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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 03 2017, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the explain-the-sound-of-one-hand dept.

Sabishii, na?

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 His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account.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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @05:29AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @05:29AM (#604920)

    Although, I did have decent parents, YMMV

    I wonder how the distribution (failed parents and failed children) of blame fits in these situations. What kind of kids would neglect their decent parents this way? What kind of decent parents would end up this way?

    My parents were failures and they will die without some bullshit happy ending reunion from me. If they die with no one around to care, then it will be a result of the life that they lived.

    My experience biases me, but I'd suspect that there are more failed parents than kids too selfish to care about decent parents.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @03:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @03:51PM (#605095)

    My parents were failures and they will die without some bullshit happy ending reunion from me. If they die with no one around to care, then it will be a result of the life that they lived.

    I hear you, AC. Me too.

    It's odd that I still miss my parents around the holidays. I just have to remember that my daddy believes that Yahweh is angry with the USA because black people aren't all slaves by birth, and he believes that it's the Jews' fault that he was a dipshit who didn't understand how investment works. Tricked me into getting a job 50 miles away and being dependent on him for transportation there so that he could evict me one morning for being gay out of the blue with no fucking way to keep that job. Spent a little while homeless.

    Then they had the audacity to accept my brother's child into the family even though the child was born out of wedlock.

    They may or may not die alone, but they can die however they want without me.