In recent weeks, three cases of kodokushi, or "lonely deaths," have been covered extensively in the news. One involved a Saitama Prefecture family of three whose bodies were found in their apartment several months after the electricity and gas were turned off for nonpayment. Police assumed they had starved. The other cases involved two sisters in their 40s who likely froze to death in a Sapporo apartment; and the discovery of the bodies of a 45-year-old woman and her 4-year-old son in Tachikawa, Tokyo.
America's ABC News reported that these three incidents "prompt(ed) soul-searching," though what they really prompted, at least in the Japanese media, was a blame game targeting various authorities and an increasingly atomized society. TBS ran a long, melodramatic report on its morning "Hiruobi" news show focusing mainly on the Sapporo incident and describing the sisters as victims of an uncaring social-welfare system and isolated by a community whose members avoided one another at any cost. The reporter quoted a survey that found 70 percent of Japanese people had no desire to "allow neighbors into their lives" and, based on this figure, concluded that "Japanese are more likely to die alone" than people in other countries.
TBS pointed to a 2001 law compelling utilities to inform local welfare offices whenever customers suddenly stopped paying their bills. Since that law went into effect, less than 4 percent of such situations have been reported by utilities, which cite privacy restrictions for their reluctance to do so. The report also implied that the local welfare office should have intervened in the Sapporo case. Though one of the deceased women was receiving disability payments the office said it couldn't enter the home of a person without being invited, which sounded like an excuse. This also became a theme of the Saitama coverage: The family was poor and apparently unwilling to seek help from the local government. A neighbor told police that one member of the family had approached her for a loan and she suggested instead that the woman apply for assistance, but the welfare office said she never did. In the Tachikawa case, the mother apparently died of a brain hemorrhage and her son, who was disabled, couldn't feed himself. The mother was receiving a welfare allowance of ¥14,000 a month for the son and there was food in the refrigerator when the bodies were found.