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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 His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account.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: 5, Insightful) by julian on Monday December 04 2017, @12:01AM (4 children)
I disagree with the Japanese immigration policy, but they have their own country and can deal with whatever problems they create for themselves one way or the other. We have a different reality we have to deal with. For one thing, the homogeneous ethno-state the Japanese sort of have which alt-reich cretins salivate over is impossible to recreate in the USA. Even if you stopped all immigration tomorrow, non-white people are already here and they're US citizens. They're not going anywhere. Since many are first and second generation immigrants and lower in socioeconomic status they have a higher fertility rate which drops off to the base rate after a couple generations.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being white. There is usually something very wrong with Internet edge-lords who feel the need to proclaim this like they're being subversive and profound. You are not oppressed, put-upon, or even inconvenienced for being white. To claim the contrary is to adopt the same nauseating victim-hood complex that dozens of right-wing YouTubers have made a cottage industry shrieking about when they see it in liberals and minorities. Yet it seems even more pathetic when it's coming from the self-proclaimed "master race" (behold them! [reddit.com]).
Moreover, having pride in your *race*, whatever it is, is fucking stupid. You should be proud of your accomplishments--I guess that explains why so many far-right ethno-nationalists fall back on being proud of their skin color. They've got nothing else going for them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday December 04 2017, @04:59AM
You're already at +5 so I can't mod you up further, but THANK YOU for being the one single fucking voice of reason in this entire festering septic tank of a thread. This place is going straight to shit...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @01:23PM
Nobody said anything about making the USA an ethnostate; nobody said anything about whites being "oppressed" (though, whites are forced to pay for the artificial advancement of other peoples); nobody said anything about whites being the "master race"; nobody said anything about being proud of skin color.
There's straw coming out of your ears.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:35PM
Nobody said anything about making the USA an ethnostate; nobody said anything about whites being "oppressed" (though, whites are forced to pay for the artificial advancement of other peoples); nobody said anything about whites being the "master race"; nobody said anything about being proud of skin color.
There's straw coming out of your ears.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @07:22PM
Then help Muslims emigrate to Malaysia (Just look at their flag! They must be the ACS project for Muslims!), Mexicans back to Mexico (under US 'management'.) And then let the chinese finish buying out the US and watch as our leadership learns mandarin and abandons us for some wealthy Chinese-majority retirement island now that they have gotten theirs :)