Apps help people living alone who fear lonely death

“You okay?”

“Okay.”

End of dialogue.

Until next time.

Every two or three days “Shota Terazono” (a pseudonym) receives and responds to this check on his wellbeing. He’s 28, living alone in a one-room apartment in Saitama Prefecture, healthy so far as he knows and, though certainly depressed, not suicidal; but one never knows, death is unpredictable and he hates the thought of dying without anyone even noticing his absence. His situation is such that no one is likely to.

The app he uses – it’s free of charge – was designed to take some of the edge off the extreme isolation that a growing segment of the population has settled, or fallen, into. Living alone is an expanding fact of Japanese life, bringing in its wake another: dying alone. You’d think this would be overwhelmingly an elderly concern, but Spa (Sept 3) focuses on people in their 20s and 30s who fear – sometimes for concrete reasons, sometimes not – a fate common enough to have acquired a name: kodokushi (lonely death).

The app was developed in 2018 by Isao Konno, director of an NPO called Enrich. The spur was his younger brother’s death. “I spoke to him two days before. There was no sign that anything was wrong.” He was 51 – in the prime of life. He lived alone and died alone – a sudden seizure, possibly alcohol-related. The body was found a week later.

The app uses the messaging service Line. If the brief query gets no reply, another follows the next day; then a telephone call; finally notification of the relative or friend the user names when registering; failing that, the appropriate authorities.

Comments from users reflect the comfort it affords “It’s such a relief to feel I’m in touch with someone,” says a woman in her 20s. A woman of 35 values “a feeling that someone who cares is by my side.”

Konno claims 14,000 registered subscribers. Most in the app’s early days were in their 40s and 50s. The demographics are shifting. Now, he says, more than a quarter are in the teens to 30s.

Terazono’s life began badly and no turning point is in sight. “Those who wonder why a guy in his 20s would worry about something like dying alone,” he says, “are people who grew up in normal families and have their fair share of happiness.” He didn’t, and hasn’t.

Bullied from infancy by a brother seven years older, threatened daily with escalating violence not only from the brother but from their mother as well – the father was never home – he grew up confused, stressed, depressed and helpless. His education is meager, his attention span short, his job skills few, his will, he admits feeble. Even leaving a home like that was too much for him until three years ago.

Nor could he stick to a job, though he did seem able to find work, drifting aimlessly from employer to employer, 20-odd in all. He now works at home in his one-room Saitama flat, inputting data. It pays little, and marriage, he feels, is out of reach. “I just don’t know how to turn my life around.” He uses Konno’s app, he explains, mostly in consideration of his younger brother and fellow victim – the one on whom, apparently, the burden of his decaying corpse would fall, should it come to that.

It’s no light burden. Ask – as Spa does – Atsushi Takaesu, who for 25 years has made post-mortem cleanup his profession. It’s an unusual perspective from which to study human nature, richly rewarding in its macabre way. “The overwhelming majority of young people dying alone are suicides,” he says. So far as he can judge, it’s not loneliness that drives them to it but fear for the future – or rather a vision of no future. That’s the hypothesis he draws from a spring surge marring the season of new beginnings in school or career.

Family members, often estranged from the victims in various degrees, react when notified in various ways, Takaesu says. Some parents are assailed by guilt: “If I’d been more caring…” Others ask after photographs or other mementos. Others still seem primarily concerned with recovering whatever valuables the deceased may have left behind. And there are those, parents or others, who say, “I haven’t had anything to do with (the deceased) for years. I’m not paying for the cleanup.” – which sounds crass, but given that Takaesu’s bill, including disinfection, extermination of the noxious life forms death brings in its wake, stain and odor removal and so on, generally comes to between 900,000 and 1 million yen, perhaps the survivors deserve some +understanding, if the family ties are no more than formal.

Modern Japan is a lonely country. Premodern Japan was not. To the modern mind – no doubt to more than a few contemporary minds as well – traditional family and community ties seem positively stultifying in their closeness, so much so that as late as the mid-19th-century when the West intruded and introduced new ways, there was no Japanese word for “privacy.” To this day the English word serves.

Change brought Japan to the opposite extreme, and three years ago the government named a “minister of loneliness” charged with relieving a condition affecting an estimated 40 percent of the population. There must be a happy medium somewhere. Individuals find it, perhaps, but society as a whole doesn’t seem to.

© Japan Today