During the first half of 2024, nearly 40,000 people in Japan have died alone at home, according to BBC reported citing the country's National Police Agency.
Among the dead, nearly 4,000 individuals were not discovered until more than a month after their death, while 130 remained undiscovered for an entire year, the agency's report said.
According to the United Nations, Japan is known for having “the oldest population in the world” and the law enforcement agency issued the report in hopes of drawing attention to the growing problem of a large portion of this population living and dying in isolation.
The data show that a total of 37,227 people living alone were found dead in their homes, of whom more than 70% were people aged 65 or older.
Meanwhile, an estimated 40% of people who died alone at home were found within a day and nearly 3,939 bodies were discovered more than a month after death.
In addition, 130 deaths went unnoticed for at least a year before their discovery.
The largest group in the dataset, with 7,498 bodies, was people aged 85 or older, followed by people aged 75 to 79, with 5,920. People aged 70 to 74 accounted for 5,635 of the bodies found.
By 2050, Japan is expected to have 10.8 million senior citizens living alone and 23.3 million single-person households, Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research said earlier this year.
The problem of ageing in the East Asian country has led to issues of loneliness and isolation, prompting its government to introduce a bill aimed at addressing these concerns.
Last year, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that Japan's declining birth rate could endanger the functioning of its society.
In addition, some neighboring countries face similar demographic challenges.
In 2022, China's population declined for the first time since 1961, while South Korea has repeatedly reported the lowest fertility rate in the world.
