At the beginning of this week, 22-year-old YouTuber Logan Paul saw one of his vlogs go viral for all the wrong reasons. The video, which was titled, "We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest...", caused outrage after it showed Logan and two of his friends mocking a suicide victim in the infamous Aokigahara Forest.
During the 15-minute clip, Logan asks his guide, "Did we just find a dead person in the suicide forest hanging?"
The video then cuts to a shot of the body, while Logan shouts at it from behind the camera.
"Yo, are you alive? Are you f**king with us?" he yells.
Understandably, this upset a lot of people - not only because it showed a huge amount of insensitivity to people who experience suicidal thoughts or have lost loved ones to suicide, but because it ridiculed something which is an incredibly delicate topic in Japan.
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After that one video drew a lot of attention, though, people began looking into all the other stunts Logan pulled while he was on the trip. And, unsurprisingly, some of them are pretty horrific.
As well as visiting the Aokigahara Forest, the YouTuber known for his "pranks" also walked around wearing stereotypical Japanese dress while mockingly saying, "you know how it is in Japan, they're all about the respect", threw a plushie Pokeball at strangers while dressed in a Pikachu costume, and dangled squid tentacles in people's faces while they were just trying to walk down the street.
Again and again, he openly mocked people - knowing full well that Japan prides itself as a dignified and respectful nation - and then posted the clips on the internet for people to laugh at.
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And it's not like he was unaware of what he was doing.
"I swear Tokyo is just a giant playground," Logan says in one the videos. "Maybe it’s not. Maybe I should stop. Probably not."
In the context of his apology for the suicide forest video - in which the YouTuber said, "there's a lot of things I should have done differently, but I didn't" - it becomes obvious that Logan was conscious of the impact his actions would have, but he went ahead and posted the videos anyway.
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Now, as a result of his videos getting so much attention, Logan is facing a huge amount of backlash on Twitter.
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In his original apology for the suicide forest video, Logan said:
"None of us knew how to react or how to feel. I should have never posted the video. I should have put the cameras down and stopped recording what we were going through. I’m ashamed of myself. I’m disappointed in myself and I promise to be better. I will be better. Thank you."
Whether or not he will extend that apology to cover all of the other disrespectful and racist things he did throughout his trip remains to be seen, but - considering that he has angered pretty much an entire nation - he'd better be prepared to make some serious reparations for his actions.
