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Japan: "Lonely Deaths" claim much larger numbers of men
Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2010-04-06 22:16
Article here. Excerpt:
'In the 1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn't any family to call on. So Yoshida started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse.
These, he learned, were kodokushi, or 'lonely deaths.' Now he has seen plenty - these deaths make up 300 of the 1,500 cleaning jobs performed by his company each year. The people die alone, sprawled on the floor beside crumpled clothing and dirty dishes, tucked beneath flowery bedspreads, slouched against the wall. Months - even years - can pass before somebody notices a body. On occasion, all that's left are bones. "The majority of lonely deaths are people who are kind of messy," says Yoshida. "It's the person who, when they take something out, they don't put it back; when something breaks, they don't fix it; when a relationship falls apart, they don't repair it."
...
Japan's two-decade economic slump is not helping. The collapse of the bubble economy after 1990 shrunk the size of Japanese firms and led to a restructuring that is still playing out today. The percentage of the workforce employed in part-time, temporary and contract work has tripled since 1990, forcing workaholic Japanese businessmen, many of whom never married, into a lonely early retirement. "Their world has evaporated under their feet," says Scott North, an Osaka University sociologist who studies Japanese work life. "The firm has been everything for these men: their sense of manliness, their social position, their sense of self is all rooted in the corporate structure."'
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Comments
At least it's getting attention
Very sad indeed. I think there's a lesson in this though too: these men, it is true, were acculturated into a set of attitudes that had them viewing themselves as needing to live for something greater and to committing themselves to it even at the expense of their own well-being. At the same time, they made decisions: not every salaryman in Japan chooses to be isolated in this way, does he? A goodly majority do not. Nonetheless, I see the need for there to be efforts made to socially de-isolate such men in Japan (and other places, should there be the need) so that they do not find themselves in the kind of position described: let go by their employer in an "early retirement", they have nothing to fill the hours they used to with work and camaraderie in bars and restaurants with their coworkers. The vulnerability to serious depression and the temptations it brings (self-destructive behavior) are great. It's gonna take a lot of work to overcome this phenomenon. I wish them luck.
I wonder
how many of those who die this kind of death are men? Most are elderly, so I would suspect that more than half would be women. It might be interesting to see how many elderly die in this fashion elsewhere - say in the US, Canada, Europe, for example. I expect a lot more of us will pass in this fashion in the years to come.
Indeed
Women outlive men categorically in Japan (as elsewhere - but they really do it in Japan). Yet it seems most of these "lonely deaths" are men. I have to imagine that more than a few are in fact suicides wherein the man didn't even try to tell anyone of his plans before he did it. Hard to get a tox report from a death scene wherein there is no body left per se to evaluate, is there? I can imagine that there are men committing suicide and not being noticed for a year, maybe more (as the article points out), by relatives they have lost touch with. This kind of thing just does not seem like the typical Japanese woman's M.O. in terms of how she handles stress and loneliness; this much more fits the Japanese male's psyche profile.
As for these kinds of incidents happening here in the western world (ie, as the compass points), I'd say yes, I agree, we are bound to see more of it, especially in larger cities.
How it's done in the East
I recall that the Japanese wives of retirees probably lead the world in "cashing out," i.e., divorcing the old man as soon as he's too old for the traces and taking her share of the pension in alimony. I read somewhere that the contempt they have for their non-working spouses is boundless, referring to him as "the worthless thing on the couch." Since they have their social networks intact, it doesn't impact them as negatively but is devastating for the ex-husband. Suicide or not, these men die alone.
manonthestreet I don't know
manonthestreet
I don't know about lonely death but I think for some men ending their lives in solitude and perhaps isolation is something they value. For me the attraction of solitude is quite large and may in the end be all I desire.
I'm inclined to agree
I don't know how things will play out, but I think if I had a choice, I'd rather just shuffle off and not have to deal with other people's issues. If there's no one close, there's no need to push into other people's lives with your death. I'd rather not make a mess though, so I think a tarp is a good thing to have handy.
manonthestreet There have
manonthestreet
There have been period of my life when I have thought about death a lot, may be even would have welcomed it. One of the terrible pains of a man's life is that nothing is actually his. Everything about his life is claimed or wanted by some one else. So I see my death as perhaps the only thing left to me that I can claim as my own. I fear that this will not be the case as those around me and who feel I am their property will pour guilt and recrimination into my mind even as I draw my last breath.