Man found six months after death: Let’s try to avert lonely deaths

Over the last months, there has been a spike in interest in all things Japanese and one of the phenomena revealed is the scale of “lonely deaths”: People dead in their homes for long periods before being discovered.

Elderly people die alone in every country, but Japan sets the pace in this questionable metric. Changing family structures and an epidemic of isolation have pushed lonely deaths to around 30,000 a year.

Though there are no official figures, the reality has spawned a business — the lonely death clean-up industry, which restores apartments to a usable condition after such tragedies. They are so frequent that some landlords buy insurance to cover clean-up costs.

As more than a quarter of Japanese are over 65, and that ratio will hit 40% within three decades, the clean-up business’s prospects look good. We might like to think that such a thing, at least on a similar scale, could not happen here, but a coroner’s court yesterday showed it does.

Coroner Philip Comyn, speaking at the inquest into the death of reclusive bachelor Ritchie Scanlan, 84, said he found it “troubling” that Mr Scanlan lay dead in his inner city home for at least six months, before being discovered.

Reclusive people make deaths like this inevitable, but we all know of someone living alone, who, through no choice or character trait of their own, faces such a possibility. Once again, make that call.