We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” says Noriko Shikama, 76. She lives alone in a flat Tokiwadaira, in Tokyo’s commuter belt and has come to the Iki Iki drop-in centre to catch up with residents over cups of coffee served by volunteers.

Here, amid the everyday discussions about the merits or otherwise of dyeing grey hair, people also share news about the latest lonely death, or kodokushi – officially defined as one in which “a person dies without being cared for by anyone, and whose body is found after a certain period”.

Almost 22,000 people in Japan died at home alone in the first three months of this year, according to a recent report by the national police agency, about 80% of them aged 65 or older. By the end of the year, the agency estimates that cases of solitary deaths will reach 68,000, compared with about 27,000 in 2011.

Tokiwadaira in the town of Matsudo was the first community forced to confront the distressing phenomenon two decades ago, with the discovery of a man whose corpse had been lying in his apartment unnoticed for three years. His rent and bills had been paid automatically, and his death was noticed only when his savings ran out.

“The economy was booming then, and families were desperate to live here. It was a lively place. But now everyone is getting old,” says Oshima, who moved to Tokiwadaira with her husband and young son in 1961, when the estate was home to 15,000 people.

Now, as Japan’s population continues to age, more people are spending the final years of their lives in isolation. The number of people over 65 living alone stood at 7.38 million in 2020 and is expected to rise to almost 11 million by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Single-person households account for almost 38% of total households, according to the 2020 census, a 13.3% rise from the previous survey conducted five years earlier.