TIME World
Apr 06, 2010
In the 1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn’t any family to call on. So Yoshida started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse.
These, he learned, were kodokushi, or “lonely deaths.” Now he has seen plenty – these deaths make up 300 of the 1,500 cleaning jobs performed by his company each year.
Read the full article at TIME World
Thanks to the HVCC Mortuary Science Alumni and Student Association for altering us to this article.
