Word: deadness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once left for dead, even by some of its leaders, the Republican Party has come roaring back into competition. The stakes are high in November; national opinion surveys show a two-percentage point GOP edge, and some polls even suggest that the Republicans could retake the Senate. Obama’s approval ratings have fallen by 24 percent in less than a year, in spite of having achieved his top legislative priority and overseeing a successful stabilization of the banking industry. Yes, the American people do tend to check their leaders by issuing them losses in midterm elections, but Obama?...
...works, but not everyone regards his service as a good thing. Several hundred years ago, the Japanese witnessed death regularly, with bodies buried by family members and samurai displaying severed heads in public. These days, such moments are rare. Such ceremonies would give "an opportunity to think about the dead person," says Masaki Ichinose, a University of Tokyo philosopher and head of the university's Institute of Death and Life Studies, founded in 2002 to encourage more national conversation on death...
...1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn't any family to call on. So Yoshida started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse...
...Building a business around the dead, as Yoshida has, is an unglamorous and oft-maligned profession, as depicted in Departures, the Japanese film that won an Oscar last year for Best Foreign Film, which follows an unemployed cellist who takes a job getting corpses ready for funerals. "The film has created interest in this profession," says Ichinose, "but most people still tend to avoid the topic...
...Ichinose speculates that the kodokushi trend might be connected to Japan's contemporary cultural habit of ignoring death, and a possible avenue of research for the Institute of Death and Life Studies. "I don't know why," he says, "but people don't want to see a dead body and, in general, they don't want to talk about death...