If a person dies alone at home and many days pass without anyone noticing, the body gradually begins to deteriorate. Then, a rotten smell wafted around the area, and it was finally discovered.
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The homes where these isolated deaths occur not only have a strong odor, but also pose a risk of infection. The bereaved family feels the deep hurt of having let the victim die alone, and is also busy cleaning up the house. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ census (2020), single-person households are increasing every year and account for about 40% of all households. As the number of people dying alone is expected to increase in the future, one man decided to change his line of work and clean up the scenes of lonely deaths, saying, “Someone has to do it.”
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“If only I had noticed…” Daughter’s regret: Father who died “isolatedly” at his parents’ home and was found two weeks later
The trigger was my hometown, which “changed” after the earthquake.
Hidekazu Shiina (67 years old) runs a special cleaning company that works at sites where isolated deaths occur. The company has seven employees and accepts requests from bereaved families of orphaned victims and apartment management companies in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture.
Mr. Shiina founded “Muramatsu Electric Industry” about 40 years ago, and has been involved in manufacturing automobile parts and high-pressure washing, and after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011, he also worked in decontamination to remove radioactive materials. I have accepted it. Shiina, who was born and raised in Iwaki City, noticed that there were fewer young people and more and more areas where only the elderly remained. He thought, “In the future, the number of people who die alone will increase,” and in 2016, he started a program called Kokoa Ai, which carries out special cleaning to sort out personal belongings and clean the scenes of isolated deaths. ) was launched.
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“We thought that there would be people who would be in trouble if there were no one to do this work. That’s why we are tackling the job with determination.”
Houses where orphaned deaths have occurred are difficult to clean with regular cleaning. A corpse that has been dead for several weeks emits a decomposing odor that permeates the entire room where the body was left. Body fluids and blood that flow from the corpse seep into the floor, which also rots and becomes caked. It is such a strange space that a normal person would hesitate to step into it.
“At first, there was some opposition from some employees. There was resistance in places where people had died, and they thought it would be bad for their families.”