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 His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account.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) by lernema on Monday December 04 2017, @02:48AM (3 children)
> A girl can walk from one end of Tokyo to the other at 3am by herself in complete safety
Maybe. But they cannot take the train at rush hour:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/International/story?id=803965 [go.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:19AM
Sure they can. They just have to make sure they get on the women-only cars that are specifically set aside for them. No idea if that costs more or not, but if the country was truly "safe" as much as some like to believe I doubt there'd be a market for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:50AM (1 child)
This is bad, but let's be clear on the severity: getting rubbed against or an upskirt photo is nothing compared to what would happen in many other countries, including the urban parts of the USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:56AM
Yeah, in most of the rest of the world this is called sexual assault.