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Japan police: Nearly 4k who died alone at home not found for over a month

107 points by rntn 2y ago

dachworker 2y ago
What a sick society! Over a month of nobody checking in on their elderly? I doubt all these people were all childless.
- pilaf 2y ago
  That's very quick judgment based on pure speculation. Do you know what the numbers look like for your own country? Are those stats even published?
- totetsu 2y ago
  If someone dies alone at 85, those children could be in their 60s too.
- exe34 2y ago
  not everybody can afford the mental health cost of talking to their parents.
  - vik0 2y ago
    Why do so many people online report having poor relationships with their parents? Is this real? I don't know anyone in real life who talks like this about their parents. Am I in a bubble or what?
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      You/we are in a bubble. Nearly half of kids today are growing up with at least one absent parent. Social decay is a real phenomenon.
      - wickedsight 2y ago
        > Social decay is a real phenomenon Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners. Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
        mensetmanusman 2y ago
        That’s great, but data is also real: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:text=Father%20absence%20during%20early%20childhood,of%20depression%20in%20early%20adulthood.&text=Early%20childhood%20father%20absence%20is,across%20adolescence%20and%20early%20adulthood.&text=Effects%20are%20strongest%20for%20females%20with%20absent%20fathers%20in%20early%20childhood https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:te.... I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome.
        wickedsight 2y ago
        Well... Duh. I would've loved to have two parents who loved each other and took me on fun family trips! But that wasn't an option, since they had an awful relationship. So the options were either divorce or doubling down on a shitty relationship. They chose divorce and I'm happy for it. Also, your study doesn't seem to have any comparison to the impact of abusive relationships vs. father absence, which is what I was talking about. If you can find anything about that, I'd love to see it.
        exe34 2y ago
        > I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome. That's pretty profound! You should write an article!
        a-french-anon 2y ago
    - Lanolderen 2y ago
      It's definitely not rare. Many people have negative relationships with their parents. Sometimes, however, it's not even a poor relationship but being unable/unwilling to deal with the stress of exposing yourself to their mental and physical degradation.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      You may be in a bubble, I know plenty of people with no/minimal relationship with parents. But it may not be a bad thing overall. Historically when people didn't go far away from home they had more "forced" contact with parents; now, not as much. In the same way that it's good that we get more divorces now (people, mostly women, are able to leave bad relationships without the community/church getting in the way), it's also good that people can live independent lives and are not bound to their families. Of course it's better if the relationship is healthy, but both sides need to work on that. There are subreddit of estranged parents too and communities like https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ but often the stories turn out to be "we're so alone, why are the kids so bad and don't talk to us anymore? (oh yeah, we did try to force them to do X, but that's irrelevant)"
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Whether this can be a good thing depends heavily on your opinion of the importance of family and shared history in society and culture.
        viraptor 2y ago
        Or more specifically whether you want to put people first, or some idealised structures with hidden issues.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Even that depends on what people you are putting first. Putting the individual first and it will likely make sense to put little value in family structures and community connection. Putting community first, or specifically the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, and valuing family connections makes more sense. Neither are an absolute fix to everything. Like everything else, a mix of both likely makes the most sense.
        exe34 2y ago
        > the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, They should have thought of that before they fucked up their kids.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - haswell 2y ago
      Very real. My relationship with my parents is extremely complicated at best. Therapy is literally why I have a relationship with them at all. This is fairly common in the particular circle I grew up in (deeply religious and very conservative), and I didn’t see a healthy parent/child relationship until I started dating someone from a very different background. It was eye opening.
    - HeckFeck 2y ago
      It's something that seldom comes up in conversation due to politeness and the strong likelihood that it will cause discomfort, but a few friends I know intimately have reported bad relationships and questionable parenting only after long personal conversations when we're alone. A causal factor is the tendency to normalise early experiences, even if they are neglectful or abusive. This means many are unaware or reluctant to realise their upbringing wasn't that good when they are older. Without critical examination the early experiences and the assumptions you had as a child are carried into adulthood. So a lot of people will say their parents are 'loving' even if they were far from it.
    - wickedsight 2y ago
      I know a lot of people who have issues with their parents/family/spouses in one way or another. In part because I'm not a very judgemental person, but probably a big part is that I have a lot of unrelated friendships, so people can tell me anything without a chance of that thing ending up as gossip. The internet is like that, you can tell anyone anything from your anonymous account without it ever coming back to you. Honestly, I know only a few people who have near zero issues with their parents and would happily have them move in when they get older.
    - throwway_278314 2y ago
      If you are in a bubble, stay there. It is a happier place. Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Parenting is hard.
      - astura 2y ago
        >Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Can you give me a specific example of this?
        pjc50 2y ago
        Before they reply, I would be willing to put money on it being something to do with "coming out".
        exe34 2y ago
        My sperm provider literally said that his dad treated him like shit, so he gets to treat me like shit, and that as a reward some day I'd get to treat my own son like shit. I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them. When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      Parenting, like life, is the accumulation of the consequences of decisions/actions. Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable. Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life. Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect". Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.
      - codersfocus 2y ago
        > the realization that ... it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?
        WillAdams 2y ago
        If you think providing for a child is not appropriate as a central focus of a parent's life, please take that into consideration before doing anything which might involve a child. While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.
        fennecfoxy 2y ago
    - astura 2y ago
      You're in a (probably upper middle class) bubble. Think about all the bad/rude/shitty/sick/criminal/awful/miserable people you've interacted with in your life or read about online/on TV. Odds are, those people have kids because most people have kids. Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse. Bad people are actually MORE likely to have children and have more children because they don't care about the welfare of their children and having children increases your social standing in life. I am someone who has truly horrible people as parents; they abused me physically and mentally/emotionally, neglected my needs, broke me down, told me they hated me and wished I was never born, and told me I ruined their life for existing. Nothing I ever did or said was "right," I was always criticized. There was also severe mental illness, domestic violence, criminal activity, and substance abuse going on my entire childhood. It's not hyperbole to describe my childhood as 18 years of torture. I've been diagnosed with PTSD due to my childhood experiences. I talk about it openly online with stranges, I talk about it with my various mental health providers over the years. However, most of my friends don't really know the full extent of the terror I experienced and I'll never talk about it with stranges or just acquaintances. It doesn't really come up in conversation very often and it's kinda hard to talk about in person. It's hard enough telling my therapists about it. It's also just really embarrassing and I have to REALLY trust you before talking about it IRL. We have an extremely pronatalist society and nobody really casually wants to hear about the victims that produces. It's not socially acceptable outside an extremely close relationship. I don't feel the same typing about it semi-anonymously online. I also REALLY feel that I need to correct the cultural idea that "all parents are inherently good."
      - jart 2y ago
        You might not realize this on a conscious level, but the reason you're reluctant to tell your friends about your parents is because they'll assume you're a bad person too, due to how you inherited their codebase. If my parents were abusive, I'd want to hide that fact, similar to how I'd want to hide a past felony conviction for abuse. Because I believe people can change and deserve the opportunity to rise above their circumstances and make themselves into something better than where they came from. Having that opportunity is more important than the emotional catharsis of oversharing, wouldn't you agree?
    - pjc50 2y ago
      People aren't necessarily that open about it, and it can take a while of getting close to someone to realize that they never mention their family. (I suspect you don't know a lot of queer people?)
    - exe34 2y ago
      Of the people that I know that are either in a similar situation (of having gone 100% no-contact) or even those that meet their parents for Christmas and Easter but otherwise keep them on an information diet about their own lives (so about a dozen, let's say), not a single one of them told me their situation first. They only opened up after I casually mentioned that I fired my parents in response to a much smaller parent-related complaint on their part.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      I know several people who have completely cut off communication with one or both parents. Consider yourself lucky.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      There was an interesting article about how much more common it is for people to cut off ties with their parents over things like politics or whatever else, things the parents did not understand as a big deal. I do think it's increasing. The ones I know who do it and I'm close enough to know the family, I think it's entirely resolvable and sad
    - missedthecue 2y ago
      I've wondered about this too. Seems 90% of people on the internet have abusive narcissistic relationships with their parents, while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much.
      - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
        >...while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much. Wait hold on. Let's not conflate a strained family relationship with not loving them. Both my parents had an extremely abusive relationship with their parents, to the point where they could not be around them (And by extension neither was I), but they always loved them — And so did their parents, they were just extremely flawed. I get along well with mine, but completely understand how complicated family relationships are.
    - 8490109481 2y ago
      Yes it's real. And some aspects of those relationships I have found are unsolvable problems, dead ends. For all of the things I feel good about accomplishing and creating, I can't heal that relationship. Some people are just set in their ways, it is a fact of life, and there is no solution to be pursued. It was an important lesson. There are a lot of other problems in the world people bicker about here and elsewhere like urban planning or regulation. Things that seem like solutions can be enacted if only big movements are made, people cooperate. Narcissistic parents are best cut off at first realization. That is a black hole of effort. You were dealt a bad hand and no social safety net would have helped (they were even tricked by the propaganda). No entrepreneur or startup is going to meaningfully address the root of people who are simply born to the wrong parents, only the aftermath. Because the parents are always right and won't be told otherwise, until it's too late. And there is no crucially important meaning behind this happenstance. It just is. Better to spend the effort undoing the years worth of damage on yourself instead.
    - kbelder 2y ago
      People with issues from horrible upbringing are often going to be far more vocal than happily raised kids from loving families. Nothing wrong with that; they have valuable opinions and experiences to share. But you mustn't draw statistical conclusions from people talking online, ever. Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."
    - tomatotomato37 2y ago
      You see a lot more talk of poor parental relationships online because those people have something concrete to talk and complain about; in contrast anyone who's relationship with their parents is just generically "fine" don't really have anything to comment on. You can see the same phenomenon in the reviews of a lot of things, not just relationships
- ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
  It looks like Japan sees 1.5 million deaths/year, so 4000 deaths in half a year is about 0.5%. So this is outlier data, and it would not be at all surprising if the overwhelming majority of them were childless. Whatever remains really cannot be enough to judge a society by.
- xdennis 2y ago
  This is not just Japan. I've seen two stories in Romania of a village with a single inhabitant: a 70+ year old man. One of them has three dogs. When he dies there might not even be remains to be found.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - xenospn 2y ago
    You’re thinking of cats. Dogs don’t actually eat the remains of their owners.
    - positr0n 2y ago
      That is a myth. From a recent HN comment: Previous studies have revealed some differences between canine and feline scavenging. Dogs tend to eat the face and throats of humans, then break the ribs and chew on bones. Cats, on the other hand, often strip skin from the nose, upper lip, and fingers (the same places, Rando notes, that they nip at when playing with a living owner). Scavenging is more common with dogs than cats, Byard adds, “but I don’t trust either of them.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182102
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Is this a symptom of demographic collapse? If China really shrinks by 300,000,000 over the next 50 years, visiting empty cities filled with mummified remains might be commonplace(economies can’t pivot fast enough to handling such a high death rate per active worker).
- datameta 2y ago
  Not that it nullifies the issue, but automation ought to be assuading their worries.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Wall-E robots to deal with the dead?
- roenxi 2y ago
  I'd guess the answer to the question is yes (if someone is 70 with no children, it isn't a stretch to see how they might have no visitors for a month). However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.
  - Qem 2y ago
    > However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.
    - throwawaymobule 2y ago
dzonga 2y ago
this is very sad. we're social animals. have people you check on often. and have some people check in on you often as well.
- wickedsight 2y ago
  > we're social animals Not all of us are, so it's nearly impossible for this to be completely avoided.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    As a person that has almost no contact with other people beyond the daily stand-up meeting I'm forced into... I kinda have to > press x to doubt The reason why some people (including myself) avoid social interactions is because of previous interactions that likely happened in their teens. But it's still objectively a very unhealthy thing. It's like being overweight, drinking alcohol or smoking. It's fine, but definitely not healthy. So I have to concur: we're social animals, even if some of us choose to avoid social interactions. Just like some people succumb to other unhealthy habits
    - wickedsight 2y ago
      Yeah, good point. I find most social situations and interactions tiresome and sometimes avoid them. But I do enjoy interactions with some people a lot, so maybe you're onto something.
      - buzzert 2y ago
        Not a judgement or anything, but pointing out that you are interacting with people in a social capacity online right now.
- Aaargh20318 2y ago
  I always feel hopeful when I read stories like this. It’s apparently still possible to live a life where no one bothers you for months at a time, even on this overcrowded planet.
thi234234234 2y ago
This is happening everywhere, not just Japan.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
Japan, both good and bad, is definitely the precursor of the future of our world. It is scary at times.
- jl6 2y ago
  I’ll take it. There are far worse ways to end up than Japan.
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    It depends who you are tbh. AFAIK they have a large problem dealing with mental health, and LGBT rights there aren't as good as a lot of other places. I understand they're getting a bit better about these kinds of things more recently but they've still got a way to go
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    I think people who say this did not have the misfortune of growing up in a society where there are few jobs that don't pay well and basically your entire existence is to subsidize a much larger class of elderly whose values, desires, etc. always trump your own
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      This sounds like graduate school.
    - Barrin92 2y ago
      that's already an extremely loaded framing from the point of view of an individualized society. For a lot of people there is meaning in taking care, and listening to their elders. There's quite a bit of misfortune too in communities where your old family members are treated with the dignity of a used sofa cushion and shoved into the nursing home out of sight out of mind so you can self actualize and have a lot of fun.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
brink 2y ago
A 401k won't check up on you when you're old and alone, a few good children will. Have kids, and raise them well.
- abound 2y ago
  I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem. If your argument is "have children so someone will check on you when you're old", I'd argue that bringing sentient beings into the world for just that purpose is a bit overkill. Other options include: being part of a strong community, living in some sort of communal place for elderly folk, or even just some sort of basic health monitoring that can alert emergency services if something looks off. Adopting is also an option if you're really sold on the "sentient beings" thing.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem. I think one unspoken assumption is that if someone is checking in with you regularly, they might actually find you before you die, and either call an ambulance to help you, or notice that something might be a problem before it becomes severe.
    - abound 2y ago
      Agreed, and I tried to address that with my suggested alternatives, all of which would also find you in such circumstances. Mostly just noting that creating humans solely for the purpose of caring for you in old age is a fairly nuclear option.
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        Is that why they call it a nuclear family? :)
      - 2y ago
beAbU 2y ago
In Ireland there were two stories making the rounds recently of a woman who was only found 2 or 3 months after passing, and another man who was found more than two years after dying. Ireland has a penchant for derelict buildings (at least where I am). Combine that with unwillingness to impose anything on anyone, and you have a recipe for modern era mummies.
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  > you have a recipe for modern era mummies Except mummies were respectfully cared for throughout the embalming process. Don’t tar ancient civilizations with our own inhuman neglect of both living and dead.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Except it has been found that female mummies usually began the process in a greater state of decomposition than males with the _raison d’être_ being that it discouraged necrophilia on the part of the workers doing the mummification.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      > raison d’être Means literally "reason for existence", this being the most important reason. It doesn't really make sense in this context. Interesting tidbit however, if true.
      - WillAdams 2y ago
        You're right, _rationale_ would have been a better word choice.
    - ourmandave 2y ago
      Is that really the answer to that problem? Or do you just simply drum all the corpse f*ckers out of Embalming Service?
      - 2y ago
lynx23 2y ago
It took roughly 3 weeks until the death of my neighbor was finally detected. Granted, it smelled a little odd to my rather non-functional nose, but the staircase of this house has smelled of weird a lot while we had this old lady with the bladder control issues. Long story short, his immediate neighbor finally called the police since the smell seeped into her apartment. Why did it take so long? He had aggression issues, and was basically kept sociable through a nice mixture of drugs. When he forgot to take them, he would randomly threaten other people from our house, sometimes with death, sometimes just screaming at them. He was a problem, to be honest. Younger women coming visit our apartment building sometimes left in fear, because he would randomly verbally attack them. I got a straigt death threat to my face. "I am going to kill you." Turns out, if you call the police, they tell you "And what am I supposed to do now?" Taught me a lot about "the system". Anyways, when he passed away, and didn't make any useless nose anymore, nobody cares. Social isolation is a complex mix of a lot of things. And its a feedback system...
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  What should the police or system have done differently? That doesn't sound like a crap situation though. Bad neighbors can really occupy your mind.
  - balfirevic 2y ago
    > What should the police or system have done differently? Investigate and press charges for death threats, is that not obvious?
    - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      Depending on the relationship and level of senility, no.
throwway_278314 2y ago
I heard this was one of the social functions filled by the Japanese postal workers. Their official job was to deliver the mail, sure, but they were also encouraged to spend a few minutes talking with everyone as they delivered the mail. That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged. Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  One memorable instance of this sort of thing from back when I was an EMT in Virginia --- rural mailman noticed that an elderly gentleman hadn't picked up their mail from the previous day, so prevailed upon the folks at the next house to allow him to use their phone to call the County Sheriff's Department --- when the Deputy arrived, it was found that the unfortunate had had the seat in their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    one day ? sounds like nosy rural people justification urban legend, more like it
    - whythre 2y ago
      If an older person doesn’t have a whole lot going on, they often look forward to these sorts of routine daily interactions. Missing one could easily be a red flag.
      - mistrial9 2y ago
        if the older person wants it, yes. On the other hand "welfare check" in lots of areas is a justification to break rules of privacy and it is increasing. This article starts with an obviously disturbing topic - dying alone as an elderly person. Yet the Japanese are super nosy people with very little privacy in my experience there. Somehow, there are customs that are deeper around privacy that are not obvious.. and perhaps a growing society that is not changing well. Expectation of privacy, territory and associated manners and legal actions.. are being examined here. The wildly-downvoted comment stands.
surfingdino 2y ago
Such cases are increasingly common in Europe. It's a global phenomenon.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
considering how thin the often made of paper walls are in japan you really have to give props to their diet that nobody smells anything sooner.
shellfishgene 2y ago
This has long been a problem in Japan, this touching article is from 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-deaths-the-end.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-d...
- host0 2y ago
  Very touching, beautifully written. http://web.archive.org/web/20240123112858/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-deaths-the-end.html http://web.archive.org/web/20240123112858/https://www.nytime...
binary132 2y ago
I wonder how many in the United States.
hilux 2y ago
It's a trend. Just last week someone died at work in a Wells Fargo office (in Tempe, Arizona) and wasn't found for four days.
ourmandave 2y ago
Maybe the government should offer something like the Dead Man's Switch email service. https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ https://www.deadmansswitch.net/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
NKosmatos 2y ago
Sad, very sad, but a sign of our times (for some years now). Life around us has/is changing and there are more people interested in their careers and bank accounts than life itself and the supporting environment of family, friends, colleagues, relatives... We're going to be seeing this more and more in the coming years :-(
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Sometimes I wonder with all our great progress what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate? I know we can not turn back the clock, but if it were a game of Sims or Civilization, what are the set of choices and progresses we could have made to avoid this outcome
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    It's not what we did wrong, it's what we did right: education, contraception, women's rights, new forms of entertainment that are quite literally better than sex. If we wanted to avoid this outcome we'd need to make the world a much worse place than it already is, and if that's really the case then we frankly deserve to go extinct.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      I really don't believe the only options are women's rights or burden our future generations one by one until they die out of collapse
  - rawgabbit 2y ago
    Japan's population decline is due to the collapse of the "bubble economy" in the 90s. This resulted in the "Lost Decades" where household incomes fell. This is especially shocking to Japan that had promoted the myth of the "salary man" where you worked for one company for life and are rewarded with lifetime employment. This break of the Japanese social contract left a deep scar on the Japanese psyche. To further complicate things, married women in Japan face social pressure to drop out of the work force after having children. They face an impossible choice of not having children or poverty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
yieldcrv 2y ago
a lot of people do things they don't want to do, all to avoid “dying alone” I wonder how many of those 4,000 were also those people
ggorlen 2y ago
Related Wikipedia articles: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi, the Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent, a British woman who had been dead over two years before discovery
TrackerFF 2y ago
It is sad, but it is what it is. If you end up in a position where you don't have kids or close family, friends, or social workers that visit you, you could very well end up laying there until the stench affects your neighbors, bills go unpaid, or similar stuff. In this day and age, many people - myself included - have bills on auto pay. So if money comes in, bills get paid, and no one knows you, it could take months to years before someone discovers you. Her in Norway we had one case, where a man laid dead for 9 years in his apartment. He didn't have anyone, and people assumed he had moved or gone to a care facility. A janitor found him by chance.
wrp 2y ago
Departures (2008) is a Japanese movie that in part deals with this issue.

107 points by rntn 2y ago

dachworker 2y ago

What a sick society! Over a month of nobody checking in on their elderly? I doubt all these people were all childless.

pilaf 2y ago
That's very quick judgment based on pure speculation. Do you know what the numbers look like for your own country? Are those stats even published?
totetsu 2y ago
If someone dies alone at 85, those children could be in their 60s too.
exe34 2y ago
not everybody can afford the mental health cost of talking to their parents.
- vik0 2y ago
  Why do so many people online report having poor relationships with their parents? Is this real? I don't know anyone in real life who talks like this about their parents. Am I in a bubble or what?
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    You/we are in a bubble. Nearly half of kids today are growing up with at least one absent parent. Social decay is a real phenomenon.
    - wickedsight 2y ago
      > Social decay is a real phenomenon Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners. Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        That’s great, but data is also real: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:text=Father%20absence%20during%20early%20childhood,of%20depression%20in%20early%20adulthood.&text=Early%20childhood%20father%20absence%20is,across%20adolescence%20and%20early%20adulthood.&text=Effects%20are%20strongest%20for%20females%20with%20absent%20fathers%20in%20early%20childhood https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:te.... I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome.
        wickedsight 2y ago
        Well... Duh. I would've loved to have two parents who loved each other and took me on fun family trips! But that wasn't an option, since they had an awful relationship. So the options were either divorce or doubling down on a shitty relationship. They chose divorce and I'm happy for it. Also, your study doesn't seem to have any comparison to the impact of abusive relationships vs. father absence, which is what I was talking about. If you can find anything about that, I'd love to see it.
        exe34 2y ago
        > I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome. That's pretty profound! You should write an article!
      - a-french-anon 2y ago
  - Lanolderen 2y ago
    It's definitely not rare. Many people have negative relationships with their parents. Sometimes, however, it's not even a poor relationship but being unable/unwilling to deal with the stress of exposing yourself to their mental and physical degradation.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    You may be in a bubble, I know plenty of people with no/minimal relationship with parents. But it may not be a bad thing overall. Historically when people didn't go far away from home they had more "forced" contact with parents; now, not as much. In the same way that it's good that we get more divorces now (people, mostly women, are able to leave bad relationships without the community/church getting in the way), it's also good that people can live independent lives and are not bound to their families. Of course it's better if the relationship is healthy, but both sides need to work on that. There are subreddit of estranged parents too and communities like https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ but often the stories turn out to be "we're so alone, why are the kids so bad and don't talk to us anymore? (oh yeah, we did try to force them to do X, but that's irrelevant)"
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Whether this can be a good thing depends heavily on your opinion of the importance of family and shared history in society and culture.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        Or more specifically whether you want to put people first, or some idealised structures with hidden issues.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Even that depends on what people you are putting first. Putting the individual first and it will likely make sense to put little value in family structures and community connection. Putting community first, or specifically the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, and valuing family connections makes more sense. Neither are an absolute fix to everything. Like everything else, a mix of both likely makes the most sense.
        exe34 2y ago
        > the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, They should have thought of that before they fucked up their kids.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - haswell 2y ago
    Very real. My relationship with my parents is extremely complicated at best. Therapy is literally why I have a relationship with them at all. This is fairly common in the particular circle I grew up in (deeply religious and very conservative), and I didn’t see a healthy parent/child relationship until I started dating someone from a very different background. It was eye opening.
  - HeckFeck 2y ago
    It's something that seldom comes up in conversation due to politeness and the strong likelihood that it will cause discomfort, but a few friends I know intimately have reported bad relationships and questionable parenting only after long personal conversations when we're alone. A causal factor is the tendency to normalise early experiences, even if they are neglectful or abusive. This means many are unaware or reluctant to realise their upbringing wasn't that good when they are older. Without critical examination the early experiences and the assumptions you had as a child are carried into adulthood. So a lot of people will say their parents are 'loving' even if they were far from it.
  - wickedsight 2y ago
    I know a lot of people who have issues with their parents/family/spouses in one way or another. In part because I'm not a very judgemental person, but probably a big part is that I have a lot of unrelated friendships, so people can tell me anything without a chance of that thing ending up as gossip. The internet is like that, you can tell anyone anything from your anonymous account without it ever coming back to you. Honestly, I know only a few people who have near zero issues with their parents and would happily have them move in when they get older.
  - throwway_278314 2y ago
    If you are in a bubble, stay there. It is a happier place. Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Parenting is hard.
    - astura 2y ago
      >Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Can you give me a specific example of this?
      - pjc50 2y ago
        Before they reply, I would be willing to put money on it being something to do with "coming out".
      - exe34 2y ago
        My sperm provider literally said that his dad treated him like shit, so he gets to treat me like shit, and that as a reward some day I'd get to treat my own son like shit. I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them. When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Parenting, like life, is the accumulation of the consequences of decisions/actions. Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable. Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life. Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect". Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.
    - codersfocus 2y ago
      > the realization that ... it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?
      - WillAdams 2y ago
        If you think providing for a child is not appropriate as a central focus of a parent's life, please take that into consideration before doing anything which might involve a child. While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.
        fennecfoxy 2y ago
  - astura 2y ago
    You're in a (probably upper middle class) bubble. Think about all the bad/rude/shitty/sick/criminal/awful/miserable people you've interacted with in your life or read about online/on TV. Odds are, those people have kids because most people have kids. Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse. Bad people are actually MORE likely to have children and have more children because they don't care about the welfare of their children and having children increases your social standing in life. I am someone who has truly horrible people as parents; they abused me physically and mentally/emotionally, neglected my needs, broke me down, told me they hated me and wished I was never born, and told me I ruined their life for existing. Nothing I ever did or said was "right," I was always criticized. There was also severe mental illness, domestic violence, criminal activity, and substance abuse going on my entire childhood. It's not hyperbole to describe my childhood as 18 years of torture. I've been diagnosed with PTSD due to my childhood experiences. I talk about it openly online with stranges, I talk about it with my various mental health providers over the years. However, most of my friends don't really know the full extent of the terror I experienced and I'll never talk about it with stranges or just acquaintances. It doesn't really come up in conversation very often and it's kinda hard to talk about in person. It's hard enough telling my therapists about it. It's also just really embarrassing and I have to REALLY trust you before talking about it IRL. We have an extremely pronatalist society and nobody really casually wants to hear about the victims that produces. It's not socially acceptable outside an extremely close relationship. I don't feel the same typing about it semi-anonymously online. I also REALLY feel that I need to correct the cultural idea that "all parents are inherently good."
    - jart 2y ago
      You might not realize this on a conscious level, but the reason you're reluctant to tell your friends about your parents is because they'll assume you're a bad person too, due to how you inherited their codebase. If my parents were abusive, I'd want to hide that fact, similar to how I'd want to hide a past felony conviction for abuse. Because I believe people can change and deserve the opportunity to rise above their circumstances and make themselves into something better than where they came from. Having that opportunity is more important than the emotional catharsis of oversharing, wouldn't you agree?
  - pjc50 2y ago
    People aren't necessarily that open about it, and it can take a while of getting close to someone to realize that they never mention their family. (I suspect you don't know a lot of queer people?)
  - exe34 2y ago
    Of the people that I know that are either in a similar situation (of having gone 100% no-contact) or even those that meet their parents for Christmas and Easter but otherwise keep them on an information diet about their own lives (so about a dozen, let's say), not a single one of them told me their situation first. They only opened up after I casually mentioned that I fired my parents in response to a much smaller parent-related complaint on their part.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    I know several people who have completely cut off communication with one or both parents. Consider yourself lucky.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    There was an interesting article about how much more common it is for people to cut off ties with their parents over things like politics or whatever else, things the parents did not understand as a big deal. I do think it's increasing. The ones I know who do it and I'm close enough to know the family, I think it's entirely resolvable and sad
  - missedthecue 2y ago
    I've wondered about this too. Seems 90% of people on the internet have abusive narcissistic relationships with their parents, while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much.
    - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
      >...while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much. Wait hold on. Let's not conflate a strained family relationship with not loving them. Both my parents had an extremely abusive relationship with their parents, to the point where they could not be around them (And by extension neither was I), but they always loved them — And so did their parents, they were just extremely flawed. I get along well with mine, but completely understand how complicated family relationships are.
  - 8490109481 2y ago
    Yes it's real. And some aspects of those relationships I have found are unsolvable problems, dead ends. For all of the things I feel good about accomplishing and creating, I can't heal that relationship. Some people are just set in their ways, it is a fact of life, and there is no solution to be pursued. It was an important lesson. There are a lot of other problems in the world people bicker about here and elsewhere like urban planning or regulation. Things that seem like solutions can be enacted if only big movements are made, people cooperate. Narcissistic parents are best cut off at first realization. That is a black hole of effort. You were dealt a bad hand and no social safety net would have helped (they were even tricked by the propaganda). No entrepreneur or startup is going to meaningfully address the root of people who are simply born to the wrong parents, only the aftermath. Because the parents are always right and won't be told otherwise, until it's too late. And there is no crucially important meaning behind this happenstance. It just is. Better to spend the effort undoing the years worth of damage on yourself instead.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    People with issues from horrible upbringing are often going to be far more vocal than happily raised kids from loving families. Nothing wrong with that; they have valuable opinions and experiences to share. But you mustn't draw statistical conclusions from people talking online, ever. Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."
  - tomatotomato37 2y ago
    You see a lot more talk of poor parental relationships online because those people have something concrete to talk and complain about; in contrast anyone who's relationship with their parents is just generically "fine" don't really have anything to comment on. You can see the same phenomenon in the reviews of a lot of things, not just relationships
ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
It looks like Japan sees 1.5 million deaths/year, so 4000 deaths in half a year is about 0.5%. So this is outlier data, and it would not be at all surprising if the overwhelming majority of them were childless. Whatever remains really cannot be enough to judge a society by.
xdennis 2y ago
This is not just Japan. I've seen two stories in Romania of a village with a single inhabitant: a 70+ year old man. One of them has three dogs. When he dies there might not even be remains to be found.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xenospn 2y ago
  You’re thinking of cats. Dogs don’t actually eat the remains of their owners.
  - positr0n 2y ago
    That is a myth. From a recent HN comment: Previous studies have revealed some differences between canine and feline scavenging. Dogs tend to eat the face and throats of humans, then break the ribs and chew on bones. Cats, on the other hand, often strip skin from the nose, upper lip, and fingers (the same places, Rando notes, that they nip at when playing with a living owner). Scavenging is more common with dogs than cats, Byard adds, “but I don’t trust either of them.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182102

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Is this a symptom of demographic collapse? If China really shrinks by 300,000,000 over the next 50 years, visiting empty cities filled with mummified remains might be commonplace(economies can’t pivot fast enough to handling such a high death rate per active worker).

datameta 2y ago
Not that it nullifies the issue, but automation ought to be assuading their worries.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Wall-E robots to deal with the dead?
roenxi 2y ago
I'd guess the answer to the question is yes (if someone is 70 with no children, it isn't a stretch to see how they might have no visitors for a month). However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.
- Qem 2y ago
  > However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.
  - throwawaymobule 2y ago

dzonga 2y ago

this is very sad. we're social animals. have people you check on often. and have some people check in on you often as well.

wickedsight 2y ago
> we're social animals Not all of us are, so it's nearly impossible for this to be completely avoided.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  As a person that has almost no contact with other people beyond the daily stand-up meeting I'm forced into... I kinda have to > press x to doubt The reason why some people (including myself) avoid social interactions is because of previous interactions that likely happened in their teens. But it's still objectively a very unhealthy thing. It's like being overweight, drinking alcohol or smoking. It's fine, but definitely not healthy. So I have to concur: we're social animals, even if some of us choose to avoid social interactions. Just like some people succumb to other unhealthy habits
  - wickedsight 2y ago
    Yeah, good point. I find most social situations and interactions tiresome and sometimes avoid them. But I do enjoy interactions with some people a lot, so maybe you're onto something.
    - buzzert 2y ago
      Not a judgement or anything, but pointing out that you are interacting with people in a social capacity online right now.
Aaargh20318 2y ago
I always feel hopeful when I read stories like this. It’s apparently still possible to live a life where no one bothers you for months at a time, even on this overcrowded planet.

thi234234234 2y ago

This is happening everywhere, not just Japan.

Brajeshwar 2y ago

Japan, both good and bad, is definitely the precursor of the future of our world. It is scary at times.

jl6 2y ago
I’ll take it. There are far worse ways to end up than Japan.
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  It depends who you are tbh. AFAIK they have a large problem dealing with mental health, and LGBT rights there aren't as good as a lot of other places. I understand they're getting a bit better about these kinds of things more recently but they've still got a way to go
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I think people who say this did not have the misfortune of growing up in a society where there are few jobs that don't pay well and basically your entire existence is to subsidize a much larger class of elderly whose values, desires, etc. always trump your own
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    This sounds like graduate school.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    that's already an extremely loaded framing from the point of view of an individualized society. For a lot of people there is meaning in taking care, and listening to their elders. There's quite a bit of misfortune too in communities where your old family members are treated with the dignity of a used sofa cushion and shoved into the nursing home out of sight out of mind so you can self actualize and have a lot of fun.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

brink 2y ago

A 401k won't check up on you when you're old and alone, a few good children will. Have kids, and raise them well.

abound 2y ago
I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem. If your argument is "have children so someone will check on you when you're old", I'd argue that bringing sentient beings into the world for just that purpose is a bit overkill. Other options include: being part of a strong community, living in some sort of communal place for elderly folk, or even just some sort of basic health monitoring that can alert emergency services if something looks off. Adopting is also an option if you're really sold on the "sentient beings" thing.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem. I think one unspoken assumption is that if someone is checking in with you regularly, they might actually find you before you die, and either call an ambulance to help you, or notice that something might be a problem before it becomes severe.
  - abound 2y ago
    Agreed, and I tried to address that with my suggested alternatives, all of which would also find you in such circumstances. Mostly just noting that creating humans solely for the purpose of caring for you in old age is a fairly nuclear option.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Is that why they call it a nuclear family? :)
    - 2y ago

beAbU 2y ago

In Ireland there were two stories making the rounds recently of a woman who was only found 2 or 3 months after passing, and another man who was found more than two years after dying. Ireland has a penchant for derelict buildings (at least where I am). Combine that with unwillingness to impose anything on anyone, and you have a recipe for modern era mummies.

thoroughburro 2y ago
> you have a recipe for modern era mummies Except mummies were respectfully cared for throughout the embalming process. Don’t tar ancient civilizations with our own inhuman neglect of both living and dead.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Except it has been found that female mummies usually began the process in a greater state of decomposition than males with the _raison d’être_ being that it discouraged necrophilia on the part of the workers doing the mummification.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    > raison d’être Means literally "reason for existence", this being the most important reason. It doesn't really make sense in this context. Interesting tidbit however, if true.
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      You're right, _rationale_ would have been a better word choice.
  - ourmandave 2y ago
    Is that really the answer to that problem? Or do you just simply drum all the corpse f*ckers out of Embalming Service?
    - 2y ago

lynx23 2y ago

It took roughly 3 weeks until the death of my neighbor was finally detected. Granted, it smelled a little odd to my rather non-functional nose, but the staircase of this house has smelled of weird a lot while we had this old lady with the bladder control issues. Long story short, his immediate neighbor finally called the police since the smell seeped into her apartment. Why did it take so long? He had aggression issues, and was basically kept sociable through a nice mixture of drugs. When he forgot to take them, he would randomly threaten other people from our house, sometimes with death, sometimes just screaming at them. He was a problem, to be honest. Younger women coming visit our apartment building sometimes left in fear, because he would randomly verbally attack them. I got a straigt death threat to my face. "I am going to kill you." Turns out, if you call the police, they tell you "And what am I supposed to do now?" Taught me a lot about "the system". Anyways, when he passed away, and didn't make any useless nose anymore, nobody cares. Social isolation is a complex mix of a lot of things. And its a feedback system...

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
What should the police or system have done differently? That doesn't sound like a crap situation though. Bad neighbors can really occupy your mind.
- balfirevic 2y ago
  > What should the police or system have done differently? Investigate and press charges for death threats, is that not obvious?
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    Depending on the relationship and level of senility, no.

throwway_278314 2y ago

I heard this was one of the social functions filled by the Japanese postal workers. Their official job was to deliver the mail, sure, but they were also encouraged to spend a few minutes talking with everyone as they delivered the mail. That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged. Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.

WillAdams 2y ago
One memorable instance of this sort of thing from back when I was an EMT in Virginia --- rural mailman noticed that an elderly gentleman hadn't picked up their mail from the previous day, so prevailed upon the folks at the next house to allow him to use their phone to call the County Sheriff's Department --- when the Deputy arrived, it was found that the unfortunate had had the seat in their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  one day ? sounds like nosy rural people justification urban legend, more like it
  - whythre 2y ago
    If an older person doesn’t have a whole lot going on, they often look forward to these sorts of routine daily interactions. Missing one could easily be a red flag.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      if the older person wants it, yes. On the other hand "welfare check" in lots of areas is a justification to break rules of privacy and it is increasing. This article starts with an obviously disturbing topic - dying alone as an elderly person. Yet the Japanese are super nosy people with very little privacy in my experience there. Somehow, there are customs that are deeper around privacy that are not obvious.. and perhaps a growing society that is not changing well. Expectation of privacy, territory and associated manners and legal actions.. are being examined here. The wildly-downvoted comment stands.

surfingdino 2y ago

Such cases are increasingly common in Europe. It's a global phenomenon.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

considering how thin the often made of paper walls are in japan you really have to give props to their diet that nobody smells anything sooner.

shellfishgene 2y ago

This has long been a problem in Japan, this touching article is from 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-deaths-the-end.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-d...

host0 2y ago
Very touching, beautifully written. http://web.archive.org/web/20240123112858/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-deaths-the-end.html http://web.archive.org/web/20240123112858/https://www.nytime...

binary132 2y ago

I wonder how many in the United States.

hilux 2y ago

It's a trend. Just last week someone died at work in a Wells Fargo office (in Tempe, Arizona) and wasn't found for four days.

ourmandave 2y ago

Maybe the government should offer something like the Dead Man's Switch email service. https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ https://www.deadmansswitch.net/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

NKosmatos 2y ago

Sad, very sad, but a sign of our times (for some years now). Life around us has/is changing and there are more people interested in their careers and bank accounts than life itself and the supporting environment of family, friends, colleagues, relatives... We're going to be seeing this more and more in the coming years :-(

aprilthird2021 2y ago
Sometimes I wonder with all our great progress what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate? I know we can not turn back the clock, but if it were a game of Sims or Civilization, what are the set of choices and progresses we could have made to avoid this outcome
- moffkalast 2y ago
  It's not what we did wrong, it's what we did right: education, contraception, women's rights, new forms of entertainment that are quite literally better than sex. If we wanted to avoid this outcome we'd need to make the world a much worse place than it already is, and if that's really the case then we frankly deserve to go extinct.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    I really don't believe the only options are women's rights or burden our future generations one by one until they die out of collapse
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  Japan's population decline is due to the collapse of the "bubble economy" in the 90s. This resulted in the "Lost Decades" where household incomes fell. This is especially shocking to Japan that had promoted the myth of the "salary man" where you worked for one company for life and are rewarded with lifetime employment. This break of the Japanese social contract left a deep scar on the Japanese psyche. To further complicate things, married women in Japan face social pressure to drop out of the work force after having children. They face an impossible choice of not having children or poverty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

yieldcrv 2y ago

a lot of people do things they don't want to do, all to avoid “dying alone” I wonder how many of those 4,000 were also those people

ggorlen 2y ago

Related Wikipedia articles: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi, the Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent, a British woman who had been dead over two years before discovery

TrackerFF 2y ago

It is sad, but it is what it is. If you end up in a position where you don't have kids or close family, friends, or social workers that visit you, you could very well end up laying there until the stench affects your neighbors, bills go unpaid, or similar stuff. In this day and age, many people - myself included - have bills on auto pay. So if money comes in, bills get paid, and no one knows you, it could take months to years before someone discovers you. Her in Norway we had one case, where a man laid dead for 9 years in his apartment. He didn't have anyone, and people assumed he had moved or gone to a care facility. A janitor found him by chance.

wrp 2y ago

Departures (2008) is a Japanese movie that in part deals with this issue.