"I killed my son."
On the evening of June 28, 2020, police in Seto City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, received an alarm call.
The police immediately dispatched.
Subsequently, the 84-year-old woman Kobayashi Mariko confessed everything to the police.
"I strangled him while he was drunk and asleep."
In Japan, such cases of child killing are endless. In addition, it is not uncommon to kill fathers and mothers.
In 2019, Hideaki Kumazawa, a 76-year-old retired japanese official, stabbed his son to death with a kitchen knife;
In 2019, a man in his 40s in Fukuoka City killed his mother after pushing her to the ground and subsequently committed suicide;
……
Repeated cannibalism has even become a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, but the key to unlocking the truth points to two words:
Live together.
We always think that when we are old, we can have family around, so we can be at ease and guaranteed.
However, in Japan, the result of parents and children living together is often to fall into the abyss of bankruptcy together, and even to stage the tragedy of family destruction.
Everything is there to follow.
NHK Special Materials Group takes materials from the situation of the elderly living with their children, excavates the crisis caused by two generations living together, and shows us this phenomenon in detail in the book "Bankruptcy of the Elderly and the Last Generation".
Although the story takes place in Japan, the sense of helplessness that runs through the book is like a sharp knife, penetrating the shackles of time and space, and piercing straight into the heart of my Chinese reader.
I believe that every reader who finishes reading this book will be tempted to ask in their hearts:
Will their yesterday be our tomorrow?
"Countercurrent"
84-year-old Mariko Kobayashi has always had a heart disease:
After his son lost his job in middle age, he has been "nibbling on the old" at home.
Not only that, but the son of the "nibbling old" is always drunk, and he has to fight with her every time he finishes drinking.
Under the multiple pressures of economy, body and mind, Ma Lizi's motherly love nature is consumed day by day.
Finally, Mariko, who couldn't bear it, killed her own son.
One night last summer, looking at her son who was once again drunk and lying down, she gently went into the living room and took out the wires that had been prepared...
According to a survey in "The Bankruptcy of the Last Two Generations", nearly half of the people who live with their parents have unstable incomes, and 21% have no income at all.
In the early 1990s, after the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, the economy went backwards and entered a "job-seeking ice age".
Japan's economy, which has been sluggish, was hit hard again by the 2008 financial crisis, with unemployment at an all-time high of 5.7 percent.
Japan's economy has been in a slump for 30 years.
In April 2015, the NHK Special Materials Team interviewed the Kakegawa family.
After graduating, mr. and Mrs. Kakegawa's son worked for an IT-related company in Tokyo.
At that time, my son rented a house alone in Tokyo and lived an ordinary office life.
However, when the son was in his thirties, he was suddenly laid off by the company.
After returning home, his son was mentally weak and did not interact with people, and fell into a "cocoon dwelling" state.
According to the survey, in 2010, the number of "cocoon dwellers" in Japan was 236,000, rose to 541,000 in 2015, and exceeded 1 million in 2018.
Later, under the persuasion of Mrs. Kakegawa, his son began to improve after nearly a year of "cocoon residence" and began to work as a newspaper distributor.
But his income was simply not enough to support an independent life, and he remained dependent on his parents until he was 38.
The daughter of the Kakegawa couple is 36 years old, and the situation is not better than that of the brother. She never left her home and has been working odd jobs in supermarkets.
The Kakegawa couple is very worried about the future, the pension is already very small, and it is still being lowered every year.
< Source: Report of the Financial Commission Working Group >
"If it's just our couple in the house, there should be no problem in maintaining life." However, something like this is not enough. ”
As a result, the sixty-eight-year-old Mr. Kakegawa could only continue to work.
The case of the Ukegawa family is not unique.
In Japan, when children go to work in big cities when they are young, they are unemployed in middle age, and many people return home to "eat old age" on the pretext of taking care of their parents.
This has long since become a "countercurrent phenomenon".
Behind this is the continuous downturn in the Japanese economy since the bubble economy, and the serious aging of the entire society.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="101" > one person gets old and two generations go bankrupt</h1>
In the Japanese diaper market, there is a unique phenomenon: the proportion of adult diapers is surprisingly high.
In 2015, Japan's total production of adult diapers was 6.993 billion pieces, and sales were 180 billion yen – almost equal to the baby diaper market.
It is the elderly who use adult diapers in large quantities.
Since the 1990 recession, Japan's aging ratio has skyrocketed like a rocket.
The long-term downturn in economic development and the serious aging of birthrates (low birth rate, high aging) have made the pressure on pension financial expenditure increase sharply.
In 1970, pension expenditures accounted for 24.3 percent of total social security spending; in 2016, this share rose to 46.5 percent.
To alleviate this pressure, in 2021, Japan's retirement age will be delayed from 65 to 70.
As a result, in Japan, taxi drivers, delivery workers, and dishwashers who have reached the age of hanagi can be seen everywhere.
Ageing also brings with it a new social problem: caregiving is difficult.
The growth rate of the elderly in Japan is far faster than the construction of nursing institutions. The shortage of nursing institutions and caregivers, coupled with the continuous increase in the cost of nursing care, children who should have focused on their careers have to personally undertake the task of caring for the elderly.
According to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the number of people who quit their jobs or change jobs due to nursing care reached 100,000 every year.
But once the children quit their jobs or changed to temporary jobs, the family's expenses had to rely on the pension of the elderly.
From this, a strange phenomenon arises:
One person grows old, two generations go bankrupt.
In "The Bankruptcy of the Old Generations", Yoshiko Tanaka's father is bedridden due to cerebral infarction and unable to act on his own.
At first, she wanted her father to be admitted to a nursing home, but after learning that "it costs nearly 200,000 yen a month," she decided to let her father be cared for at home.
She applied for two hours of on-site care a day.
In order to pay for medical expenses and nursing expenses, she worked part-time while caring for her father.
She delivered newspapers every morning and evening, worked in the middle of the night while her father was sleeping, and although she was exhausted every day, she could not guarantee that her father would be cared for every moment.
Once, Yoshiko went out to work as usual, and the applied caregiver was still a few hours away from the agreed door-to-door time.
In just a few short hours, my father fell ill and died, and no one was around before he died.
This made Yoshiko blame herself to this day.
The caregiving problems brought about by Japan's aging, such as a large knife hanging over the heads of two generations, this invisible pressure, may eventually lead to a series of tragedies.
Between 2007 and 2014, there were 371 homicides caused by "caregiver fatigue" in Japan, an average of 1 per 8 days.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="153">✎✎✎</h1>
At the end of the book "The Bankruptcy of the Old Generations", it is written:
The problem of "two generations losing both" has raised a variety of problems on the front lines of labor and caregiving in the last decade. In the future, Japan, which has fewer birthrates and is becoming more and more seriously aging, will surely have new problems with the changes of the times.
Some time ago, my mother had an operation for "lumbar disc herniation with sciatica", stayed in the hospital for 10 days before and after, and went home to stay in bed for three months.
In my opinion, it is a very common disease, but I did not expect to spend nearly 140,000 medical expenses.
In 2018, the father-in-law of a middle-aged man in Beijing was admitted to the ICU step by step because of a small flu. In the face of the high expenditure of the ICU and artificial lungs, he calculated that even if he sold all the wealth management products, stocks, and pension money of his parents-in-law, he could only support 30-40 days.
If all the savings are used for an uncertain outcome, what will happen to the whole family in the future?
Eventually, my father-in-law's condition deteriorated and he died. And that large amount of treatment costs also hollowed out the family foundation.
In the face of the ordinary flu, the middle class in a first-tier city can go bankrupt overnight: only when something happens, will it be found that the family's ability to withstand the impact is so vulnerable.
Back to myself. Because of health insurance, the actual cost of my mother's surgery was more than 30,000 yuan. That didn't put us in bankruptcy.
But during the 10 days in the hospital, my sick mother was always paying attention to how much money the family paid because of her illness.
She didn't want to make herself a financial burden for her family.
As a child, it is natural to do her best to treat, just let the mother not think too much.
For a while, the two of us ran between the company and the hospital every day.
One day, I was running in the hospital to go through the formalities, pay fees, and buy things, busy until 5 p.m., and then rushed to pick up the child, and the mother could only be cared for by the nurse she asked. When I got home, I casually pulled a few mouthfuls of food and took my children to write homework. When the child finished his homework, he wanted to go to bed after washing, then looked at the work messages on the mobile phone, opened the computer again, and wrote until 2 o'clock at night...
Like everyone else, in addition to the family identity of my children and parents, I also have a social identity that cannot be discarded - a worker.
After my mother was discharged from the hospital, I was very uneasy and wanted to take care of my mother as much as possible. But thinking about the trouble he caused to his colleagues during his leave, he could only return to work immediately.
Ten days of hectic work have passed, but if you think about it, I was able to get through this stage only because my mother's illness was not yet enough to require 24/7 care.
This makes me wonder:
If my mother really needs 24/7 care, can I still keep my job?
If one day I also hit middle-aged unemployment, how should I cope with life?
If one day in the future, my child is still repeating my current life, what will be the way I get along with him?
Will there be another cycle between him and his children?
Written by: Yi Yi
Edit: Mediterranean crab
Editor-in-Chief: Ono
Source: "Hard Labor Train", "Unenterprising Tamako", "Shrinking Japan: Tackling a Worker Shortage", "5mm", "Divorce Activity", "Family Suffering", partly from the Internet
Part of the references: [1] In 2018, the output of Japanese diapers was 23.479 billion pieces of aging, and the adult diaper market space is vast, and the industry information network continues to be aggravated
[2] Pension alone is not enough to retire, 20 years need 13 million yen savings, Nippon into Japan
[3] Japan Pension Game in Trouble, Ding Yingshun [4] Beijing Youth under the Flu
Today's Recommendation ➠ "The Bankruptcy of the Old Generations"
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