Photo/Illutration An apartment in Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward where a 65-year-old man on welfare died alone (Taishi Sasayama)

A ward government official has been disciplined after leaving the body of an elderly man on welfare who died alone in his apartment in Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward there for more than two months before cremation.

The official, who was a case worker assigned to the 65-year-old man, was suspended from work for five days, the ward government said June 30.

“I put off disposing of the body because I had other work to do,” the official, who is in his 20s, was quoted as saying in a ward government investigation. “It became more difficult to bring the issue up as the days went by.”

Police sent his case to prosecutors in May on suspicion of abandoning a body. Prosecutors decided not to indict him in June.

His supervisor, who received a report about the man’s death from the official, also failed to confirm whether he had taken the necessary steps, such as burial procedures.

Kiyoto Nakazawa, chief of the ward’s welfare promotion division, said the ward government will improve checking systems.

“There is a major problem with an organization in which such a case occurs,” he said.

According to the ward’s announcement, a nursing care worker found the elderly man collapsed in his apartment, where he was living alone, on Jan. 10.

A doctor contacted by the caregiver confirmed his death and reported it to the ward government official on the same day.

An employee of a welfare equipment rental company who visited the man’s apartment on March 27 found his body still there.

When the body was taken out of his apartment, part of it had been skeletonized, sources said.

The ward government official took administrative action to end public assistance payments to the man in mid-February on the grounds that he was deceased.

His supervisor approved ending the payment without asking why the paperwork had taken so long after the man’s death or confirming whether the necessary steps had been taken.

Nakazawa said the supervisor apparently took it for granted that the man’s body had already been disposed of.

The ward government announced facts about the case after The Asahi Shimbun asked why they had not been released.

Keita Sakurai, an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University who is familiar with the public assistance program, said society as a whole needs to tackle the problem of solitary deaths of welfare recipients because they are expected to increase.

According to the welfare ministry, about 1.65 million households were on welfare as of March and about 55 percent comprised of only those 65 or older, or those 65 or older and children under 18 years.

Case workers, who are employed by local governments and work in their welfare offices, decide whether households are eligible for public assistance and provide support to recipients on their daily lives and employment.

Sakurai said case workers have to handle a wide range of duties when welfare recipients die alone, such as burial arrangements and searching for surviving relatives.

The Edogawa Ward official had less than one year of experience as a case worker when the elderly man died.

Sakurai said there is a problem if an inexperienced case worker was left alone to deal with the case, being unable to receive guidance and support from a supervisor.

Statistics indicate that case workers are overloaded in urban areas.

According to the Social Welfare Law, one case worker is generally assigned for every 80 households on welfare in urban areas and 65 households in rural areas.

However, the number of case workers fell short of standards in about 70 percent of the 107 municipalities covered by a welfare ministry survey conducted in fiscal 2019, including major ordinance-designated cities and Tokyo’s 23 wards.

(This article was written by Taishi Sasayama and Yosuke Takashima.)

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