all photos by Naoko Kawamura courtesy Asahi News
Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. The instances first began to be reported around 2000, and are thought to be a product of increased social isolation coupled with a greying population.
Part art therapy and part public service campaign, Kojima spends a large portion of her free time recreating detailed miniature replicas of the rooms she has cleaned. A word of caution: although recreated without the corpses, some of the replicas can be quite disturbing.
Kojima has been working for the clean-up company for about 4 years and explains that she cleans on average 300 rooms per year. To preserve and document the scene, the company always takes photographs of the rooms in case relatives want to see them. However, Kojima noticed that the photographs really don’t capture the sadness of the incident. And while she had no formal art training, she decided to go to her local craft store and buy supplies, which she used to create her replicas. She sometimes uses color-copies of the photographs, which she then sculpts into miniature objects.Kojima says that she spends about 1 month on each replica.
Kojima originally started working for the clean-up company after her father experienced a similar fate. When she was in high school her parents separated and her father was living alone. One day her mother went to visit him to discuss divorce proceedings when she discovered him collapsed after suffering a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital and was sustained, but drifted into a coma. While unconscious, the doctors told Kojima that there was a good chance her father could hear her. And so, together with her mother, they spoke to him. The father never awoke from his coma but before passing away, tears rolled down his face. At that moment “I realized he had heard me,” explains Kojima. “I wished I would have fostered more of a bond with him.”
It was those feelings of regret that led her to create art that coveys the true sadness of kodokushi and, on another layer, the vital importance of simply communicating with those around you. Kodokushi doesn’t just affect the elderly. It can happen to anyone. But in almost all cases it happens to those who have poor relations with their family and no one to reach out to for help.
In this instance the victim passed away in the bath due to heat shock and wasn’t discovered for 2 months. The reheating mechanism in the bath caused the decomposition to accelerate.
October 4, 2018 at 1:58 am
powerful stuff
October 4, 2018 at 2:16 am
I think these are far more disturbing without the corpses. The lack of bodies make you wonder what happened and what led to such tragic outcomes.
October 4, 2018 at 3:03 pm
Those are your personal little demons doing the talking. That’s why leaving things to the imagination can be worse than not. Because we all have those niggling little monsters that show themselves when we summon up our imagination. These scenes become our personal nightmares when left to our own devices.
October 6, 2018 at 11:49 am
What can anyone say? Still, I think it is good someone is doing this to bring our attention to this problem, but how many of us act to help those less fortunate than ourselves?
October 6, 2018 at 7:17 pm
This article goes into much more depth about Miyu kojima job and artworks. 🙂
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/10/woman-cleans-lonely-deaths-japan-171012115412607.html
October 7, 2018 at 12:45 am
Reminiscent of the dioramas created by Francis Glessner Lee:
https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells
October 7, 2018 at 8:02 pm
mstock – Yes! I saw her dioramas a few months ago in Washington DC and they immediately came to mind when I saw these images.
October 16, 2018 at 3:53 am
This will almost certainly be me in a few years.
October 18, 2018 at 3:34 am
Join a group, even an online chat group. Meetup.com can help you meet people with similar interests! Don’t give up on yourself!
October 18, 2018 at 5:05 am
Jonathan, please talk to someone, connect with people, is there a group you can join if you’re isolated? No one deserves to die alone. Sending you a great big hug.
October 20, 2018 at 1:44 am
Saying “no one deserves to die alone” seems so ridiculous to me. We actually all die alone, regardless of our circumstances. I’ve known for quite awhile now that there is a strong chance this will happen to me. I have family & a small group of close friends, but we don’t talk constantly or see each other all that often. If I were to die unexpectedly at home, it could be days before anyone discovered it. And more likely to be prompted by me not showing up for work than by friends or family noticing I was “missing”. Not because they don’t care about me or I have a sad, lonely life & need to reach out online or find someone on meetup.com…. but because we all have busy lives & our “normal” means easily going days or weeks without communication.
October 28, 2018 at 7:48 am
….the point of the article is that these people have absolutely no one; their bodies are discovered in weeks or months (or years) and are usually only noticed due to smell and bugs. it’s great that you have friends and family you care about, but it’s sort of insensitive to just wave off suggestions to connect to people since you don’t seem the type to actually understand what it means to be alone, either through circumstance or mental illness.
October 18, 2018 at 5:59 pm
me too
October 19, 2018 at 6:19 pm
Big tight hugs from Manila for Jonathan ❤️
October 21, 2018 at 5:15 pm
i resemble that remark
October 17, 2018 at 11:06 pm
I was speaking of the aging and isolated population, particularly in Japan, today. It is real. It is contemporary. It is a social ill. Other developed countries… beware.