At the pier in Oiso Town, Japan, an old man personally pushed his wife, who had spent half his life together, into the sea.
On the day he ended his wife's life with his own hands, he was 82 years old.
Before the incident, no one would have thought that this old man named Hiroshi Fujiwara would have his wife's blood on his hands.
They are a model couple in everyone's minds, and their relationship has always been the envy of everyone.
Fujiwara Hiroshi's wife, Teruko Fujiwara, was partially paralyzed and unable to walk, and Fujiwara Hiroshi took care of her for forty years.
In Japan, such cases are called "caretaker killings" and occur almost every eight days, and nearly 60% of the perpetrators are over the age of 60.
The tragedy of the elderly killing the elderly" continues to be staged in Japanese society.
Killing his wife. Before killing his wife, Fujiwara Hiroshi lived in guilt for forty years.
Forty years ago, 37-year-old Teruko Fujiwara fainted at home due to a cerebral infarction, but Fujiwara Hiroshi happened to be away from home on a business trip.
Because she was not sent to the hospital in time, the left half of Teruko's body was paralyzed, and she was unable to take care of herself from then on, and she needed to be taken care of.
The doctor said that if the photo had been sent earlier, there would not have been such serious consequences.
The doctor also asked Fujiwara Hiroshi: "My wife is sick like this, didn't you notice it before?"”
Because of his own negligence, he ruined the rest of his wife's life, and Fujiwara Hiroshi was burdened with deep guilt.
He took care of his wife's daily life, changed her clothes and bathed, and decorated the balcony with various plants in order to make his bedridden wife happy.
In order to take care of his wife, he once quit his job and opened a convenience store, but after 10 years, the convenience store was not doing well, so he had to close the store and live on a pension with his wife.
But as he grew older, his patience was gradually worn out over the course of forty years due to the heavy workload of nursing care and his deteriorating physical condition.
The place of residence of Hiroshi Fujiwara and his wife
Teruko had a hard time getting in and out of the wheelchair, and once, Hiroshi Fujiwara tried to help his wife sit on the toilet, but her fell down, and he completely broke down and yelled at his wife.
On the other hand, he is also afraid that he and his wife will become a heavy burden to the children, and everything he has endured over the years will be repeated on the children.
A month before the crime, he tried to strangle his wife, but found that his strength was not enough to free her quickly, so he gave up.
One day in November, he drove his wife to the beach and pushed her into the sea with a wheelchair.
Location of the crime After being arrested, Fujiwara Hiroshi continued to reflect and repent:"I did something stupid. Now I can only pray for my wife, but this will not solve anything because she is no longer there. ”
At the same time, some sympathetic voices appeared on the Internet: "This is also too uncomfortable. I have taken care of my wife for 40 years, which is not half of my life. The husband carried the ...... alone”
Burden. In Japan, more than 5.5 million people need close care from relatives for various reasons.
Every caregiver has made up their mind at the beginning to take good care of their loved ones.
However, according to a survey conducted by NHK, 1 in 4 people who have ever been a caregiver have ever thought of killing the other person.
Caring for the elderly is like an extremely endurance marathon, and caregivers are always suffering both physically and mentally.
NHK investigated 44 caregiver killings and found that nearly half of those who killed their loved ones had severe sleep deprivation.
Sanae's mother is vegetative, and in order to take care of her, Sanae needs to get up at 4 a.m., feed her mother liquid food, change diapers, and suction, and feed her four times a day.
After going to bed at 10 p.m., she needs to turn her over every hour, as well as change diapers and suction, in order to prevent her from developing bedsores.
This process is constantly circulating, and after more than ten years of caring for her mother at home, Sanae has never had a good night's sleep and suffers from depression and neurasthenia.
Finally, she raised the murder weapon against her mother.
Nearly 30 percent of those who have to become caregivers are also in poor health, but they are forced to devote themselves to caregiving.
Compared with physical fatigue, the impact of nursing work on the soul is an important cause of tragedy.
During the long period of staying at home, many caregivers have drastic personality changes and even suffer from cognitive diseases.
A man's mother, who suffers from cognitive impairment, opens and closes the door of the cubicle every day, making the man sleep well and disturbing the neighbors.
The man tried to stop her, but to no avail.
In order to relieve his pressure, the man called his younger brother, who was unemployed and at home, to help take care of him.
My mother speaks all day long in words that no one understands, and for most of the day she is completely unable to communicate, and she acts in a way that no one can understand.
One night before the tragedy, my mother came out of the toilet with her pajamas and towels stained with feces.
In the end, he decided to kill his mother's younger brother, and even thought that it was not his mother, but a monster in his mother's clothes.
In the end, he killed his mother, not only to remove the source of his own pain, but also to free his mother.
Nursing homes were supposed to be a way out of their stress, but the high cost discouraged them.
Shigeru Kimura, 75, strangled his dementively impaired wife, Sachiko, with a towel, and before the tragedy, he had thought about sending her to a full-time care facility.
But his pension is only 100,000 yen per month, and the average institution spends 100,000 yen (about 5,000 yuan) per month, and the monthly cost of private nursing homes is as high as 20-300,000 yuan.
Even if you have enough money, it's hard to get a bed.
The head of one agency told him that there were currently more than 100 people waiting in line for a bed.
Shigeru Kimura could only continue to take care of himself, and a month later, tragedy struck.
The families at the bottom are already exhausted in life, and the family members who need to be cared for are likely to become the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
The curse of longevity.
In Japan, aging often means losing dignity.
Due to the problem of a declining birthrate (low fertility) and the longevity rate due to high medical standards, Japanese society has become old.
According to international standards, more than 7% of the population aged 65 and above is considered an aging society, more than 14% is a deep aging society, and more than 20% is called a super-aging society.
As of September this year, the proportion in Japan was close to 30 percent, and one in 10 people was over 80 years old.
In Japan, 60-year-olds are already considered "young people" and have become the mainstay of society, and in this situation, problems arise one after another.
A relatively meager pension is not enough to cover the high cost of living.
According to a report released by the Financial Services Agency of Japan in 2019, if a Japanese couple (65 years old for men and 60 years old for women) live for another 30 years after retirement, then in addition to pensions, they also need to have financial assets of 20 million yen (about 1.31 million yuan).
In other words, in addition to their pension, they need to have an additional income of 50,000 yen per month to support themselves.
In addition, the elderly can choose to receive a pension between the ages of 65 and 75, and the later they receive the pension, the higher the amount they get each month, which is equivalent to encouraging the elderly to receive a pension late in disguise.
But before that, Japan's elderly people had to work hard to support themselves.
65 years old is already an age to enjoy old age, but there are 9.12 million elderly people over the age of 65 in Japan who are still working.
Because of the deterioration of their physical functions, they can only do simple and not necessarily decent work in exchange for a small pay.
In Japan, it is common to see a gray-haired old lady standing in front of the cash register at a convenience store downstairs, disliked by customers because of her slow response.
Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism will also raise the upper age limit for taxi drivers to 80.
In Japan, when passengers take a taxi, they often find that the driver has gray hair and keeps apologizing because they can't move the passenger's luggage.
There is an elderly man, Mr. Yarata, who is 95 years old, but he still has to work as a cleaner at McDonald's.
He works four days a week, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., cleaning more than 80 seats in the store by himself.
It seems like a lot of work, but it's lucky to have a job to do.
Very poor elderly people, if they have no income for a while, even need to dig up wild vegetables on the side of the road to feed their stomachs.
In order to escape the "pension trap", some people choose to commit crimes on their own, hoping to be taken care of in prison.
Many old people are just surviving, and they are dying very miserably.
In Japan, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 10 men over the age of 65 are single.
They have no children, no one to take care of them, and at some point they are likely to lose their mobility and die quietly in the absence of any care.
In Japan, 27,000 people die alone every year, 80% of whom are over the age of 60.
A 75-year-old Japanese man died for a month without being found, and his room was full of bugs and flies on his windows.
The clean-up staff found a note beside him that read, "Administrator, please help me", but the note was never handed out of the house.
In Japan's super-aging society, even if you can die peacefully, you may not be able to afford to die.
There are few places in Japan and many people, and the price of cemeteries is constantly rising, and high-end cemeteries cost one million yen (about 40-450,000 yuan).
On the other hand, when the elderly over 80 years old pass away, most of the children are already in their fifties and sixties, and they do not have the energy to carry out a grand funeral.
In such a situation, all kinds of strange funerals emerge one after another.
Recently, the popular "balloon burial" is to fill the cremated ashes into the balloon, and when the balloon rises to an altitude of about 50 kilometers above the ground, it will be affected by the air pressure**.
In Japan, it is popular to "tree burial", in which the ashes are buried directly into the soil and a tree is planted around the burial of the ashes.
Sato Cemetery in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, has also launched a "shared cemetery", when the mourner activates the electronic tombstone with a "certificate" with Bluetooth function, the information of the deceased will be displayed on the screen, focusing on "rational use of land resources".
Working hard all day while alive and being undignified when dying may be the current situation faced by the elderly in Japan.
Japan's extreme "anti-Laos" rhetoric has also appeared frequently.
On Japanese social platforms, netizens left remarks such as "I am very willing to get rid of old pests" and "I hope that the old people will stop their cardiopulmonary activities at the moment of yelling".
Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso also "suggested" that the elderly should "die" if they are not cured.
Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University, even prescribed a "prescription" for Japan's aging society"In the end, it will depend on the collective suicide of the elderly and seppuku together. ”
The whole of Japanese society is in the midst of antagonism, gradually sliding deeper into the abyss.
As one of the longest-lived countries, the living conditions of the elderly in Japan are really worrying, and longevity seems to have become a curse.
The situation in Japan may be a mirror for all countries.
Eliminating the curse of longevity requires the concerted efforts of society as a whole to address the root causes.
After all, no matter how young a person is, there will be a day when he will be old, and this predicament is destined to make everyone have nowhere to escape.
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