The article is written is if this is unique to Japan. But lonely deaths, unnoticed for months happens every day in every (modern) society. And it is mostly men.
The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
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Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing. My heart is with you. Why don't you plan to marry?
To some that question is the same as "Why don't you plan on being a billionaire?"
The more interesting question is: how has one traversed their entire life up to gainful employment and has no friends? This seems to be the more telling question.
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#53>We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone. ...or... >For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone.
Unless you were born in a vat, you probably didn't enter the world alone.
I interpret it as "we enter the world greeted by a bunch of strangers" and "when we die no one follows us to the other side".
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#54> His epiphany came when his current partner told him how she had lost her grandmother. Unlike Koremura’s loss, her grandmother had died alone—a kodokushi. It was seeing the deep regret in her, and accepting his own ennui, that made Koremura finally take action. He left his job as a stockbroker and set up his own removal company dedicated to the cleanup of kodokushi victims. He wanted to give something back to the ge…
Japan is incredibly stubborn and ignorant when it comes to addressing core social and psychological problems in their society. It isn't even recognized by most of the population so when people begin to complain of their own social issues or depression, people around them will slowly distance themselves from that person. As a result, most people will choose to hide their issues until it is unbearable. At the point the…
Solution: Meetups. I am not sure if you remember an article from last year about elderly Koreans (in NY) who would do weekly meetups to check on each other...Maybe something like this can work in Japan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/nyregion/fighting-a-mcdona...
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#55Sad but not uncommon I think. There was a guy who had a radio show that interviewed people with odd jobs. One such jobs was sort of like Toru's but was "special cleaning". Basically the guy started a business to clean up crime scenes. But found that most of his business came from landlords and others discovering deceased elders in their rooms. His suggestion was to crawl your grandparents from time to time to say hi. Several times he had cleaned up places where the person had simply fallen and then died where they were because they could not get up to get any help.
This is probably especially challenging with people who don't have relatives or the relatives never check up on them.
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#56[deleted]
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#57Why are there so many stories HN on social problems in Asia? I would have expected that smart people on HN would make some effort to understand Orientalism[0]. In the case of this story, this is a phenomenon that is occurring all around the developed world. Japan is in many ways just another developed country. But through the eyes of Orientalism, Japan's problems are unique and quaint, and the objective Westerner can…
Japan's problems related to the aging aren't unique and quaint at all, they're just ahead of the curve.
Most of the developed world has fertility below the replacement rate: where Japan is today, South Korea will be in a decade's time, and China and great big slabs of Europe will follow soon after. (America looks set to avoid this for time being though, largely thanks to immigration.)
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#58My wife is a hospice nurse here in Japan visiting terminally ill patients at their homes.
She comes home with many different stories. Some people are incredibly wealthy but their family doesn't want anything to do with them so they basically wait to die alone. Some people are poor and mentally ill and are basically living in dumps with rodents running around. Some people do have good situations in which they are cared for and can die surrounded by loved ones.
My wife is the only person I've met who wants to die young (around 40 or 50). Death is usually hidden from our lives - especially when we're young and only comes up infrequently.
While some people who are poor do use their service due to government subsidies, a lot of people don't and there is no public service for the elderly. Stories like this will become much more common over the next 20 years as a huge proportion of the Japanese populations passes on.
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikata_ga_nai
I lived in Japan for two years, and studied the language, and it was amazing how that sentence always brought any discussion to a conclusion. Grammatically, its negation would be "Shikata ga aru", but I never heard this said once.
Sounds like it's a thought-terminating cliche- of which we have many in English.
Re: The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
#60[deleted]
This is definitely not the case. I question how many elderly people (80+) you actually know in your life and see on a regular basis.