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from the explain-the-sound-of-one-hand dept.
With no families or visitors to speak of, many older tenants spent weeks or months cocooned in their small apartments, offering little hint of their existence to the world outside their doors. And each year, some of them died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell.
The first time it happened, or at least the first time it drew national attention, the corpse of a 69-year-old man living near Mrs. Ito had been lying on the floor for three years, without anyone noticing his absence. His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account. Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, the authorities came to the apartment and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his next-door neighbors.
The huge government apartment complex where Mrs. Ito has lived for nearly 60 years — one of the biggest in Japan, a monument to the nation's postwar baby boom and aspirations for a modern, American way of life — suddenly became known for something else entirely: the "lonely deaths" of the world's most rapidly aging society.
To many residents in Mrs. Ito's complex, the deaths were the natural and frightening conclusion of Japan's journey since the 1960s. A single-minded focus on economic growth, followed by painful economic stagnation over the past generation, had frayed families and communities, leaving them trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births. The extreme isolation of elderly Japanese is so common that an entire industry has emerged around it, specializing in cleaning out apartments where decomposing remains are found.
Compounding matters, Japan has a declining birthrate and bans immigration.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:47PM
The number of places to have a non-echoChamber, open discussion on the Internet is vanishing.
That said, many of the posters here seem to think that their US/EU opinions on the world of Asia/Russia are relevant. Anti-immigration policies ("Japan has no policy on immigration" - Japanese PM) in Japan usually refer to *Westerners* and *Chinese*. They don't have an influx of Muslim immigrants because 1) they are an island and can more-or-less protect their borders, 2) they are relatively distant from the Muslim world, 3) their (illegal) immigrants are from Asiatic descent, and 4) the Japanese people are openly hostile to the gaijin. I've been there. There was an *actual* protest on my Western organization during my visit.
That said, there aren't many options. In the old days, children were an asset rather than a liability. They worked the farm. They worked the store. They cared for you in your old age. They contributed meaningfully to the household. People had many of them.
In modern times, they are a liability. They need to be fed. They need more-or-less continuous care until age 18. They need education. They generally give nothing back; it is generally assumed that parents should have saved for retirement. It should come as no surprise that people have less of them. The 2nd-3rd world still have lots of kids, as they are assets. As nations develop, children turn from assets to liabilities by 1000 small changes (retirement savings replacing family care, children being unwelcome in the workforce and going to daycare, child labor laws forbidding 12-year-old workers). Similarly, an educated, rather than strong/industrious, population becomes the backbone of the economy. On the whole, "less people that work nicer jobs and producing more economic value" is probably a good thing.
That said, you cannot ignore the costs of these changes, and the Japanese/US systems highlight the difficulties in transition. In anti-immigrant Japan, this looks like "old people dying alone" when adults didn't have children or the few children they did have don't take an active role in elder care (because they moved off to the city to pursue grueling work schedules?). In more-or-less pro-immigrant America (whatever the modern climate tells you, the USA is ~11-12% LEGAL immigrants by population), this means that our elder care is mostly provided by foreign caregivers (https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynrosenblatt/2017/03/07/aging-parents-immigrants-and-the-caregiving-cliff), and that our economy is more-or-less growing, while the GDP per capita of Japan is falling fairly rapidly (4% last year!) while the population retires/dies. Individually, Japanese citizens are better off. As a nation, Japan's relevance is fading.
At the end of the day, it is hard to say what policy is "right", but both of these nations made their decisions independently. Part of the new world of freedom was supposed to be a "live and let live" policy - Japan *chose* to be anti-immigration early on, and, as a byproduct, does not have a domestic workforce for elder care. Both Japan and America will both suffer the consequences of their decisions.