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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 His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account.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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:47PM (4 children)
I think we'll launch right into an international genetics race akin to the old arms races.
White people, along with everyone else, will be left behind by the augmented class.
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Flamebait? What's the point of a discussion forum other than flamewars, you worthless website of whiners???
Suck a flaming cock, SoylentNews, you work of whiners.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:20PM (3 children)
> What's the point of a discussion forum other than flamewars ...
At the risk of feeding the troll (bad idea, I know). How about this:
Reasoned debate at an intellectual level and avoidance of emotional triggers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:30PM
Spock made everyone all hot and bothered.
For wrongheadedness, there's no salve more effective than ridicule.
Logic dictates that you suck a cock, SoylentNews, you illogical rubbish.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @01:10PM
Spock made everyone all hot and bothered.
For wrongheadedness, there's no salve more effective than ridicule.
Logic dictates that you suck a cock, SoylentNews, you illogical rubbish.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:33PM
Spock made everyone all hot and bothered.
For wrongheadedness, there's no salve more effective than ridicule.
Logic dictates that you suck a cock, SoylentNews, you illogical rubbish.