I heard this was one of the social functions filled by the Japanese postal workers. Their official job was to deliver the mail, sure, but they were also encouraged to spend a few minutes talking with everyone as they delivered the mail.
That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged.
Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.
One memorable instance of this sort of thing from back when I was an EMT in Virginia --- rural mailman noticed that an elderly gentleman hadn't picked up their mail from the previous day, so prevailed upon the folks at the next house to allow him to use their phone to call the County Sheriff's Department --- when the Deputy arrived, it was found that the unfortunate had had the seat in their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
An important detail that makes this possible: in Japan, the postal worker is allowed to enter your house.
Every Japanese home has a little square area near the front door called a "genkan", where guests are supposed to remove their shoes when entering. Postal workers also occupy this area when delivering mail.
In Ireland there were two stories making the rounds recently of a woman who was only found 2 or 3 months after passing, and another man who was found more than two years after dying.
Ireland has a penchant for derelict buildings (at least where I am). Combine that with unwillingness to impose anything on anyone, and you have a recipe for modern era mummies.
Except mummies were respectfully cared for throughout the embalming process. Don’t tar ancient civilizations with our own inhuman neglect of both living and dead.
A human or animal corpse that was accidentally mummified is still called a mummy. It's a technical term. A lot of mummies are just people who died in a peat bog, desert or ice cave.
Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.
So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.
Except it has been found that female mummies usually began the process in a greater state of decomposition than males with the _raison d’être_ being that it discouraged necrophilia on the part of the workers doing the mummification.
If China really shrinks by 300,000,000 over the next 50 years, visiting empty cities filled with mummified remains might be commonplace(economies can’t pivot fast enough to handling such a high death rate per active worker).
I'd guess the answer to the question is yes (if someone is 70 with no children, it isn't a stretch to see how they might have no visitors for a month).
However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.
> However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling".
I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.
Guess it will become much worse in South Korea, with their 0.7 fertility rate. Many people going single childless today will become lonely elders 30 years from now. It will compound for all the single children, that will have almost no collateral relatives to check on them (no siblings, no nephews/nieces, et cetera).
The current population of China in 2024 is 1,425,178,782, a 0.03% decline from 2023. I don't know where you're getting your alarmism from. If you bother to work out deaths per day in your scenario I suspect it's only a fraction of a percent higher.
(People go absolutely bananas about fertility dipping briefly below replacement, as if this isn't a contingent phenomenon that can and will be changed as circumstances and population change)
There is a demographic pyramid. Once the trend sets in, it’s almost impossible to reverse. You can see the pyramid now and get an idea how their population will look like. Current year growth is not informative.
According to UN projections, by 2060 China's population will be shrinking by approximately 15 million people from one year to another. This is a lower bound estimate on the number of deaths/year there by then, as it includes the effect of births partially offsetting deaths. See https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/Popul...
China dipped below replacement rate over 30 years ago. This means that there are now half as many people even capable of having children than there were then. This is exponential.
People go bananas about it because reversing below replacement birth rates is extremely difficult, basically has not been done in the modern era, and is one of the things that can lead to our economy and society collapsing, a la Japan.
It seems like you're saying that 6 million excess deaths a year in a country has been the norm throughout history, but I don't think that's the case. Even if we just think about it as a percentage of the total population, 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years, which would be catastrophic for a country's ability to maintain its economy, among other things. It's not exactly as bad as the bubonic plague, but much worse than Covid in any country, and much worse than any wars I can think of, so I think it would have a pretty large effect.
Around 25% of china population is rural and working on agricultural. They can lose 300m and be completely unaffected if they succeed to move people around. You only need 1% of the people to feed the 99%.
It is sad, but it is what it is. If you end up in a position where you don't have kids or close family, friends, or social workers that visit you, you could very well end up laying there until the stench affects your neighbors, bills go unpaid, or similar stuff.
In this day and age, many people - myself included - have bills on auto pay. So if money comes in, bills get paid, and no one knows you, it could take months to years before someone discovers you.
Her in Norway we had one case, where a man laid dead for 9 years in his apartment. He didn't have anyone, and people assumed he had moved or gone to a care facility. A janitor found him by chance.
Japan has only just begun its implosion. Population dropped by about 0.5 million last year but that will 3x within a decade given their population pyramid.
Losing 1-2% of your population per year is catastrophic and exponential.
I think people who say this did not have the misfortune of growing up in a society where there are few jobs that don't pay well and basically your entire existence is to subsidize a much larger class of elderly whose values, desires, etc. always trump your own
It depends who you are tbh. AFAIK they have a large problem dealing with mental health, and LGBT rights there aren't as good as a lot of other places. I understand they're getting a bit better about these kinds of things more recently but they've still got a way to go
Japan is already known for its aging population plus a low birth rate. The article mentions many of them were old, and of course older people have their friends and family die off, and move around less frequently. The low birth rate means fewer connections to a younger generation.
So for japan, and later the world, yeah - this might go up.
Sad, very sad, but a sign of our times (for some years now). Life around us has/is changing and there are more people interested in their careers and bank accounts than life itself and the supporting environment of family, friends, colleagues, relatives...
We're going to be seeing this more and more in the coming years :-(
Sometimes I wonder with all our great progress what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate? I know we can not turn back the clock, but if it were a game of Sims or Civilization, what are the set of choices and progresses we could have made to avoid this outcome
As sibling comment says, this is the outcome of what we did right, and decades of policy programme.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?
Japan's population decline is due to the collapse of the "bubble economy" in the 90s. This resulted in the "Lost Decades" where household incomes fell. This is especially shocking to Japan that had promoted the myth of the "salary man" where you worked for one company for life and are rewarded with lifetime employment. This break of the Japanese social contract left a deep scar on the Japanese psyche. To further complicate things, married women in Japan face social pressure to drop out of the work force after having children. They face an impossible choice of not having children or poverty.
What I find so weird about this whole situation that it has been coming for decades. Like at least 20, but probably lot more. And no one has found effective solution.
It's not what we did wrong, it's what we did right: education, contraception, women's rights, new forms of entertainment that are quite literally better than sex.
If we wanted to avoid this outcome we'd need to make the world a much worse place than it already is, and if that's really the case then we frankly deserve to go extinct.
The game is rigged and has always been, but through the entire human history people were too stupid to realize this, and the survival instinct made them, well, survive. Now is the first time ever that common man asked himself the question "Wait what?". We need a new social contract wherein the society actually does take care of an individual, instead of saying "git gud"
> what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate?
Gave people freedom via women’s rights, a somewhat peaceful society, and birth control. The previously high fertility rates were entirely a consequence of Mother Nature giving men more physical power than women, and women not being able to control their fertility.
Readit News
That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged.
Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.
Deleted Comment
> their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
You lost me. Were there multiple people trapped in the seat?
Every Japanese home has a little square area near the front door called a "genkan", where guests are supposed to remove their shoes when entering. Postal workers also occupy this area when delivering mail.
Ireland has a penchant for derelict buildings (at least where I am). Combine that with unwillingness to impose anything on anyone, and you have a recipe for modern era mummies.
Except mummies were respectfully cared for throughout the embalming process. Don’t tar ancient civilizations with our own inhuman neglect of both living and dead.
Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.
So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.
If China really shrinks by 300,000,000 over the next 50 years, visiting empty cities filled with mummified remains might be commonplace(economies can’t pivot fast enough to handling such a high death rate per active worker).
However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.
This is dangerously incorrect, as India is continuing to discover.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.
(People go absolutely bananas about fertility dipping briefly below replacement, as if this isn't a contingent phenomenon that can and will be changed as circumstances and population change)
Why? People have died at relatively faster rates in populations throughout history.
In this day and age, many people - myself included - have bills on auto pay. So if money comes in, bills get paid, and no one knows you, it could take months to years before someone discovers you.
Her in Norway we had one case, where a man laid dead for 9 years in his apartment. He didn't have anyone, and people assumed he had moved or gone to a care facility. A janitor found him by chance.
Losing 1-2% of your population per year is catastrophic and exponential.
So for japan, and later the world, yeah - this might go up.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
If we wanted to avoid this outcome we'd need to make the world a much worse place than it already is, and if that's really the case then we frankly deserve to go extinct.
Gave people freedom via women’s rights, a somewhat peaceful society, and birth control. The previously high fertility rates were entirely a consequence of Mother Nature giving men more physical power than women, and women not being able to control their fertility.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi, the Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent, a British woman who had been dead over two years before discovery