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.