Governing through kodokushi. Japan’s lonely deaths and their impact on community self-government

ABSTRACT

As more and more older persons in Japan are living in one-person-households, the number of unaccompanied and undetected deaths has risen as well. These so-called “lonely deaths” (kodokushi) have been problematized in various contexts over the last decades. Popular mass media reports interpret the growing number of kodokushi as a sign of the demise of traditional values, while academic publications interlink the issue with broader societal challenges such as social isolation, poverty, or social exclusion. This article traces how kodokushi developed from a rare event at the margins of society into a buzzword in the center of public attention. It discusses how the contemporary discourse constructs kodokushi as a “bad death” and how this negative image is utilized as an incentive to construct efficient local welfare networks. In this regard, the article introduces the example of a local initiative that tries to reduce the number of lonely deaths through raising the residents’ awareness of the issue and through re-activating neighborhood life. By doing this, it promotes a certain set of values and rules, therefore not only governing the residents’ deaths, but also attempting to positively influence their lifestyles. The article reveals the effects and practical problems of this strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging society
• lonely death
• social isolation
• civic engagement
• community building
• governmentality

Notes

¹ The old age dependency ratio relates the number of individuals aged 65 or over (who are more likely to be in need of support) to the population aged 20 to 64 (who are potentially economically active and could provide such needed support).

² All Japanese quotations have been translated by the author.

³ The term koritsushi further includes not only undetected deaths of persons living alone, but also undetected deaths of multiple persons who have lived in isolation from their surrounding community. An example of the latter is when both caregivers and care receivers are aged persons, a phenomenon called rōrō kaigo (老老介護). When then the caregiving person dies an unexpected death, the care receiving person often dies as well, potentially leading to two undetected deaths.

⁴ The law is called kōryobyōnin oyobi kōryoshibōjin toriatsukaihō (行旅病人及行旅死亡人取扱法).

⁵ Fujimori Katsuhiko (2010, p. 168) insists that the lack of mitori in the last moments of a person’s life was not the real issue behind the lonely death, but rather it was the fact that the persons have lived completely isolated lives and that their death was therefore undiscovered for a long period of time. He thus regards the increase of isolated lifestyles and feelings of loneliness as more problematic than the increase of lonely deaths.

⁶ Even authors who depict the last stages of life rather positively, as a chance for self-realization and leisure (see Ueno, 2007), mostly stress the individual responsibility for developing one’s aging either into a success story or into a story of failure due to loneliness.

⁷ For a more detailed introduction into the Community General Support Center’s envisioned role in the local welfare system see (Dahl, 2018).

⁸ There also exists a number of digital monitoring systems or ambient assisted living systems which are set to alarm in case of sudden changes in behavioral patterns, unusual incidents or home accidents. However, such systems did not play a significant role in my field site. This absence was probably due to the lack of financial resources in this particular neighborhood.

⁹ The concept literally pictures a house surrounded by the two neighbors on each side (ryōdonari) as well as the three neighbors on the opposite side of the road (mukōsangen).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nils Dahl

Nils Dahl studied “Modern Japanese Studies” and “Communication and Media Studies” at Heinrich-Heine University Dusseldorf. He successfully completed the doctoral programme of the interdisciplinary Graduate Research Training Group ‘Age(ing): Cultural Concepts and Practical Realisations’ with a PhD thesis about social isolation in old age and the growing number of lonely deaths (kodokushi) in Japan.