Norimitsu Onishi, The Times’s Johannesburg bureau chief, talks about the evolution of his story on the lonely deaths of the elderly in Japan.
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Readers widely lauded the recent story on the lonely deaths of elderly Japanese people by Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times’s Johannesburg bureau chief who was born in Japan. His essay is part of “The End” series, which looks at how we die and what it tells us about how we live.
In dozens of the story’s nearly 400 comments, people thanked Nori for his “ profoundly moving piece ” and expressed their approval for examining the issue through the lens of two people who live alone in a danchi, a sprawling government apartment complex, outside Tokyo.
