45-year-old man arrested after mother's mummified body found at home

Creepy

Let me guess...no job, living with mom, plays video games all day, and didn't report her death because he was dependent on her pension.

How can you live in a apartment with a corpse and not be scared to come out of your room at night in the dark??

Not really surprising news for me, these cases seem relatively common in Japan, to point of becoming an outright national scandal a few years ago.

What I'm always morbidly curious to know is, why don't the bodies give off the tell-tale stench? I mean, people live crammed so close together in cities here, so I'm pretty certain that if there was a decomposing corpse in the next apartment, I'd know about it from the smell within a few days or weeks, especially in summer.

Living with skeletons in the closet.

Unemployed no skills played video games the guy never grew up. Perhaps his life support has always been his mom and once she passed he had no other means of survival. Perhaps he just didn't have the money to give her a proper burial and didn't know what to do but put his mom in a box. He lost everything poor guy was stuck with a poor lost soul. Hopefully now his mom can Rest in peace

One of the unreported so that the son could receive her pension, no doubt. I'm with Tessa on this one, though -- how do you NOT notice the smell of decomp? In my old house not far from hear I noticed a wretched smell that just got worse and worse, and when my neighbours complained about it I went looking about and found a dead cat lying under the steps leading into my shed.

Now, it did say mummified, so perhaps the guy constantly kept it in air-condititioning or something, but I find it hard to believe there would be no smell at all.

alex, smith,

ya, maybe he had some super olfactory senses or lack thereof that protected him.

However, the truth is, I don't understand it either, but sometimes bodies just mummify, and as it says in the article, that was the case here. Mummify means basically dry out. Pretty much zero smell. Just like how raisins and dried fish are grapes and fish that didn't rot but got dried, unlike the grapes and fresh fish I throw out and get moldy and stinky w/o drying. If the conditions are right this will happen spontaneously, it is also possible it was helped along. Conditions will include but are not limited to, presence of bacteria, what kind of bacteria, circulation of air, temperature, humidity, manner in which the body was laid out (i.e. in futon, on tatami in closet etc) what sorts of materials were touching the body (wood, tatami, plastic, what kind of fabric, etc). It is important to note that these factors don't necessarily have to be one way or another, ie a dry place does not automatically mean no rot, and a humid place does not automatically mean it WILL rot. It is the collection of factors and their interaction that will create mummification. Or not.

It is also very important to note, body condition is another important factor. What kinds of and how much fat on body? What condition was the muscle and skin tissue? Prior disease? How much over all meat on bones? Condition and size of organs? Elderly are already shrunken and tend to be dry. Plus, wth all the pickles (salt) consumed in this country, well...

Ya, I know, like, what a fount. I read this series of books by a police coroner about his real-life suspicious death investigations.

There are ways to keep a body from smelling after death and if the body was actually mumified then there would be no smell from decay at all.

ie: I worked in a morgue.

i want to know why it took her relatives 9 months to report it to the police. None of them got suspicous after not talking to her by phone for so long, to even stop by the house and check on her? especially if she was sick. my mom goes crazy if she doesn't hear from my grandma(88 yo) every week. and we live 12 hours away her. but she starts calling people to go check on her.

Japan is strange. You have a neighbors and they disappear but no one calls the police to investigate until months or years later as seen in many of these articles. What about the smell of a rotting body, can't blame it on natto in the trash can for months until the corpse dehydrates.

Lowly: "Mummify means basically dry out. Pretty much zero smell. Just like how raisins and dried fish are grapes and fish that didn't rot but got dried, unlike the grapes and fresh fish I throw out and get moldy and stinky w/o drying."

Seriously? You think we perhaps don't know that? It's not a matter of luck or selection, there are conditions required for a body to be mummified rather than rotting or rotted. So, obviously, the man did something that helped keep away the smell, most likely inadvertently. Nine months or so, especially given this hot and humid summer, there's no way you could get away with that kind of desiccation without the suspect controlling the environment to an extent.