> His epiphany came when his current partner told him how she had lost her grandmother. Unlike Koremura’s loss, her grandmother had died alone—a kodokushi. It was seeing the deep regret in her, and accepting his own ennui, that made Koremura finally take action. He left his job as a stockbroker and set up his own removal company dedicated to the cleanup of kodokushi victims. He wanted to give something back to the generation of his grandmother, and he also wanted to change who he was. “I was ready for the prospect of change, but looking back, perhaps I wasn’t quite so ready for how different my life was to become,” he remembers.
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.
Japan is incredibly stubborn and ignorant when it comes to addressing core social and psychological problems in their society. It isn't even recognized by most of the population so when people begin to complain of their own social issues or depression, people around them will slowly distance themselves from that person. As a result, most people will choose to hide their issues until it is unbearable. At the point they feel they cannot continue is when they do something drastic which includes suicide.
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.
How about a startup where one can dial a 1-800 number from Japan and get someone in ,say, Europe, who is also bored, and the two can rant to each other about how bad things are , and then go back to their lives ? International PainBuddy program, Dial-An-Agony . 1800-call-pain !!
Best part, we pay a couple of life coaches to analyse some rants and provide anonymous advice
I was going to comment that you'd have language issues but then I realised, most people who want to vent don't actually need to be understood they just need to get it out.
It might actually work better if a European makes soothing noises and a Japanese person makes soothing noises at a European in exchange, without either side knowing what the topic is.
I cannot agree with you enough.
I must add that, personally i feel more comfortable discussing problems with total strangers - this avoids the social ramifications part.
do hope someone picks this idea up seriously.
I really strongly disagree with the sentiment of this comment. I've been living and working in a very ethnically / culturally diverse non-profit charity organisation for several years now. We're a Christian charity, so there are strong religious ties across the board, but huge cultural differences.
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.
Expanding a bit on what I mean by shared experience:
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.
Sorry, I'm no troll on most days. I agree with you on Jesus, but mainstream christianity was already so far removed from his teaching just a few centuries after his death. I could be interpreted to have said "those christians with segregative values", of which there are many communities, priests/pastors and churches. You can say they're not christians, and I'd even fancy your definition, but they would beg to differ, splattering Jesus on your face.
Yeah, a lot of the local government stuff in the UK is the equivalent of the US saying: "Oh, we believe this is a states rights issue, therefore we're not gonna do anything about it."
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.
Solution: Meetups. I am not sure if you remember an article from last year about elderly Koreans (in NY) who would do weekly meetups to check on each other...Maybe something like this can work in Japan.
How has your country (you must be American) distinguished itself by doing these same core social and psychological issues? Or are Americans stubborn and ignorant?
America is home to thousands if not millions of volunteer groups, social change movements, debates and university studies on these sorts of situations. There isn't any sort of central government ministry dealing with stuff like this, but large independent swathes of society do try to work to establish where these problems come from, and how best to deal with them.
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.
In part of the USA, the tradition of churches tending to the flock is still going strong. Also, the local gathering place where folks swap news and talk (the bakery in the small town I'm in) is still a fixture.
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.
Not stoic so much, but my uk wife sliced her hand open on a can of cat food (in the US). 3 inch gash right across her palm. Bleeding. A lot. Wrapped it up in towel and said "we're going to the emergency room, get in the car". She replied "oh no, I don't want to bother them, they might be busy."
Serious question: What gave you the impression he was American? I assumed the opposite -- that only a Japanese person, or at least the child of first-generation Japanese immigrants, would have made that post.
Maybe that negation would be too obviously related to the idiom. There are other ways to say there is a way; e.g. instead of shikata, there is houhou： 方法 （方法がある）.
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.
That's educational. Had a boss who normally on an even keel then someone said "it is what it is" to him and he got very, very angry. It was like someone kicked him. He said that was just unacceptable and we would find a solution / work around. I guess I now know the other half of the story.
Ah, this must be the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese "mei banfa" (没办法), probably the national slogan. Oh, they are building a dam and you need to move your house twenty metres up the hill? "Mei banfa".
I think the problem is present in all the countries where traditional marriage system has been broken. The only difference between USA and Japan will be that you can find old-homes very easily in USA. Japan being a very conservative country that prides itself over 'protecting' all the bad symptoms of its culture will not solve this problem because, ironically, they think that this is what makes them 'Japanese'.
I don't think it's related to "traditional marriage systems," but instead to social nets and expectations about who will do the caring. For instance, in Scandinavia marriage rates have simply plunged over the last few decades -- fewer and fewer people get married, even though they are still getting together. But social safety nets ensure that taking care of children or older relatives is not such a financial burden as in Japan. Marriage isn't necessary to supporting elders or children in Scandinavia. In Japan, though, there is very little government support. Families are the main line of support, and it is expensive!
This is scary. This is the first time I read such article. I live alone, never married ( no plans to marry either ), have no friends. I have a decent job though.
Do something like go joint meetup.com. If you job isn't something like brain surgeon or another essential item then it's the old adage: nobody ever wished they had spent more time at work on their death bed.
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).
The more interesting question is: how has one traversed their entire life up to gainful employment and has no friends? This seems to be the more telling question.
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.
I doubt it is the psychology, but the lack of shared experiences outside work. In school you have shared experiences and you grow to like some of the guys you hang out with. You don't hang out (much) at work and so don't have the shared experiences and consequently make no bonds.
Not the OP, but Death is a cruel mistress. Sometimes even a 40 year old will outlive quite a few friends. I'm 44 and about a 1/3 of my graduating high school class of 20 are gone. Of the friends I made in college about 1/3 moved and I didn't keep in touch, and a couple of other died. I never married (that billionaire comment tomcam feels a bit too true sometimes).
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.
If you have a phobia that impedes your life, you probably should overcome it. It's also easier to get over spiders, or get married than become a billionaire.
Yes, if you have a phobia you should overcome it. We know that telling people to just get over it doesn't work. That's why we provide short courses of carefully planned therapy.
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.
We know that telling people to just get over it doesn't work. That's why we provide short courses of carefully planned therapy.
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.
I'd refrain from the pickup artist / redpill subs, as the toxicity is genuinely pervasive, but the "just get out there and talk to people" advice is spot-on.
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.
There are core skills relating to attractiveness and not everyone picks them up intuitively. Without those skills, and without even knowing what they are, "get out there and talk to people" will be vastly less effective. Similarly, "just go to the gym and work out" will be far less effective than "follow starting strength".
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.
I thought everyone is aware of that. Life of a Slavic man is sadly, similar to a life of an American black man [1], for the same reasons - poverty, low educational level, lack of opportunities, which causes crime and self-destructing behavior. Which results in that by the age of marriage, there is a shortage of men at least as bad as a shortage of black men in U.S. - except black women have a slim chance of getting into an interracial marriage - getting a European or other foreign guy for a Russian girl is more difficult.
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)
same here.. except for the friends part. i feel happy with a lot but the difference is ive thrown myself into japan and dont have really close friends.
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 :)
I used to help out in roujin hoomu (homes for the elderly) when I was a missionary in Japan. Meeting Japanese people who worked there and really gave a care was a huge experience for me. They genuinely tried their hardest to make the experience pleasant in these under-budgeted, dreary places. While we Americans were just a temporary sideshow, they were there to help for as long as they could live off the salary. Makes me sad but also a bit hopeful that those waves could build up over time. If I ever go back I will happily exchange my fascination with Manga or cool stationery or whatever for some more time trying to help out.
Sad but not uncommon I think. There was a guy who had a radio show that interviewed people with odd jobs. One such jobs was sort of like Toru's but was "special cleaning". Basically the guy started a business to clean up crime scenes. But found that most of his business came from landlords and others discovering deceased elders in their rooms. His suggestion was to crawl your grandparents from time to time to say hi. Several times he had cleaned up places where the person had simply fallen and then died where they were because they could not get up to get any help.
This is probably especially challenging with people who don't have relatives or the relatives never check up on them.
This could be addressed with monitoring. We have more and more alternatives to choose from. Either from external sensors (movement within the house, toilet usage, phone activity, bank account activity; or, alternatively, from devices worn by the people. This would be a great use of the IoT.
There's a boiling water pot in Japan which will send an sms to you when it's used - since making tea / miso soup is so integral to the lives of especially the elderly here. The idea is if you don't get your morning SMS from gradma's pot something might be up.
Human contact is good, but you can't have person there 24x7, a monitor never tires, and you can address false positives by relying on multiple signals/sensors.
It was one of two carbon monoxide monitors, false positives are treated as failure of the second device to detect - which is, of course, the safest way.
In my mind I see this as a social health crisis. The elderly provide an unbelievable amount of wisdom to the next generation. By abandoning them, we abandon our children's future. I think of the elderly as an essential vitamin for children. They impart valuable social memes and at the same time tell the children, by there mere existence in their lives, that we value our family and when the children's time comes to age and pass away, they can expect to be valued as well.
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.
> The elderly provide an unbelievable amount of wisdom
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.
Assholishness and wisdom seem to be orthogonal to me. Most of us could probably name a dozen famous people off the tops of our heads who were both wise and unpleasant (most famously, Isaac Newton... arguably in the running for the smartest person who ever lived, but kind of a dick in his interpersonal relationships).
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. :-)
There's a great short story called "The Last Answer," by Isaac Asimov.[1] In it, a scientist dies and is preserved by a "god" to think for eternity. He is quickly horrified by this and declares that he won't do it.
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.
Really have to qualify your comment. All horrible people will eventually become elderly. Despite the "wisdom" that such people may have, many have an incredible ability to wreak havoc in the lives of others... to the point of being a net negative on future generations.
You bring up a good point. There's no qualification test for wisdom. Is someone a bitter dogmatic psycho? Or are they warm and truly emotionally intelligent? No way to know. One problem is that there is no real regard for wisdom in modern American society. We value youth and energy over wisdom and depth. So, why even be bothered to think about such things?
Society is bizarre in innumerable ways. The number of people who I know that have contempt for children or people having children is repugnant to me. I think the disdain for the young and old is a sign of decadence.
There is nothing you can ever do to destroy the planet. Check your hubris. Most of what you like about the planet is its suitability for human life, which is to say, it isn't the planet you like, but your descendants.
If the people who care about the environment don't have children, then future generations will just be comprised more of people who don't care about the environment.
I'd ask what mental gymnastics are involved for a rich country to ignore tens of thousands of elderly to die alone and abandoned until their bank accounts drain?
My grandparents all died when I was young, mainly from alcohol and cigarettes. I never knew my father. My mom is a terrible person. Each elderly person has a story, and it would be wise to review how they got to a scenario that involves them dying alone. I am sure there are some sad tales, but there are probably some less than sad tales involving the life of an asshole.
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.
That's a big problem with technological progress. It fulfills more and more of our needs, making it harder and harder to fulfill our need to be needed. Sure, you can give everyone basic income and robot caretakers, but people who aren't needed by other people will still suffer. I would much prefer it if society somehow changed itself to want and need all of its members, not just the young productive desirable ones. That's a kind of utopia I've never read about, it just kind of crystallized in my mind after years of thinking about this.
That sounds insanely dystopian to me, for the fact that any member of that society is viscerally dependent on others -- anyone who claims to value freedom needs to think again.
Being needed is crucially instrumental toward controlling one's own experience in the current environment. But why would it ever be a terminal value?
If it's only an instrumental value, how do you work around it? Put people in holodecks and give them illusions of loving friends? Or modify people's minds to make them content with not having any loving friends, because they already have guaranteed food/shelter/entertainment? I think many people wouldn't agree to either of those alternatives. They want to "actually" have someone who cares about them, whatever that means.
They might be given that kind of control without their will.
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.)
My wife is a hospice nurse here in Japan visiting terminally ill patients at their homes.
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.
Instead of the elderly living in homes/apartments by themselves, why not try to get them to live in elderly communities where they can engage with other elderpeople and have caregivers oversee their journey into eol.
@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.
Why not put untouchables in communities where they can engage with other untouchables, with software monitors which call robot helpers if there's a problem and they are dying of loneliness and despair unacceptably quickly.
As long as it all happens to them, at a distance, and we're not having to get involved, eh?
That's basically segregation/caste systems and the foundation of ensuring that the rest of the population considers it "that groups problem." And a few short steps from "god what is their problem."
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.
The article is written is if this is unique to Japan. But lonely deaths, unnoticed for months happens every day in every (modern) society. And it is mostly men.
This is so sad. Dying alone is more frightening than death itself. It is articles like this that force me to stop working so hard and spend more time with family.
> Dying alone is more frightening than death itself.
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.
That is also what I find the worst. Everything else, that can be seen in the disturbing pictures of the place seems to me as merely surface and materialization of the inner despair and suffering that one has to go through in a such situation.
I don't understand it either. Why is it frightening?
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.
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?
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 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.
True where I live as well (Canadian city of ~150,000). I would say the majority of my friends were at their grandparents death bed and would assume the same for their grandchildren.
No kidding. I'm willing to die alone, but that's because of a legion of horrible experiences. Without those I would be glad to be with people in are about and who care about me in turn.
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.
America's a pretty big country. You can drive the 400 miles from where my grandmother lives to where my parents live and the largest city during that drive has a population of fewer than 4,000 people.
>I think some people have this fantasy, that they are on their death bed and there is 3 generations weeping around them.
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.
At the moment of death you're having your last memories, so dying alone is like going into the abyss alone forever. Dying with people is like going into the abyss with that company forever. Or something like that. It could be even more subtle than this. I'm speaking psychologically of course. Replace the abyss with whatever.
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.
Society. The very notion of "well" etc (and most things we believe to be "good" or "ethical") comes from shared culture, else it's totally arbitrary personal preference.
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).
Society has been trending towards "arbitrary personal preference" in many areas lately. Conversely, society has condoned and even encouraged things that are horribly unfair. So I don't see why we would carve out an exception for judging the "well-lived-ness" of a person's life based on society's precepts about the number or closeness of friends and family.
>Society has been trending towards "arbitrary personal preference" in many areas lately
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.
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."
It doesn't seem to have much to do with the eldery age, or even (physical) sickness. None of the people described have been at very old age, or terminally sick. This is just an illustration of how limited is society based on collectivism, obedience and hard work. It helped them out a great lot in the industrial age, and even then made many of them mentally broken, or outright sick, and completely stopped working in the post-industrial era.
> how limited is society based on collectivism, obedience and hard work.
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.
In every culture or country, the elderly will have a higher chance to live alone than the population in general, simply because they spouses have died. I thought that was pretty logical, and unavoidable.
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.
> 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.
is this a causation correlation issue of generations?
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
I didn't grow up on the Internet, but I have gotten a lot older on it. I'm married and social, so I probably won't die alone, unless I flee and hide ;) But it's clearly much easier to meet people online who share my interests.
If only there was something like World Of Warcraft that is suitable for the elderly.
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.
Why are there so many stories HN on social problems in Asia? I would have expected that smart people on HN would make some effort to understand Orientalism[0]. In the case of this story, this is a phenomenon that is occurring all around the developed world. Japan is in many ways just another developed country. But through the eyes of Orientalism, Japan's problems are unique and quaint, and the objective Westerner can dispose some sage wisdom[1].
Japan's problems related to the aging aren't unique and quaint at all, they're just ahead of the curve.
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.)
People look at Japan because most first world countries are going to have the same sorts of problems in 20 years. There's no reason to bring in terms that don't fit.
There certainly are cases of orientalist depiction in journalism, but I don't feel that is the case here. It could simply be the case that the volume of their social debate is loud enough that it is being picked up by other countries, because, as you say, it is a common problem.
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 would argue that it's not because the volume of the social debate is louder in Japan than the states. It's because of a tendency to see another country's problems from outside the country allows journalism articles like this.
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.
I downvoted you, not because I disagree, but because I think this is a desperate attempt at censorship. We're not allowed to talk about X because of Y.
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.
The kind of political correctness that exists around "racism" does not apply to Asians, so there is not issue with censorship. As long as you are not using racial slurs, you can say whatever you like about Asian culture without fear of repercussions in our society. So there is no need to fear that my comment will encourage censorship.
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.
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.