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Dying Alone in Japan: The Industry Devoted to What’s Left Behind
- duxup 8y agoIt might be grim but I wonder if you could setup a system where people bid on the contents of a home..... digging through a stranger's things could be an interesting, even if morbid thing.
- DanAndersen 8y agoIsn't that what an estate sale is?
- wavefunction 8y agoAn estate sale? Unless I'm missing some nuance.
- mirimir 8y agoI've helped clean out a few homes. All but one had housed relatives, and that was OK. Sad but also nostalgic. But when we bought a house with contents, sold by the estate, that was just plain grim. They had no children, and a distant relative had inherited. They first held an estate sale, for the most valuable stuff. And we got the rest. With price tags :( But damn. Clothes. Personal papers. Photos. Home movies. It was overwhelming. But much of that, I admit, was projection. In that I have no children, either ;)
- ars 8y ago> Personal papers. Photos. Home movies. It was overwhelming. And all to the trash I assume? I have a goal to not leave anything like that behind, if future people aren't going to want it, I shouldn't be keeping it in the first place. I'm failing utterly in doing it, but it's a goal.
- mirimir 8y agoActually, I burned it all. This was a rural property. So I just went old-school, with a large steel drum, with holes punched around the bottom. And then buried the ashes. We did a little ceremony. I did keep some stuff. That old pair of scissors that I've mentioned. Some antique tools.
- ggm 8y agoThe beat feeling I had helping clean up after my mother in law's death,was the sense of enganegmeny and gratitude for good usable things in the op-shops. They said they don't appreciate the trash dumping but when stuff is generally usable and given in good faith, they love it as much as I did. It's a huge release of burdens to take somebody 's stuff and pass it on.
- nostromo 8y agoI'm interested in how shrinking populations may impact generational wealth. In past generations, where it was common for a successful person to have six, seven, or eight heirs, even a large inheritance was quickly dissipated over a few generations. In a shrinking population, the opposite is true. A single child often inherits the wealth of two working adults. And childless couples will commonly leave anything remaining to a niece or nephew. This could have a consolidating effect on wealth distribution.
- spaceflunky 8y agoI see this happening in the US now. For example with homes, when grandparents died in the 80s/90s a home was sold at a modest value and split among 3-5 heirs. Which amounted to very little per family after taxes. Nowadays you have millennials set to inherit homes that are overvalued in the $1MM+ range and split among 1-2 heirs. Which can be a life changing sum of money. I personally know of people who feel little pressure in their lives because they know they stand to inherit a $1.5MM home plus whatever else their parents have at some point in their life.
- mirimir 8y ago> I personally know of people who feel little pressure in their lives because they know they stand to inherit a $1.5MM home plus whatever else their parents have at some point in their life. Unless said parent(s) get clever with reverse mortgaging, and spend all the cash on travel or whatever ;)
- ryandrake 8y agoGrossly generalizing a whole generation, but chances are, those Baby Boomer parents were in debt up past their eyeballs, and that $1.5MM home is going to get sold along with all their other assets in order to square everything up. This generation may be having fewer kids, but it's going to be leaving fewer net assets behind.
- mirimir 8y ago
- lukasLansky 8y ago"The Swedish Theory of Love" is a great documentary about loneliness in Sweden. It features public workers doing the job discussed in the article.
- cryptozeus 8y agoGood suggestion, its on YouTube
- mc32 8y agoIt’s s shame so few things hold enough value to be considered for the second hand market, which is mostly the philipinnes. Evenso, the cost of landfills makes some things worth recycling. It’s also telling that Ikea (furniture) is held in such low esteem from a second hand market, that there is no market for it. That highlights to me that Ikea is detrimental to the environment since it means these thjngs end up in the dump. On a side note, at least that apartment had very poor natural lighting coming in.
- krapht 8y agoI think Ikea is great! It is engineered to last exactly as long as most people want for cheaply made furniture. I think you overestimate the market for second-hand, used furniture in old styles. I can't count the amount of well-made furniture that goes unsold in consignment stores and estate sales. Simply because it is well-made doesn't mean that people desire it.
- sehugg 8y agoYes, the hassle of storing and moving (or disposing) often exceeds its value. I had a good experience donating my old furniture to a charity that supplies impoverished or recently-homeless people.
- mc32 8y agoIn addition to being extremely contemporary, which contributes to not fitting into future trends, Ikea is made of cheap synthetic materials with the aid of lots of chemicals. Classical furniture can last longer can fit in a variety of design languages and in the least the component materials can be recycled. For example well made mid century modern furniture can be in heavy demand. Moreover, antique furniture stores offer good furniture, if at times, at unaffordable prices. That said, maybe Ikeas product is no more environmentally impactful than traditional furniture.
- owenversteeg 8y ago> More seriously, she worries that low-cost Chinese-manufactured goods are starting to offer real competition to secondhand goods in developing markets. And this is what I worry too. Not just in developing markets, but everywhere. I buy a very large amount of used tools and electronics, but recently new tools and electronics have gotten so cheap it usually makes much more sense to buy new. You can get a slightly older phone used for about $200 or so, but there are plenty of great brand new options around $200 as well. You can get someone's old angle grinder used for $10, but you can buy a new one with a warranty for $14. I personally don't care about scratches or heavy visual damage on my stuff, so buying used usually makes sense for me. But nobody wants to sell their old stuff for as cheap as Chinese new products these days. Even if they do, the Chinese stuff comes with a warranty and a promise of support and refunds. That's what worries me: at some point, manufacturing new stuff just gets so cheap that it outweighs buying used even for the most hardcore thrift shopper like me. I recently bought a nice looking pocketknife with a pretty wood handle for $3.49; in a thrift store you'd see a used one for maybe $10. I recently got a used angle grinder for $10, but it broke, leaving me wishing I had bought a new one from a local store for $14 (including disks and a 2-year warranty!) The worst thing is that because of lower-quality manufacturing for decades, many used things have very little inherent value. When every particleboard table cost $25, a used one was worth maybe $7. But now that you can get a new particleboard table for $5, the same used one is worthless. The same goes for a billion other things, from calculators to drills to speakers. In the past, when cheap new things weren't available, the used low- and mid- quality versions of those things held value. Now, anything that's not high quality does not hold value. When you can buy a used calculator for $3 or a brand new one with a warranty for $4, nearly everyone will pick the new one. TLDR: When cheap Chinese products are available, used low & mid quality products become worthless and only used high quality products hold value. This will cause enormous amounts of unnecessary waste to be produced.
- ryandrake 8y agoIt's hard to buy anything new today and expect it to last more than 5 years. This includes cars, tools, appliances, all kinds of electronics, furniture. You have to buy old if you want long term reliability. My rough rule of thumb is: If it was made before 1980 (maybe before 1990), it will probably last as long as you need it. If it was made after that, expect it to break.
- baursak 8y agoThis is also a vibrant niche industry in the US. E.g. https://www.estatesales.net/ https://www.estatesales.net/
- bratsche 8y agoI don't understand these things. I've gone to a few estate sales thinking maybe I can get some cool stuff for a decent price. But no, every one I've gone to they were asking insane prices for everything.
- baursak 8y agoUsually they expect you to negotiate and these are 3-day events over the weekend, where every subsequent day there are sharp discounts applied for anything unsold previous day.
- tathougies 8y agoEstate sales are not new.
- baursak 8y agonever said they were
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThis reminded me of a thought I had the other day. I was watching a documentary with a terminally ill person and they had a small set of plastic drawers on their dresser. It was ghastly. Then I realised just how much more plastic is going to end up in landfill in coming decades. People used to have wooden furniture that got passed down for generations. Now if someone dies everything they own that's made of plastic will be dumped. None of it has any value. There must be so much plastic accumulated in the homes of living people. It's scary.
- jpatokal 8y agoJapan's second-hand boom is not caused by a sudden spiritual uplift to not be mottainai, but by 20-30 years of economic stagnation and a growing underclass of poorly paid temp workers who can't afford anything else.
- adventured 8y agoThat's without question a big part of the story. In 30 years they've gone from having a higher GDP per capita than the US, to being in a position where they have to increase it by ~57% to catch up. It's roughly where it was in 1993 in USD terms, before adjusting for inflation. The US is well known for having a high output economy. It took the US until 2005 to catch up to where Japan's GDP was at in 1995 per capita (~$43,000). Or to lend another perspective, their GDP per capita in 1995 was about 40% higher than Germany, and now it's below Germany. It would probably be fair to say they've seen a real loss of at least 1/3 of their standard of living in a quarter century. It was artificially inflated from the asset bubbles they had in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however that's still a painful drop and a long stretch of time to stagnate. They went through truly massive public works spending that entirely failed to spark big economic productivity gains or greater output. A savings rate that dropped to nearly zero. A public debt so high it's 2x that of the US as a percentage of GDP. Debasing the Yen became their only means to try to escape the towering debt, once the population could no longer afford to lend the government any more money (as the savings rate plunged). With the Yen debasement went their extraordinary standard of living. The challenging part, is that they're nowhere near done needing to debase the Yen, they still can't afford their debt at all. As part of their magic central bank economy solution, the BOJ has even taken to juicing the stock market directly by slowly nationalizing it (buying up nearly 4% of the market directly). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-29/the-boj-s-stock-market-distortions-are-coming-under-new-scrutiny https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-29/the-boj-s...
- z1mm32m4n 8y agoAnd if you want a visualization of those stats: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US-DE-JP&year_high_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... ^ I find it really interesting to see how volatile some of these charts are, while the US GDP per capita seems relatively stable.
- hboon 8y agoSomewhat related: I've found Departures (Japanese) to be a great movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/