The Limits of Dwelling and the Unwitnessed Death

Was he dead? Did others wonder this too?

* * *

It is estimated that about 32,000 people die “lonely deaths” in Japan each year (Tamaki 2014, 211), or about one every sixteen minutes. Sometimes the bodies of those who die unattended are discovered weeks or months after they have expired, but most are found within two or three days. In most cases, the deceased is an older person, often living alone after the death of a spouse. The number of older people living alone in Japan rose sixfold between 1985 and 2015 and continues to rise. While Japan was first considered an aging society four decades ago,⁶ it is now experiencing another shift, to a “mass-dying society” (tashi-shakai; Nippon Keizai Shimbun 2016). The number of deaths has been increasing each year and is predicted to peak around 2040, when 1.67 million Japanese people are expected to die, with an estimated one in four dying unattended and unwitnessed (Masuda 2015).

In Kyoto, a city with about 1.4 million residents where I conducted fieldwork, solo-dwelling older adults made up 46 percent of all households where an older person resided.⁷ While the main focus of my research was people caring for older family members in the city, it quickly became apparent that local volunteer services were almost entirely occupied with looking after older people who lived alone and who had significant cognitive or mobility impairments that hindered their ability to go very far from home. While paid care services were more accessible in cities like Kyoto than in outlying rural areas, a high proportion of solo-dwelling older people meant that those services were sometimes stretched very thin. This article draws mainly on interviews with paid care workers, minseiiin (commissioned community welfare officers), and ten months of volunteer work delivering meals to solo-dwelling older adults in the neighborhood where I lived in eastern Kyoto.

In 2008, the Association for the Advancement of Building Communities Where Seniors and Others Can Live Safely, a national group within the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW), published a report titled “Aiming for Zero ‘Isolated Deaths’” (MHLW 2008). The report, peppered with anecdotes alongside national mortality statistics, sought to outline a means of preventing the growing social problem of isolated deaths. It began by recounting several cases, each composed with the same clinical distance despite the harrowing details. To give a sense of this style, I include a sample here:

In the spring of 2001, the skeletal remains of a fifty-nine-year-old man were discovered. Three years had passed since the death. He died on the wooden floor of the kitchen. The neighbors all believed there was someone living there since the lights had been left on and the electric meter was running. Someone coming to collect rent discovered the man’s corpse. This man had divorced and lived alone. He had cut off all contact with his children and siblings. (MHLW 2008, 1; author’s translation)

The story provides an intense and disturbing image of a body decaying in the house, while the rest of the world goes on, unnoticing, around it. The families of the deceased in this and other stories recounted in the document are represented as neglectful or absent because of the implied social failings of the deceased. They failed to connect. Like campfire ghost tales, these anecdotes deliver a little morality along with the fright, propelling the rest of the document into its impassioned appeal to eliminate “tragic” scenes by mobilizing the community to build caring relationships, to “greet each other with a pleasant voice,” raise “community consciousness,” and make watchfulness a part of “everyday life” (MHLW 2008, 11–12).

Kodokushi became a popular media topic in Japan in part because of the sensational images they produced. This held especially true in the aftermath of the Hanshin earthquake of 1995.⁸ Many of the survivors, relocated to residential apartment blocks (danchi), became solitary not just for reasons of age and infirmity but also because the residences did not provide significant opportunities to socialize or build ties for the dislocated refugees. Some older people, suffering from inadequate postcrisis support, died and were not immediately discovered. After a national outpouring of aid, this lonely end stood as a haunting reminder of the challenge of caring for others and raised anxieties about social and family disintegration (see Morioka 2012) amplified in the postbubble recession of the early 1990s. Anne Allison (2013, 8) describes this sense of internal alienation and precarity in the context of late liberal, post–3/11 Japan as “liquefied,”⁹ and, echoing Derrida (1994, 21–22), haunted with a sense of “being out of place, out of sorts, disconnected” (Allison 2013, 14).

My neighbor, Okuda-san, whose fall had brought the ambulance to his house, would be considered a typical case of someone whose dwelling had become uninhabitable. In this case, it was the minseiiin who stepped in to contain the narrative. Since the establishment of the national People’s Welfare Law in 1948, unpaid community welfare workers, selected because of local standing and interest, have looked after the most vulnerable, including disabled persons and the elderly. As local extensions of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, minseiiin volunteers act as intermediaries between state-led initiatives like the “Aiming for Zero Isolated Deaths” report and communities, playing a crucial role in reinforcing images and ideas about kodokushi and the crisis of social disconnection by transporting and translating information between formal governmental bodies and local neighborhood associations. Before approaching the home, then, we must first understand how minseiiin simultaneously construct local community life and its opposite: the lonely death.

When talking to local minseiiin about incidents of kodokushi, all strongly expressed how important it was to “watch over” solo-dwelling older people. At the same time, they had little sense that their efforts were actually able to prevent kodokushi. One reason they gave was the restrictions on entering houses. Community leaders considered the house both a site of surveillance and an obstacle to direct witnessing. Since most houses in the urban residential areas of Kyoto were closely packed together, facing directly onto the street, it was easy to see and hear what was going on when people were active. Because of this exposure, however, most people took care to keep shades and shutters closed—it was also easy to go unnoticed in plain sight.

“We are all scared [of kodokushi],” one minseiiin told me, adding that she visits the older solo-dwelling adults once a month to check on them. “But since they might die at any time, I ask neighbors to stay alert and contact me if anything seems amiss.” Other minseiiin echoed these comments, saying, for instance, that it is the “main job” of the minseiiin to “help people before they become kodokushi,” by dropping in and watching over (see Figure 2). “We’re not really allowed to go into homes and check on people, you see,” one minseiiin confessed, “but ordinary people, well, they can do as they like, so we can ask them to check on so-and-so if we are concerned.”

Since the frail elderly (or their decaying bodies) remain hidden from view, the house stands in for them. A skillful minseiiin will be able to gently persuade or cajole neighbors and friends into help keeping watch on the signs of possible kodokushi, such as untended plants or messy entranceways with stacks of mail. Of course, as the case of Okura-san indicates, even when it looks as though someone might be very vulnerable, there is little that ordinary community members or even minseiiin feel they ought to do.

Figure 2. A visit from the minseiiin rarely crosses the threshold of the home of the solo-dwelling older person. Photo by Jason Danely.

The city requires community social welfare volunteers to publicly report any kodokushi that has occurred in their district at monthly meetings, with representatives from other areas present. There are no direct repercussions, financially or otherwise, and while no one likes to report a kodokushi, it is understood that it could happen to anyone. As one minseiiin put it:

It’s not kodokushi prevention, [it’s] just watching over (mimamori). People with bad luck are going to become kodokushi. So in order to make sure that doesn’t happen, we watch over them. But we never know when it is going to happen. No matter how much we look in on them, if they don’t have any family around, we can’t help!

This kind of distance and resignation surprised me initially, but after several similar conversations with care professionals, it became clear that care needs for solo-­dwelling older people in particular were on a scale far beyond what minseiiin could reasonably be held responsible for. The immediate effects of kodokushi, the gossip and stories that circulated after the ambulance had left, do, however, affect the minseiiin and their ability to maintain a symbolic role as wards of overall community health, vitality, and spirit.

Why continue to make these efforts to watch over solo-dwelling older people if you cannot prevent unwitnessed deaths? This question led me to reconsider acts of watching over as not only instrumental, preventative gestures of care but also as the basis for recognizing solo-dwelling older people as the “unsettling image of the other” (Stevenson 2014, 15), subjects who, as the term unsettling suggests, are adrift, haunting, and at the edges of dwelling. At stake in efforts to integrate the solo-dwelling older person, then, was the ethical and aesthetic sense of dwelling in the community.¹⁰ Deaths that occur with family or care staff present are orderly. But kodokushi, as one minseiiin put it, “is a mess,” continuing:

There are police, and reporters arriving—and then what would people think? That minseiiin-san wasn’t doing anything! So to make sure that doesn’t happen we have to constantly be vigilant. First, we look to see if their plants are OK, if it looks like they haven’t been tended in a while. Or we look to see if they have been getting their mail. We can’t go around to everyone and be ringing doorbells.

Watching over (mimamori) provided a means of creating a public image of the solo-­dwelling elderly person. Its mode of communication was in the register of what Shunsuke Nozawa (2015, 388) identified as “phatic mereness,” where gestures of connection leave momentary traces, or trace momentary encounters with others, as absent as it is present:

The moment of effacement may create an imaginative worlding, and summon anew “the vitality of something that refuses connections.” A fuller copresence may be just a dream, a hoax. People will still die alone. But a reckoning of alterity might allow them to live and die believing their life and death will be notable to someone, a you, any one of you, on the other side of the channel. I know you are not here, I just want a hint, a sign that you are alive and waiting for me—not even that. (Nozawa 2015, 395)

Nozawa reminds us here not to fully close the door on the possibilities of connection (en, tsunagari) often mobilized in kodokushi-prevention narratives, even when it appears that there is little to be done. Make no mistake: the concern of community leaders expressed a genuine compassion for lonely and isolated older people, even if cultural conventions of civility mediated their concern. To present themselves as a community of concerned others, they could only gesture at connection, creating a space of indeterminate potential, imagination, and endurance.

Figure 3. An impression of phatic mereness. A poster reads: “The safety of solo-dwelling older people is the neighborhood’s [safety].” Schoolchildren greet a smiling older couple at a distance, without facing them directly. Photo by Jason Danely.

A political ethic of watchfulness like that adopted by minseiiin requires looking at techniques of envisioning and the images envisioned. Images of kodokushi are described in policy documents, case studies, popular news reports, documentaries, and posters. They are the spectacular images that obscure less perceptible and more widely distributed specters of social isolation and abandonment of older people. Community volunteers and care managers make drop-in visits, and their observations often make their way through the local community as gossip. When I asked about stories I had heard with the minseiiin and care workers I knew, they responded with visible expressions of pity and disgust as well as a kind of moral talk that tried to contain this affect and provide some resolution to the unease it provoked. But press just a bit further and one also found an undercurrent of resignation and even indifference.

Deaths that go unobserved or unnoticed are viewed retrospectacularly as messy and disorganized, casting a shadow over other community efforts to instantiate connectedness and belonging.¹¹ As such, they motivate and mobilize community efforts to manage the end of life. The goal is not to prevent death, but to prevent a messy death.

HAUNTED HOUSES

I had met Okura-san before, but rarely saw him outside of his home. The last time I had seen him was two weeks earlier, when I accompanied another volunteer to deliver a lunchbox as part of a community service to older people living alone. We met him at his front door where, after we announced our arrival several times, he appeared, disoriented and exhausted. The other volunteer didn’t look too concerned, but I was relieved and smiled as I handed him the lunch. I asked if he was getting along since his wife had been away at the hospital, to which he offered a list of complaints. He felt worried because she was reaching the three-month limit on her stay and would need to be transferred to another hospital, even though she was still in a coma. He told me that he takes a taxi to the hospital almost every day, sometimes bringing a CD player with music she enjoys. The other volunteer, eager to move on, prompted Okura-san for the lunch fee. We ended up asking him several times, and each time he would disappear into his darkened house and return to the door with a look of surprise, having forgotten the amount or what he was looking for in the first place. We ended up just telling him that we’d pick it up when we collected the lunch box later. What else could we do? There were a lot of other meals to deliver to older people living alone.

In hindsight, I wondered if we shouldn’t have done something more. What was my responsibility?

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Around the end of the nineteenth century, when a Japanese person spoke of “home,” they were most likely referencing an environment, a family group, or even a set of practices (Sand 2003, 25) rather than a building set apart from others. Throughout Japan’s rapid national modernization process in the early twentieth century, however, a radical shift occurred in the meaning of home and the domestic, in conjunction with other material, architectural, and economic changes. Over the second half of the twentieth century, rapid urbanization and increased mobility linked to infrastructure and a stable employment system created opportunities to live independently of the family home. In the 1950s, the vast majority of urban dwellers were renting, but as the economy began to prosper, home ownership rose sharply to around 60 percent in the 1960s (Izuhara 2015, 179), where it remains today.

In the era of Japan’s post–World War II so-called economic miracle, having one’s own home became an emblem of aspirations, a “my-homeism” inspired by hope and underwritten by debt (Allison 2012). Since the postbubble recession of the 1990s, however, a phenomenal growth in “empty homes,” or akiya, has occurred. At first, these were not the newly built homes of the suburban “bed towns,” but rather older homes that were not inherited, where aging parents stayed, then abandoned when the old people died or vacated. A landlord in a semirural area outside of Tokyo told me that he had noticed a rapid increase of both akiya and kodokushi over the past decade as the town’s population grew older, and that even among his rental properties, two or three cases of kodokushi happen every year. He not only has to bear the cost of cleaning out the property afterward but said that he also always tells prospective renters about the fate of the former tenant, offering a discount on their rent.

Figure 4. Akiya house, with leaflets overflowing the unused mailbox. Photo by Jason Danely.

As I walked down residential streets of Kyoto with informants, some commented that they could tell if there were a lot of older people in the neighborhood by the number of shuttered and empty houses. Sometimes these looked as one would imagine a haunted house: discolored walls and doors, stained curtains and peeling paint, vegetation wildly creeping across the facade (see Figure 4). At other times, however, the akiya were hardly noticeable, blending in with the other tightly packed houses that appeared similarly vacant except for a few potted plants by the door. When I volunteered delivering meals to solo-dwelling older people, the empty houses became a frequent topic of conversation. The circulation of knowledge about former inhabitants enhanced my sensitivity to the small details that distinguished the aesthetic presence of these akiya, sometimes only apparent after time had passed. In some cases, the individuals to whom we delivered food were like islands left by the rising sea of akiya all around them.

Although the existing housing stock is greater than the total number of households in Japan, public funds continue to be used to build new units in a neoliberal strategy to stimulate the economy (Izuhara 2015, 186). As a result, in contrast to other countries where home ownership constitutes an important welfare asset for older people, Japanese homes are left without refurbishment and lose value. Already in 2014, the number of akiya nationwide exceeded 8 million, or 18 percent of the houses in Japan (Sobel 2015). In the same year, there were more than half a million names on waiting lists for entry into long-term residential care and nursing homes. The contrast between the sea of empty houses and the excess of older people seeking care homes is striking, yet a similar inhibition of dwelling characterizes them both. Kodokushi and akiya, like ghosts and haunted houses, are the enduring subjects of mourning in this late liberal landscape.

“All the empty houses, that’s the biggest problem,” said one shop owner I spoke with when I mentioned my interest in aging. “The children don’t want it, but the parents keep thinking that they can give it to the kids. But by the time they die, the house is worthless! The kids sometimes demolish the house, and then build two or three separate lots on those spaces.” Since visual pollution regulations prevent the building of large high-rise apartment blocks around the center of Kyoto, and because of the high cost of demolition, however, many successors may not be able to convert houses after the owners pass. To the shop owner, this was not just economically wasteful, but also constituted a persistent image of a decaying landscape where bonds of kin and community were stretched to breaking. The akiya tend to bring down the prices of homes in the area, but more than that, they serve as potent reminders of the limits of dwelling. Like abandoned graves of the unconnected spirits (Danely 2014, 107), the akiya are seen as messy, disruptive, and dangerous; they are difficult to mourn.

If the image of economic success had been home ownership, then the image of failure was not only the messy death but also the messy house (Allison 2018; Gygi 2018). Cleaners of kodokushi houses, covered head to toe in protective suits and ventilators and picking through soiled remains, bear an uncanny resemblance to the crews tending to the dangerous radioactive waste of the Fukushima reactor damaged by the earthquake and tsunami on 3/11. Similar images of Fukushima survivors and the kodokushi cleaners praying for the spirits of the dead amid life’s wreckage, dressed in mortuary-white protective gear, have been widely circulated by the media in Japan and abroad.

These images, like those of “rubbish houses” (Gygi 2018), echo the unhomely between mourning sites of environmental catastrophe and intimate entropy, dramatizing the potentially contaminating effects of messy deaths for both the spirits and the survivors. But specters must fade back into invisibility, quietude, into the inner recesses of the home that traps things and people rather than facilitating flows and relationships. In one case, for example, Nishida-san, a minseiiin living in central Kyoto, told me about discovering the body of a woman who had died days earlier alone in her home. After alerting the police and confirming that the woman had no next of kin, Nishida-san called other local community members to help clean the mess made by the leakage of bodily fluids. As they lifted up the tatami mats on the floor, they discovered a hidden stash of money (hesokuri). When I first wrote about Nishida-san’s discovery (Danely 2014, 146), I treated it merely as an example of the ways older people express concern and perform ritual services for the abandoned. When she told this story to me again a few years later, I asked about what had happened to the money, to which she replied:

We laughed and said we’d all divide it up! Even the police said that he’d take some first! [laughs] But the police took it and counted it and did everything properly. I really feel bad for people with no family. The end was coming and all she had left was money. She didn’t have anyone to give it to. No children, no siblings. So we just asked for enough to cover the cost of a small funeral, cremation, and some sort of memorial. The police just took [the money]; I don’t know what happened in the end. They didn’t give any to the minseiiin to say thank you for all of your hard work!

Here again, the absence of family and the messy corporeal remains revealed a hidden accumulation of money that remained trapped rather than circulated. The work of the minseiiin, however small, allowed some of that money to flow back into the work of relationship building through the funeral, to resettle the spirit and contain the unsightly spectacle.

Nishida-san’s story, like that of the professional kodokushi cleaning crews, shows how the homes of solo-dwelling older people have their own pungent “ecology of sensibility” (Hankins 2013); they are anything but empty. She described another case of kodokushi where funeral instructions and money were set aside for whoever found the body, but in most cases, she only found a mess: unpaid bills, soiled underwear, the wrapping of cheap instant noodles. These are unhomely homes that bear the stains of a person beyond dignity, beyond dwelling. Like the police response after kodokushi, empty houses continue to produce political and existential consequences for the community and those charged with watching over it.

Inge Daniels (2010) described the ways in which houses in Japan at once appear structurally impervious and opaque, shuttered and gated off from the community, yet also surprisingly porous, as friends and neighbors find ample opportunities for watching over and dropping in. These flows happen because of the social and ideological infrastructures of the house. Japan’s universal and mandatory Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) system has become part of this infrastructure, regulating the flows of dependencies, bringing carers into the home or keeping them out. Several informants told me that it was easier to access care services when living alone, since co-residing family reduced eligibility for LTCI benefits. Many people, however, are hesitant to become a burden on welfare services, even when they are eligible. As LTCI displaces the flows and porosity of family and community, it also creates semi-absences that render the solo-dwelling older person vulnerable.

Home-modification and contracting scams are some of the most common forms of fraud targeting solo-dwelling older adults. In one recent case, a man posing as a contractor in Kobe city defrauded a solo-dwelling woman with dementia for 6.8 million yen (around US$637,000) between 2013 and 2014 (Asahi Shimbun 2018). These schemes differ from other fraud targeting older people because they include face-to-face home visits; in about half of all such cases, the victim is over seventy (compared to one-quarter of the cases of store-based contractor fraud; National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan 2013, 10). These scams are particularly devious because they take advantage of the symbolic significance of the home on at least three levels. First, home is a place where one will grow old and die. Scams often promise to make older homes fit for older persons considering a future where they will need more supportive modifications, and so home improvement becomes a means of asserting autonomy over aging, even as it leaves them more vulnerable to predatory schemes. Second, the unnecessary repairs are often infrastructural, as was the case with one solo-dwelling neighbor in her nineties, who was scammed by a contractor claiming that she needed to urgently repair plumbing and hidden water damage beneath her floors. Other scams target roof repairs, since loose tiles cause damage to surrounding houses during typhoons. Both cases leverage a sense of fear and responsibility by making these imaginary infrastructures visible and ethically laden. Third, they take advantage of the social isolation of the older person by providing a rare chance for recognition and generosity; older people want to give, and may find meaning in some kinds of loss. As Nozawa (2015, 375) notes, these scams fill “security holes” of indifference with interest, but in the end, this interest is at best a costly fantasy, and at worst, dangerous abuse.

Those watching over and dropping in on solo-dwelling older adults might try to catch these sorts of abuses and guard the older person’s fragile state of dwelling for as long as they can. But too often abuse remains hidden within the home, itself more of a specter than a public spectacle.

EMPLACING AND EMPLOTTING DEATH

Somehow one of the women in the gathering surmised that the ambulance had been called by Okura-san’s son, who had by chance been visiting that day. Okura-san was soon carried, strapped to the stretcher, into the ambulance, alert but confused and disheveled. His black nylon socks were bunched awkwardly and his feet laid askew, one leg slightly bent up. This detail broke the smooth performance of the paramedic crew, who, like the puppeteers of Japanese bunraku theater, seemed to disappear in their quiet, efficient movements. I was riveted by the man with the rumpled socks.

Okura-san’s son soon joined the paramedics, carrying a bright green nylon duffel bag and briefly apologizing to all of the neighbors as he climbed into the ambulance next to his father. As the door shut, one of my neighbors, a woman with thick gray hair and large glasses leaned over to me, whispering: “I am eighty-eight years old. Isn’t it terrible that people here are living too long? There are no young people in our neighborhood anymore. . . . No young people in Japan . . .” She turned and walked back down the street alone before I could respond.

* * *

For the spectators, an event like a neighbor’s fall has significance that reaches beyond the house, beyond the neighborhood, enveloping an entire nation: no young people in Japan. Young people, or so I read her tone, do not die like this. Even though this scene in the alleyway did not involve the actual event of death, I could not have been the only one who imagined it. The event asks the questions of mourning: whose body and where is it? For my neighbor, the disappearance of the body into the ambulance signaled a movement from the social body of the community, bonded through the phatic labor of volunteers, and the body politic, marked as much by uniformity and order as by a sensorial spectacle of emergency (Scheper-­Hughes and Lock 1987).

Many ethnographies have already discussed the significance of place, and especially of the home, in regard to attitudes and practices surrounding death, dying, and mortuary ritual in Japan (e.g., Long 2004; Connor and Traphagan 2014; Danely 2014; Kim 2016). Most of these note that historically, the embodied copresence of intimate others to watch over the dying person is critical; the same expression, mimamori or mitori, is used both for keeping a death watch and for watching over solo-dwelling older people. Around 75 percent of deaths in Japan occur in hospitals (MHLW 2017b), where the patient is not given the option of returning home before they die.

One explanation for this, as mentioned earlier by a minseiiin, is that for the bereaved family, the death at home, even when the body is discovered quickly, can become something like the spectacle of kodokushi, with police and medical staff called to scene. Doctors and medical staff sympathetic to bereaved families sometimes become complicit in avoiding this spectacle by clever ways of emplacing and emplotting death,¹² staging a bureaucratic performance that transforms the haunting, messy death to one that is good and orderly. For example, one doctor told me:

A lot of people call the hospital at the last minute to avoid a big scene. My advice is that if someone dies at home, you should call the doctor you trust. If I get a call, sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ll tell them to hold on and clean the body. Then I’ll come later and do the examination and take care of the paperwork. That way the family can avoid dealing with the police. This happens a lot!

These efforts to avoid a suspicious death were performed not only for those who died at home but also for older persons in geriatric care facilities. One nurse at a geriatric institution (rōjin hoken shisetsu) told me that even when someone had clearly died, staff would call the ambulance, and the paramedics would go through the motions of trying to save the person or examine them as if they were still potentially alive until they arrived at the hospital. Then, on arrival, doctors could pronounce that the person had died at the hospital rather than at a care institution. In examples like these, bureaucratic procedures and documentation lent themselves to a process of emplacing and emplotting death to produce conformity to both legal requirements and an ethics of dwelling.

As with the minseiiin, a general consensus existed among the medical professionals I spoke with that preventing kodokushi entirely was absurd and that the good death at home, surrounded by family, was, as one nurse put it, “nothing more than a fantasy.” There was no such thing as Kodokushi Zero society. Middle-aged people I spoke with thought dying alone at home was more desirable than dying in a hospital, which remains associated with the frightening image of life-support systems of wires and tubes that Japanese people refer to as “spaghetti syndrome.” But they also realized that despite personal preferences, the end of life in old age was very difficult to control (Long 2004). In the context of overburdened care institutions, there is little left to do but live under the occasional gaze of the minseiiin and nosy neighbors and hope to dwell unto death without becoming trapped in one’s home.

One case manager described the “trap” of home this way:

People are going to need help, and if the services are not there, they’ll go to a hospital, then to a geriatric institution, then to a home or to older persons’ housing, where you can heap on all sorts of services. Then you’re in your own place but you’re imprisoned in solitary confinement [zashikirō] . . . we’re becoming a dying society. There won’t be the family there to watch over [the dying], or the family will be old themselves. We’re worried about what lies ahead [Saki yuki fuan]. The country hopes people who have dementia or are bed-ridden die in the community, receiving care from local groups, so they don’t have to use hospitals and care facilities. They tell the local people to do something about these people. People living alone are increasing, kodokushi and things like that. So the community is told to take care of these people, watch over them [mimamorinasai].

This care manager is rightfully concerned about what lies ahead. The last major revision of LTCI in 2017 (MHLW 2017a) raised fees and overall personal spending limits while promoting support for independence (jiritsu shien) and rehabilitation. Most of the older adults and family caregivers I spoke with expressed deep concern about this change and about what it will mean for the quality and kinds of care available for older adults living alone. “The government is just throwing all of this on our backs,” complained one minseiiin. “They say you take care of these old people, but we don’t know how to be a community like that.” Statements like this suggest not only an ethos of disinterest or resignation but also a struggle to mourn in meaningful ways in a “mass-dying society” where care economies of home simultaneously depend on and conflict with the tenuous bonds of community.

CONCLUSION

Kodokushi insinuates itself into the social imagination as a constant haunting presence, a banal tragic ethos, like the unsettling undertone felt when an ambulance stops outside one’s door. It haunts the borderland between the state and neighborhood, public and private, just beyond the touch and watch of the community. In maintaining this blurred boundary zone, the houses that isolate solo-dwelling older people are hidden in plain sight. They were there all along, as both an ideology and a structure of care.

This article has examined the ways care, and particularly community-based “watching over,” is employed to imagine the unwitnessed deaths of solo-dwelling older adults. I have argued that the construction of the kodokushi narrative in minseiiin reports, death certificates, welfare documents, cleaning rituals, and everyday gossip provide an opportunity for mourning that attempts to restore the possibility for an ethics of dwelling and witnessing. Narratives that try to make sense of kodokushi as a local event, as well as an index of an age of national decline, prompt feelings of both crisis and resignation. The excess of lonely older people and houses without value, however, continues to produce semi-absences for the specter of kodokushi to reappear and cast uncertainty over this possibility.

An economy and ethics of dwelling raises questions about the material environments that people dwell within. People who become kodokushi are defined paradoxically by their inability to fully dwell and their inability to do anything but linger on alone in their home. Houses are not the cause of kodokushi any more than automobiles are the cause of traffic accidents. However, their place in the economic and political landscape of Japan’s history since the mid-twentieth century has intensified their significance as places of hope and aspiration, care and community belonging. The narratives and images of kodokushi exist alongside those of the empty houses that haunt an aging, postbubble Japanese society like the brittle husks of great cicadas. In the absence of a witness, these ghosts bring forth a hauntological demand to mourn the unsettled other, to emplace and emplot them in ways that can counter the spectacle.

It is difficult to picture what kinds of changes the next decades of Japan’s aging society will bring. There has simply never existed a society where 40 percent of the population are over sixty-five and are expected to live well into their nineties. The death rate will continue to rise, as will the numbers of kodokushi, since institutions will not have the capacity or resources to otherwise deal with the aging population. Japan will continue to be a place for the work of mourning, where images will play a central role.

Throughout my own narration of kodokushi, the solitary subject of death has remained quiet. Perhaps it was this silence that led to his invisibility even before death. He didn’t communicate, didn’t know how to narrate his own ending. We are left to imagine, as my neighbor did, that his fate is also ours, or even Japan’s. The specters still ask: who is responsible? We are left with a glimpse of an oddly rumpled sock disappearing into the back of an ambulance, and then, with ourselves.

NOTES

Acknowledgments I thank the Cultural Anthropology editorial team and the anonymous reviewers for their generous, thoughtful, and encouraging input on this article. Research for the article was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship (PE13251).