The Lonely End: in aging Japan, thousands die alone and unnoticed
> <i>His epiphany came when his current partner told him how she had lost her grandmother. Unlike Koremura’s loss, her grandmother had died alone—a kodokushi. It was seeing the deep regret in her, and accepting his own ennui, that made Koremura finally take action. He left his job as a stockbroker and set up his own removal company dedicated to the cleanup of kodokushi victims. He wanted to give something back to the generation of his grandmother, and he also wanted to change who he was. “I was ready for the prospect of change, but looking back, perhaps I wasn’t quite so ready for how different my life was to become,” he remembers.</i><p>It's odd that Toru Koremura's reaction to lonely elderly deaths was to go into the corpse-cleaning-up business, rather than starting a social outreach program for the lonely elderly.  I understand there's dignity in how we treat the dead, but it doesn't solve the problem at all.