Lonely in Tokyo

In1977, as a bullet train rolled into a Tokyo station, conductors found a 70 year-old man dead in his seat. A post-mortem showed he had been there for some time, unnoticed and undisturbed by passengers and staff. Trapped in a bizarre, worldly purgatory, endlessly ferried from one bland municipal station to another, his final resting place was an untended, anonymous grave in a state cemetery. The case was only one of many cases of kodokushi, or solitary death, that began to emerge in the 1970s and 80s, with the press picking up on scores of isolated elderly men and women dying alone — forgotten by their families and neglected by the state. Amidst a growing mood of national self-flagellation, commentators lamented the death of the Japanese family and of neighbourly sociability. How, in the largest city in the world, could a public death be ignored by thousands of impassive commuters? <a href="https://medium.com/the-megacities-issue/lonely-in-tokyo-e4d0b89c17f">Read More</a>