Aokigahara is an area of dense forest covering 35km² below the base of Mount Fuji, Japan's most famous natural landmark. According to folk legend, phantom spirits once haunted the "Sea of Trees", but the reality is even more ghoulish.

In the 19th Century peasants would leave their elderly folk and unwanted children there to die, and these days it is the world's most popular suicide destination.

For Toby de Silva, a London-based photographer who explores notions of the macabre through his landscape projects (including a series on houses used for horror films such as Poltergeist and The Exorcist, and another based around the murder sites of the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper), Aokigahara was an obvious destination.

"It's a scary place," he says. "I saw people who looked like they'd definitely be staying - awkward-looking without any hiking gear." For The Perfect Place to Die, he focused on the mute remnants of the suicides - including discarded kitchen knife wrappers and the miles of plastic tape that run throughout the forest, used by the local volunteers to track their daily search for bodies - discarded in the romantic forest setting.

"It's so remote, I wouldn't want to be there after dark," he admits, saying he shot there between 10am and 5pm, visiting by bus each day from a nearby town."There are a lot of fissures in the ground and if you fell through them you wouldn't be found. Your mobile phone doesn't work, and compasses don't either because of the magnetic volcanic sub-rock. I didn't tell anyone where I was going, which probably wasn't very bright."

He plans to return to make pictures at dusk and dawn, but says expanding the project has proved difficult. "If you ask about the forest, no-one engages," he explains. "It's not a subject they're open about. I didn't push it because I didn't feel comfortable."