, dreams of the future gone grey from the past. Perhaps this is why the focus needs to be on forests with all their layers of growth and decay. An efficiency-oriented approach to forest management has created an ecological problem as forest ecosystems have been cleared of decayed trees, which should be left there. A person’s death in an efficiency-driven society wreaks temporary havoc and creates disruption. Nature takes over culture, tissues break down and become mushy, various decomposers have a ball – even if it all takes place in a flat in the middle of a big city.

Tytti Rantanen

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