The YouTube star Logan Paul has apologised and deleted a video of him and his friends discovering a body in Japan’s so-called suicide forest.

The Aokigahara forest has developed a reputation as a site where many Japanese people have killed themselves.

In the since deleted video, released late last month, Paul and his friends were planning to camp in the forest overnight but stumbled upon a corpse hanging from a tree.

Paul blurred the face of the body, but he and his friends stood around the corpse and filmed it before leaving the forest.

“I’ve never made a mistake like this before,” Paul said in an apology on Twitter on Monday.

Paul initially found fame through the Twitter-owned video service Vine and has since migrated to posting daily videos on YouTube. His younger brother is Jake Paul, a fellow YouTube star who has been accused of turning his neighborhood into a "war zone" after a series of parties, stunts, and fan attention.