Living a "good death": Caring for solitary deaths in Japan

Abstract

How do public health metrics of “good death” shape care and everyday life? Concerns over dying alone has become prevalent worldwide. In Japan, social anxieties over solitary deaths (kodokushi) have intensified in a rapidly aging society. In response, care practices have emerged to keep people social in life and death. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a tsunami-affected town in Miyagi, I examine how post-disaster care has been reorganized in response to fears of kodokushi. Care workers improvised their activities to reconcile bureaucratic demands for “statistics of sociality” with survivors’ shifting needs and desires. These activities demonstrate the impact of standardized scripts of “good death” on the quality of life and care of those they aim to protect. At the same time, they reveal the potential for care that embraces the indeterminacy and situatedness of what constitutes a good death, allowing for diverse ways of living and dying well.

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

Publication Date

12-30-2025

Publication Title

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Department

Anthropology

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70051

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

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