Why Japan’s ageing population is dying alone

Cicadas, every Japanese schoolchild knows, lie underground for years before rising to the earth’s surface in summer. They climb up the nearest tree, where they cast off their shells and start their short second lives. During their few days among us, they mate, fly and cry. They cry until their bodies are found on the ground, twitching in their last moments, or on their backs with their legs pointing upwards.

Chieko Ito hates the din they make. They have just started shrieking, as they always do in early summer, and the noise will keep getting louder in the weeks to come, invading her third-floor apartment, making any kind of silence impossible. As one species of cicadas quietens down, another’s distinct cry will take over. Then, as the insects peak in numbers, showers of dead and dying cicadas will rain down on her enormous housing complex in Tokiwadaira, on the outskirts of Tokyo, stopping only with the end of summer itself.

“You hear them from morning to evening,” she sighs.

It is the afternoon of her 91st birthday, and unusually hot, part of a heatwave that has community leaders worried. Elderly volunteers have been winding through the labyrinth of footpaths, distributing leaflets on the dangers of heatstroke to the many hundreds of residents like Ito who live alone in 171 nearly identical white buildings. With no families or visitors to speak of, many older tenants spend weeks or months cocooned in their small flats, offering little hint of their existence to the world outside their doors. And each year, some of them die without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbours notice the smell.

The first time it happened, or at least the first time it drew national attention, the corpse of a 69-year-old man living near Ito had been lying on the floor for three years, without anyone noticing his absence. His monthly rent and utility payments had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account. Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, authorities came to the flat and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet from his next-door neighbours.