The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
roadsandkingdoms.com
roadsandkingdoms.com
It's odd that Toru Koremura's reaction to lonely elderly deaths was to go into the corpse-cleaning-up business, rather than starting a social outreach program for the lonely elderly. I understand there's dignity in how we treat the dead, but it doesn't solve the problem at all.
Though I understand, that does sound off to my western mind.
If you bring the problem to light, people will just shy away from the debate (Japanese avoid arguments at all costs) and act ignorant. So to anyone that understands Japanese culture, Koremura's response is understandable. At least in the position he is in, he can do something.
Good idea!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/nyregion/fighting-a-mcdona...
I was in hospital with my gran (born in 1922) in ICU (a pulse of 33bpm - and turns out she had kidney failure too), when alone with me she was gripping my hand and saying "this is the worst I have ever felt", when a few minutes later the doctor arrive d and asked "how are you feeling?" she replied "I'm fine thank you".
I think the current crop of younger people will be more vocal, if their sense of entitlement about their current lives is anything to go by.
If anything, Americans would suffer more from fatigue by being bombarded with tons of national social issues to genuinely worry about and try to work against, rather than remaining in denial about them.
Not just Japan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-33...
Politicians in the UK talk about community this and community that but in practice we are losing the ties between neighbours/families.
It's another way of saying, fix it yourself. Oddly enough though, when we actually have the government step in, then all sorts of people start complaining about the nanny state.
Politics - Damned if you do, damned if you don't!
A sense of community is far more developed by the shared experiences together, rather than just the similarity of past culture. I always had a very strong sense of community with the people I did my initial training with, and the people I worked with every day. Much less so with the people from a similar culture.
I'm currently living in Carlisle, in the North of England. Very mono-cultural, very white, working class, etc. There's really not a lot of sense of community at all. After the flooding a few years (shared experiences) there was. But here now? No. Most people just sit at home in the evenings watching TV, and never do things together (much shared past / culture, they often watch the same shows, but no shared experiences, so little sense of community).
My wife and I work quite hard to deliberately develop community, inviting people over for meals, (board-)games evenings, barbecues, etc.
But the thing is now, you have to be deliberate about creating community. It's no longer automatic.
Personally, I blame TV hugely. It's far too easy these days to spend all ones free / down time disconnected from the people around you. The internet just continues the trend.
In our organisation, on board our ship(s) ( http://www.logoshope.org/ ) which doesn't have TV, when people started having their own laptops that were able to watch TV series and movies on, we saw a huge shift in community, from people in free time hanging out together and talking, playing games, exploring, etc, to people sitting on their own in their cabins playing computer games, watching TV / movies, etc. And the sense of community suffered.
My experience also in multi-ethnic Birmingham. I think shared experience is the key.
There's a huge difference between active and passive experience. Listening to a lecture is a passive experience. Asking questions is an active one. Watching TV is a passive experience. Playing a board game is an active one. The exact definitions can be a bit hazy, but the major concept should be fairly clear.
This is why in longer training courses / workshops run for a bunch of people from different communities, rather than from an already established one, there's often an 'icebreaker' game which is interactive and requires active participation, rather than just watching a funny cat video, or listening to a talk straight away. Even if the game is a little bit boring, or if you don't remember anyone's name, you have now all got at least one shared active experience, and a (slight) sense of community. If there's already a sense of community, then this is less needed, obviously. This sense of community is then useful for getting people to offer assistance to each other, be more likely to ask questions, make team discussions / activities later on much more interactive, and so on.
It's why there is a sense of community on slashdot, here, github, etc. and many many communities on reddit, youtube etc. but bbc, cnn, amazon, netflicks, etc. don't (much). Even if many many people watch BBC, or the same tv series on netflicks, and spend hours watching the same content as other people there, there's very little active participation. Often any active participation is lost amongst all the other noise, rather than becoming a shared active experience with other people. 30 people watch a glove and boots video, make their own responses, and watch each others videos, and maybe make responses to those responses. They will feel like a community. 300000 people watch it and 'like' it, and then go on to watch a video about kittens, and maybe like that too. They may enjoy their time, but won't feel like a community.
Segregation and discrimination are far away from any of the teachings of Jesus. He partied and hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors, and other social outcasts of the day. He was killed alongside thieves, and spoke to them without disparaging. He, as a Jew, travelled to the Samaritan towns (a people-group treated apartheid style by Israel back-then), stayed with them and treated them as equals. He spoke kindly to a woman caught in adultery that the community wanted to stone to death, and through his response to her, saved her life. He treated all sin (falling short of the intended perfect standard) as proving us all equally fallen.
His teaching boiled down to: All people are broken, and failed. No-one is better than anyone else, and any 'self-righteousness' you may think you have because of your religion, or background, race, whatever, is of no value in the end at all. But God still loves us, come back to him!
The Pharisees (essentially the fundamentalist evangelicals of the time) and other religious leaders slammed him for this, and it was because their power over the people being challenged by him that they ended up conspiring to murder him.
Please don't take the rude, abusive, hurtful, bigotted and unwelcoming attitudes of certain people who call themselves 'Christians' to actually be values originating in the teachings of Christ.
Grammatically, its negation would be "Shikata ga aru", but I never heard this said once.
The counter-idiom, if you will, to "nothing can be done" might be "where there is a will, there is a way":
意志のあるところには方法がある。
If someone says しょうがない or しかたがない, and you don't agree, that might be the thing.
I've always thought of the counter-idiom as being やればできる (yareba dekiru) -- "you can do it if you try."
This article scares me.
A person can be at school and have a small number of friends. They then leave to go to college and lose those friends. They may make a few more friends at college. They then leave college and go to work - and again they lose their friends.
Once you're at work it is hard for some people to male friends.
This isn't a new or unusual point of view. We freqently hear about how lonely cities can feel.
"$cityname is lonely" returns hits of people talking about how lonely they are in any city. The fact that they do this on the Internet makes it, to me at least, very sad.
Some people just struggle to make and keep friends.
That was my point. Why?
I have plenty of relatives along with close friends (enough that getting together to play Arkham Horror is becoming a logistic nightmare), but I could easily, with just a few unlucky breaks or moves, not have any close friends. It isn't even that uncommon.
Try online dating, or go to a bar to meet a girl. It's a lot easier than you think, especially when you're gainfully employed.
Coupled with sexism meaning that women typically earn very little if anything, and their only chance to escape abject poverty is to get married, and because there are so many women for so few men and with nothing else to make the guy interested, pregnancy becomes the only option. To keep the guy married (especially given that divorce laws are very weak and not in general working in post-Soviet countries, and men lose little if they divorce), an extreme psychological pressure is required, which usually takes efforts of the whole girl's family. Except the very cynical guys, only chance to escape this is to keep as far from marriage as possible. This is probably why post-soviet population declines so fast.
Of course, the higher classes of society (e.g. coders) are exempt.
(the other side of this is domestic violence which is very common, and sometimes not even viewed as a problem, which is an even more sad side of the story)
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...
Similarly telling a lonely person to just get over it does nothing to help that person. It might even make things worse - increasing feelings of failure and hopelessness.
These two sentences seem to contradict each other - the short courses of planned therapy are basically a therapist saying "get over it" and providing opportunities to ease into getting over it.
And in this particular case, I can state confidently that telling people to just get over it does work. I've done it with a number of people, mostly successfully. At first they think approaching women is just one of my firangi powers and completely impossible for a desi. Then they try it themselves and discover it works better for them than for me.
If you are in this situation, go to a pickup artist, red pill or other male self improvement subreddit and follow the FAQ. (Do NOT internalize the misogyny - that stuff is toxic.) Unless you are completely hideous in a manner that can't be fixed by lifting and eating right (read: facial disfigurement, muscular dystrophy) there is a simple program to follow to solve your problems.
One thing that the FA crowd doesn't seem to realize is that you don't have to be attractive or even average to get into a relationship or friendship. Ugly people get laid all the time and have plenty of friends. The important thing is getting out there. And yes, it's hard. It's new, it's uncomfortable, and you suck at anything that you're new to. But the only way that you're going to get better at it is by getting out there and talking to more people.
Unfortunately the only people teaching those skills are redpill, pua, and similar sorts. I think this is mainly because many of the effective techniques contradict a lot of socially desirable dogma.
There's advice in the post, BTW. Did you read it?
In any case, there are far more many spouses than there are billionaires in this world.
Not really a fan of that advice (although better than no action) - I believe it is difficult to avoid shallow connections with a shifting group of people.
I personally (A) choose to share accommodation (shared house), (B) live in a part of the city that has that community feel (not the "best" neighborhood). Now meaningful long-term connections just happen without trying (in fact it would take effort to avoid it).
that sucks that the article scares you, stay strong my friend. my room in japan actually has started to look like the picture i saw in the article. back in the states, i was a much cleaner person but now i find it almost impossible and stuff is just lying around everywhere... the similarity is a little scary there but i just laughed it off like i usually do. im hoping ill be fine :)
This is probably especially challenging with people who don't have relatives or the relatives never check up on them.
Recently my gran lost her heating & cooking for two days because her necklace went faulty and reported a false positive carbon monoxide incident.
Edit : this is the pot http://www.mimamori.net/service/index.html
In other words, by abandoning our elderly, we're sending a clear message to our children that human life has no inherent value if you can't produce. No wonder children in industrialized nations can't seem to feel a sense of belonging.
"How do you know where you're going if you don't know where you've come from?"
I would agree that there should be better social safety nets in place for the elderly, not because their family members failed them, but exactly the opposite. It should be intended to free up family members from the burden of being someone's retirement plan. I have heard people say a good reason for having kids is so you have someone to take care of you when you're old. That sounds like a great way to set yourself up to die alone.
Edit: why all the downvotes?
There's some disgusting and ignorant comments on this page, but this one takes the prize.
Your religion claims that the universe is here just for mankind's benefit? You really believe that?
This planet was here for millions of years before mankind came along, and hopefully will be here for millions afterwards.
Who cares how long the planet was here before humans? The planet isn't going anywhere no matter what we do.
Sorry, no. It's not because you grow grey hair that you get gifted wisdom or anything. There's a bunch of older people who are actually assholes, too. Getting old does not make your into a Saint.
Old people have survived, which represents a first cut against doing foolish things, ranging from driving too fast to smoking to getting in bar fights. Barring cognitive decline, it makes perfect sense that older people should be, on average, more wise than younger ones. Plus some people do actually manage to learn a few things over the course of their lives. :-)
Murray said, “Consider, then, that my thoughts may be useless to you. If I come up with nothing useful, will it not be worth your while to – disassemble me and take no further trouble with me?”
“As a reward? You want Nirvana as the prize of failure and you intend to assure me failure? There is no bargain there. You will not fail. With all eternity before you, you cannot avoid having at least one interesting thought, however you try against it.”
You might be an asshole. You might be a fool who has wrecked his life and screwed everything up. However, you've lived for many decades. I'm sure that you have something interesting, valuable, or insightful to share. It would be extremely difficult to imagine a life where that's not the case.
[1]https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_AxwTK5W6b4aG9ZUVRVcnJMN2M...
Being needed is crucially instrumental toward controlling one's own experience in the current environment. But why would it ever be a terminal value?
Sorry to get all Jed-McKenna-Theory-Of-Everything here, but no being has proof that they are not in such a situation. In fact it is arguably the only consistent possibility.
Expect that pure power would eventually (partially) allow itself to experience a situation without the ability to recall its own construction of that situation. (Imagining temporal bounds for that situation can be a helpful way of thinking about it from the human perspective, but of course temporality is a construction within the limited frame rather than something inherent.)
She comes home with many different stories. Some people are incredibly wealthy but their family doesn't want anything to do with them so they basically wait to die alone. Some people are poor and mentally ill and are basically living in dumps with rodents running around. Some people do have good situations in which they are cared for and can die surrounded by loved ones.
My wife is the only person I've met who wants to die young (around 40 or 50). Death is usually hidden from our lives - especially when we're young and only comes up infrequently.
While some people who are poor do use their service due to government subsidies, a lot of people don't and there is no public service for the elderly. Stories like this will become much more common over the next 20 years as a huge proportion of the Japanese populations passes on.
@timhon, I meant as a society, why not invest in elderly communities. Their pop is only going to get older, so it behooves them to address this option.
As, a side note, there is a curious phenomenon of relatives going along with the rouse of their dead elders living so they can cash their checks. Seems to be in the news on occasion.
As long as it all happens to them, at a distance, and we're not having to get involved, eh?
It's the opposite of what you want a group to do, which is to engage with the problem, internalize it and reduce barriers with other humans.
It's not about "logical objective reasoning" either. Treating people bad for example. Nothing "logical" about it being more wrong that treating them nice (especially if it benefits you to do so). But the culture we co-created and live in makes it wrong (and that's a good thing).
Yeah, or degenerating, one could say. It also happened in the last days of Rome...
>Conversely, society has condoned and even encouraged things that are horribly unfair.
Well, it's a balancing act. Society doesn't mean people get a free pass to abandon personal judgement. That said, all those "horribly unfair" things seem horribly unfair to us, from a distance. To their own society they looked perfectly normal.
I also didn't quite understand the family comment either. Whose family are you talking about?
When you are born, you have your mom (and possibly Dad) around you. But as you grow older, Mom and Dad will pass away and you'll thus be alone. Unless you have kids, you'll die alone.
Even if you do have kids, life happens. I know plenty of people who don't talk to their kids or they hate their mom or dad and there is no relation. Thus some people have died alone.
I think some people have this fantasy, that they are on their death bed and there is 3 generations weeping around them.
Sorry, but is this even true any more? Quite honestly for me. I'm quite happy to leave as unnoticed.
Oh and another thing. Friends. Unless you make seriously good friends and not those on facebook or acquaintances. They may be around you a long time. But I have rarely met someone in their 50s/60s that still knows their childhood friends.
So strike that one off the list. I think a life well-meant is what you did with it. Rather than who is in it.
Well, at least here in my Southern European country, it sure is. While there are many more elderly people dying alone than a couple of decades ago, I'd say most people I know still keep in close contact with their parents and grandparents, and they spend their last days (usually in the hospital) with them.
In fact, that's one thing I always found disconcerting in online conversations with US Americans - the willingness to just move hundreds of miles from their parents and grandparents. I've never considered myself a family-oriented person -I've always disliked family reunions and the "you have to go visit your great-uncle"- but the idea of leaving now, when my grandmothers probably just have a few more years to live, just sounds so ungrateful and selfish :|
In practice, this doesn't seem to occur often: http://phys.org/news/2010-05-americans-surprisingly-mothers....
I've regretted not being able to be there for the passing of one of my grandparents, and in general the entire family has and will be there at their last moments if they can make it. Not to mention doing what we can to ensure that they are taken care of and happy.
I think you hit it spot on with this. My dad's father died after parking his car in his garage. My mom's father died in his sleep. His wife (my mom's mom) died in an elderly care home in the middle of the day a year later. Between both sets of grandparents, there were 30 grandchildren. None of us had seen them in a few weeks at the times of their deaths. It's not like we weren't close, they all just sort of died unexpectedly. None of them were sick or anything.
This may seem odd in logical terms but it seems to be a common understanding, and it's found in movies, books, etc.
[edit]It might be analagous to children who don't want to fall asleep without an adult with them. They are scared by the darkness and don't want to go through something scary alone.
Maybe, but most people mentioned in the article apparently die from heart attacks, and you don't know when it's going to happen - so it's not like you "know" and expect death to come around the corner. It could have literally happened when that person was shopping out, too.
The "epidemic of loneliness" has spread to many places. If you haven't read "The Lonely American" I implore you to do so if you care about this topic at all. An incredibly sobering read.
Book blurb:
"In today's world, it is more acceptable to be depressed than to be lonely-yet loneliness appears to be the inevitable byproduct of our frenetic contemporary lifestyle. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, one out of four Americans talked to no one about something of importance to them during the last six months. Another remarkable fact emerged from the 2000 U.S. Census: more people are living alone today than at any point in the country's history—fully 25 percent of households consist of one person only.
In The Lonely American, cutting-edge research on the physiological and cognitive effects of social exclusion and emerging work in the neurobiology of attachment uncover startling, sobering ripple effects of loneliness in areas as varied as physical health, children's emotional problems, substance abuse, and even global warming. Surprising new studies tell a grim truth about social isolation: being disconnected diminishes happiness, health, and longevity; increases aggression; and correlates with increasing rates of violent crime. Loneliness doesn't apply simply to single people, either—today's busy parents 'cocoon' themselves by devoting most of their non-work hours to children, leaving little time for friends, and other forms of social contact, and unhealthily relying on the marriage to fulfill all social needs."
Here's an article for Britain:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
It's everywhere.
So you are implying a society based on independence, rebellion, and slacking would do better at treating its elderly?
Whether a culture cares for its elders only has to do whether they care for their elders, and in Japan they do. Making any other association is racism.
The fact is only because they care have they associated a dreadful term "lonely death" that anyone can relate with and fear, and have made it the center of social debate.
The fact is the US doesn't talk about this problem. They don't even have a word for it. But statistically more seniors live alone at 28% vs 20%.
In fact, I don't know of a culture that cares more for their elderly than Japan. They care so much that the way they've highlighted the problem has made western headlines. If that isn't proactivism at its finest, I do not know what is.
They're even voluntarily combing neighborhoods to identify elders living alone so that the police and local help workers can be aware.
Yes, there is ageism in the workplace, and there are those that are blatantly ageist, as there are anywhere, but Google has been cited for ageism, and to many they epitomize modern western corporate (IT) culture. Granted, the west certainly provides more tools to do something about professional ageism, but to generalize that obedient, hard working people go crazy and die alone in a culture that couldn't care less is the exact opposite of what is really happening.
I would add that the younger generation are less obedient and do not work as hard. There is a word they gave this problem too, and it is yutori-sedai.
refs: http://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/10-17-14-facts-about-senior... http://www8.cao.go.jp/kourei/whitepaper/w-2013/gaiyou/s1_2_1... http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-02-28/in-japan-the... http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/05/us-column-miller-a... http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/05/us-column-miller-a... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%86%E3%81%A8%E3%82%8A%E4...
Again, the article in question did not tell much about the very old people. 60 year old man with a heart condition? In a country where life expectancy at birth for males is 81.13 years? He wasn't old at all, he could marry and live a happy life for another about 30 years, that's what life expectancy for males at 60 in Japan is. This is not about ageism, nor about treatment of the eldery. It is simply about how people are systematically depressed and feel lost, having worked for industrial super-machine their whole life - a machine which is now gone.
This has nothing to do with the youth caring for the lone elderly. That is what this story is about. There is no story in the US not because the elderly aren't dying alone, but because the youth don't care. And more are dying in the US. And plenty are dying everywhere.
Just because a culture made a reputation for itself as hard working and obedient it does not follow that there is systematic depression. If you don't care to highlight the real cause of this completely separate problem, then you are just racist.
Also, many who are dying in their 80s and 90s retired long ago. There are even stories of working elders happier and healthier for having the motivation and exercise they otherwise would not have. Japanese work ethic has nothing to do with this story or with your drawn bigoted conclusions.
could i die alone without any great effort to do so having grown up on the internet?
i have seen promotional material for teaching seniors computer skills.. and there seem to be so many similar services and efforts that a search was unable to lead me to the specific video..
the internet is filled with a mess of stuff but within there are many communities covering very many interests
why imagine yourself alone?
I'm not joking. I keep wondering if I should introduce my grandma to such a game, but I live far away and they all seem too complicated. Would be happy about suggestions.
And what would be good sites for those games?
The first games I listed are highly social though with a relatively small number of players in a single session.
> And what would be good sites for those games?
local community centers, senior living centers, coffee shops, parks, private residences, etc.
...or...
>For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
[1] I don't want to pick on anyone, but there are already some great examples in the thread.
I actually agree with this being a phenomenon that is occurring all around the developed world though. Just avoid your thinly veiled accusation of racism.
On the other hand, I am accusing people of bias, and if you disagree you will have to show how my claims are wrong. Don't tell me what to do in a patronizing way either.
Most of the developed world has fertility below the replacement rate: where Japan is today, South Korea will be in a decade's time, and China and great big slabs of Europe will follow soon after. (America looks set to avoid this for time being though, largely thanks to immigration.)
As it turns out, senior isolation is at 28% in the US vs 20% in Japan. In the US, we don't even talk about it. To me, that is a far more serious problem.
I'm sure there are plenty of articles in other countries talking about how Americans are having an elderly crisis that no one is talking about, as well. Certain things like leaving your elderly in a retirement home away from the family are downright unthinkable. My parents (Chinese, I'm a 1st gen Chinese American) have told me they don't want me to treat them like the Americans treat their parents (e.g. putting your grandma in a nursing home to rot alone). I'm sure they get this from their own Chinese media sources.