Grief needs a ritual, not a discount. Japan's quietly building both
We need to talk about what 'jiko bukken' actually encodes, because it isn't irrationality — it's a society taking death seriously enough that buildings carry it. A home where someone died alone, the 'lonely death' the article names so gently, FEELS different to people. You can call that superstition, or you can call it grief with an address. Either way, mocking it fixes nothing.
What fixes things is what's emerging: rituals that let people move forward. A Shinto priest cleansing a house before new tenants arrive. Kachimode's overnight vigils — and look past the electromagnetic gadgets to what's underneath: someone sits with the house all night, bears witness, and formally declares it ready for new life. That's not pest control. That's a secular wake, with thermography. Humans have always needed ceremonies to hand spaces from the dead to the living; we just stopped providing them and called it efficiency.
The part that IS a solvable injustice: 9 million empty homes in a country where young people struggle for housing, and 'lonely deaths' common enough to have a name. The vacancy crisis and the loneliness crisis are the same crisis, holding hands.
So: community check-ins for isolated elders, so fewer homes gain the mark at all. Rituals — priest, professor or both — honoured as real housing policy. And every certified home offered first to someone who needs a start. Let the houses hold the living again. Sign the petition; the incense is optional but encouraged. There is always a petition.