Japan police: Nearly 4k who died alone at home not found for over a month
www3.nhk.or.jp
www3.nhk.or.jp
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.
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.
All of this was of course, a long time ago, and a further consideration was that the family whose phone was used were on a party line with the neighbor in question and specifically mentioned that a phone call for that neighbor went unanswered the previous evening which added some urgency to the matter.
If anything, Japan has a culture of privacy and respect of individuals which make this originally noted societal problem more likely.
> their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
You lost me. Were there multiple people trapped in the seat?
Except that it was not
Singular they has existed for hundreds of years, it has nothing to do with ideology.
Every Japanese home has a little square area near the front door called a "genkan", where guests are supposed to remove their shoes when entering. Postal workers also occupy this area when delivering mail.
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.
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.
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.
Or do you just simply drum all the corpse f*ckers out of Embalming Service?
I think this is a situation if “of course no one wants necropheliacs, but we’re all ears as to how you drum them out” so the practical hack of just letting the bodies sit for a bit so perverts don’t like them any more is much more effective.
This comes up a ton in software development where people fixate on what users SHOULD do (eg, rtfm, click this button, register this way) instead of what they actually do. I’m old enough now that I can’t afford the luxury of time spent trying to change users psychology and just want to adapt.
Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.
So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.
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).
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.
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.
We and other animals tend to mourn those that we personally knew and were dear to us. This situation is a bit different, as it involves a surging share of dying people that were left with no close people to mourn them, or even simply notice their absence.
BANG
This is dangerously incorrect, as India is continuing to discover.
All you need to do is not poison 99% of your vulture population, which is what India did. They learned their lesson, and based on your Wikipedia link, the poison is now banned and populations are starting to recover.
It is obviously possible for old people to live too long so as to become a net cost to society, which means the resources used to keep them alive take from resources that could be spent elsewhere (such as on the young). In fact, that is the top political problem in almost all modern democracies, even though it is not stated that plainly.
Why? People have died at relatively faster rates in populations throughout history.
A feature of St Petersburg is the weather. It helped keep the place sanitary when corpses just froze.
Productivity of 10s of new STEM every few years > productivity of 300m of subsistence farmers / low skill workers in informal economy. Having a lot of surplus people helps in some domains of development / consumption, it's a drag in others, i.e. per capita food/energy security. Thinking about PRC being just 20% less crowded during holidays/events is still pretty stressful.
This is old age we're talking about. All of those three hundred million people are going to die anyway over that time period.
> much worse than any wars I can think of
The Taiping rebellion killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people, approximately 5-10% of the population of China at the time. See if you can spot it on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China - it's lost somewhere in the steep vertical climb on the right.
For a part of that period of dramatic population growth, China famously had a (badly enforced) one child policy.
(also, I guarantee you that there's some maniac in the Chinese ministry of defence looking at a prediction of deaths in a nuclear exchange with the United States that runs into the hundreds of millions, and declaring it winnable. There certainly were on both sides of the US-Russia Cold War, fortunately ignored all the time)
(People go absolutely bananas about fertility dipping briefly below replacement, as if this isn't a contingent phenomenon that can and will be changed as circumstances and population change)
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.
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.
There is a whole national responsibility from young to old and the other way. This transactional language of talking about old people as a political class, of support as "subsidies" is already being stuck in an entirely different economized, weird mindset.
Losing 1-2% of your population per year is catastrophic and exponential.
Plus, that demographic deficit helped kick off the Industrial Revolution.
This is going to end up in a top heavy pyramid with a ton of old people relying on fewer and fewer young people. Simply because fewer and fewer are being born every year.
Why?
So for japan, and later the world, yeah - this might go up.
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.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?
I don't think we should grow the population forever. I also don't think we should shrink so smaller and smaller generations are burdened to pay for the life of older and larger ones.
Gave people freedom via women’s rights, a somewhat peaceful society, and birth control. The previously high fertility rates were entirely a consequence of Mother Nature giving men more physical power than women, and women not being able to control their fertility.
- 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, a British woman who had been dead over two years before discovery
we're social animals. have people you check on often. and have some people check in on you often as well.
Not all of us are, so it's nearly impossible for this to be completely avoided.
> 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
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.
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.
Mostly just noting that creating humans solely for the purpose of caring for you in old age is a fairly nuclear option.
The US and other individualistic Western countries are probably the exception.
It's probably because the areas of greatest economic opportunity keep shifting, so children don't end up in the same city as their parents to care for them.
How many died after breaking their leg and starving alone on their floor?
Having kids isn't even a guarantee that they'll be around to care for you in your old age. My grandparents had four and still needed to be moved to a home with a full time carer at the end because none of their kids were able to move back home to take care of them.
Plus it's not just about really literal full-on elderly care, but also simply keeping society running even when you're old enough that you can no longer actively contribute your share as much.
I know it's horribly cynical, but if you don't have kids then go on Medicare then rack up a huge bill, you've basically burdened a smaller next generation with a higher tax bill and basically are setting up a Japan 2.0
Not having many close relationships when you die is probably a better net benefit. People are crushed when their parents pass.
People don't always go from fine to dead in an instant. There can be a period of days when you are still alive, but incapable of calling for help. If you were found in that period you wouldn't necessarily have to end up dead.
There is no solution for growing old and dying.
Personally, I was around seven years old when I realized that there was no god and it meant that death would be the end of my consciousness. It probably didn't help that I had an operation about that time using general anesthesia which effectively turned my brain off for a few hours and showed me what it might mean to be dead for a short time - a period in which I was not present and formed no memories, and what it would mean to be dead for an infinite time. I was not a particularly easy-going child after that.
I really appreciate you sharing your story, helps me think about my own thoughts and feelings. :) <3
____
It's something I think about a lot. I have siblings and niblings, but I live in a 3rd world country and my goal in life is to escape to some first world country.
If I escape, I will die alone abroad; but while I live, I'll be able to make my life and the life of my loved ones better.
If I stay, I might be able to count on my nephews/nieces to check on me in old age...but depending on how life goes and what the economic conditions are, it's much more likely that...
Not only do I live a terrible life, but when I am old and my siblings dead, my niblings will ignore me, unable to take care of another burden, nor would I want to be such a burden on them.
Which lends me back to option 1: go abroad... then maybe retire back here? But then I would have no connection, and nor would they have one with me.
_____
I'v seen this happen here a lot. A lot of people I know lived their lives in the Gulf... used to a certain standard of living and having barely any connection to the relatives back home.
They educated their kids and sent then to uni in 1st world countries, while they retired to big palatial homes here.
But now they are alone, their kids have no reason to come back after uni to the big 3rd world homes their fathers built... and the relatives here have no connection to the uncle/aunt from the gulf they saw once every three years.
The kids are alone abroad, the parents are alone here. No one wins.
That doesn't sound like a crap situation though. Bad neighbors can really occupy your mind.
Investigate and press charges for death threats, is that not obvious?
I wonder how many of those 4,000 were also those people
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.
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.
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.
That's pretty profound! You should write an article!
There are still plenty of people in religions where divorced is frowned upon (to put it lightly) and there are also plenty of people who are mentally unable to pull out of a toxic relationship. But the reduction in societal pressure that 'marriage is forever' definitely has an impact.
And don't get me started on the vicious interactions between the "soft deprecation" of fault divorce, the abolition of adultery laws and economic aids for single parents. Clearly not the best mixture of choices.
Lets flip that coin... Religion/tradition forces people to get married before they actually knew each other well. Then they move in together, have kids and must stay together forever. I feel like 'we need to get married to live together' is way more in the realm of perverse incentives.
In the 70's, people on average married around age 22. Right now that's closer to age 29. Which one seems more carefree to you? To me it's the getting married at 22 without having lived together.
This is a bad position to begin with because neither parent stands up with the child. A single parent could be a friend the child would not otherwise have. And on top of that it could fall below the threshold for outright removal of child by support services if there is no "obvious" problem (divorce, physical abuse, abandonment). Because a certain degree of emotional abuse for a young child is near totally invisible to others if the child thinks they're the one in the wrong and doesn't defend themselves (which both parents agree on so it is stronger). And invoking those services can severely damage one's working future due to material concerns about college the parents would not have paid otherwise.
That in turn creates a sense of entitlement to opinion (we did everything for you, this is all you do to pay us back, etc...), feeling of creating debt/attachment to that past, and so on. Because they didn't hit or spank, but merely taught an important lesson in a more subtle way, they're not abusive like everyone else, so there is no problem, so on.
I know I'm just venting by now but these sorts of issues take years or decades to come to light after venturing into an adult life and might not be easily quantifiable in the way "this couple divorced" or "this child was removed from the household" would. There are grey areas in between, some of which still have some support by the public (like some types of corporal punishment being acceptable to an undefined degree)
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/ 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)"
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.
They should have thought of that before they fucked up their kids.
If you really think that a large percentage, or even a majority, of parents have fucked up their kids we have much bigger problems to deal with than how many elderly people may be living alone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you give me a specific example of this?
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.
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.
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"?
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.
When the sperm and egg fused, thus you began, and you very much wanted to be alive: it is literally programmed into your genetic makeup. It was you who decided to divide and divide continually at that point.
My point is that when you use the word "I" you seem to imply only the little bit of yourself which exists in your prefrontal cortex is you, and the rest is !you.
If you regret being alive, that is different from claiming you didn't want to be alive at one point. Wasn't it you who suckled on milk? Who cried for care and love?
Do you also think rape victims "enjoyed it" if they climax?
I'm sorry, I don't talk to people who think a single cell is a person. I'm too old now to waste time pointing out fanaticism and trying to correct it in random Internet encounters. Good day to you.
- children are a burden to be complained of and minimized
- children are a resource to be exploited
- children are incidental and may be ignored
- children are a way to increase one's social security payout
- children are inherently sinful; nothing they can do is good enough in god’s eyes; the most important thing in existence is to believe in this particular story and to dedicate one’s life to this belief
I truly believe it was love for their kids that drove my parents to instill such an extreme and harmful worldview. Primarily because of some pretty major unresolved Traumas with a capital T in both of their lives. Decades later, I’m still unwinding what remains a complex relationship in therapy.
The point of this anecdote was just that there’s a subset of us who had parents extremely focused on their kids and who really did invest the time into focusing on what’s “best”.
They just saw the world very differently, in ways that turn out to be extremely harmful, and I’m a messy product of that.
>...realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams...
That your parents labeled how they treated you as "love" does not make it an act of lovingkindness (to pull from my wife's Master's thesis) --- it is important that people should evaluate things without considerations for labels applied by others, and then arrive at a reasoned, impartial perception which is valid in terms of logic and correlation with the facts of the past. (Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? A: Four, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.)
The drunken and enraged parent who claims, "This will hurt me more than it does you." as he unstraps his belt is lying to himself and to the child, and it is important for the child to realize that --- understanding the self-deception which makes such an act possible may be helpful, but it is more important to understand the facts of the matter --- by way of contrast, the toddler who bites another person has to be slapped because their intellectual engagement does not yet admit of other people having feelings (which is why they are able to inflict pain since they do not realize that others will feel pain), and since they are on the cusp of that realization, explaining afterwards along with some natural consequence will help guide them to that realization.
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."
> Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse.
They had very clear rules about how we (bro and I) weren't supposed to talk to other people about our home life, and they went full personality cult propaganda on how amazing they were as parents, and how other people wouldn't understand. And yes, they were shitty to service workers, anyone socially below them really. And they were worse at home.
It's not a contest; all child abuse is a tragedy.
(I suspect you don't know a lot of queer people?)
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.
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.
Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."
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.”