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 His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account.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 isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @05:08PM (1 child)
We have plenty of cheap property in the UK, they just aren't in the right areas for where the work is. What Japan will end up with is dying villages and towns, with old people still living there, but no young people to do any actual work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @05:28PM
In Florida the dying villages are a source of jobs. Nursing, construction and repair, lawn maintenance, restaurants, even hotels are driven by the retirement communities. Bonus: the near-dead immigrate to Florida on a regular basis, sustaining the source of income.
Not the most enjoyable bunch of people to work for, but a steady feedstock for industry nonetheless.
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