A woman in her 80s in Fukushima died of heat stroke due to sleeping without a fan or air conditioner

13 comments

1. Uhhh…it’s like 35 degrees every day. Not surprised.

2. Yeah, old people can be stubborn about that. My grandmother had an AC and wouldn’t turn it on even when it was 30+ outside

3. Tried sleeping with an open window and a fan last night.

   Couldn’t fall sleep after like an hour so I closed the window and put my ac on. I don’t remember lying down after.

4. Fukushima schools didn’t have AC until like 2019 where I lived. They were very slow on catching up with the rest of the country

5. I’m sure she is someone’s grandma and will be sorely missed, but this is pretty much Darwin Award territory, and I have trouble feeling sorry for dumb (usually older) people that do this.

   Yea old people can be stubborn but this is no different than old people that refuse to renounce their drivers licenses and cause car accidents. At least in this case there are no other victims…

6. My area is full of older people. Air cons are hardly ever running. The way people, in general, behave in the heat here is odd for me.

7. there are dumbasses spending hundreds of yen a day on bottles of OS-1 instead of turning their AC on for like a 100 yen a day.

8. Older people don’t like air conditioners and they don’t like fans.

9. Fukushima city is one of the hottest places in all Japan. But people still refuse to use a/c. In the summer, the sound of ambulance sirens is as common as the chirping of cicadas.
   However, I think the heat this year has caught a lot of people off guard. I’m taking a short trip in Tokyo rn, and it feels so much less oppressive here.

10. Does anyone know if it is as prevalent as a belief as it is in Korean that sleeping with a fan on is bad for your health? There might be a cultural aspect to the sadness of this case. Of course financial cost or just being used to not having a fan your entire life could be a reason as well. Very sad, but even worse is it is probably the start of a large amount of these for people who don’t have the means to have a fan on all the time or ability to turn it on to begin with.

    Heck I even recently was watching a news segment on how it can take like 1-3 years for elderly people in Japan to be put into full care homes once they have been diagnosed as needing the full time care. So that’s years of people suffering there.

11. Saving money > cooling down your home to safe levels

    Apparently.

12. To be fair, this temperature isn’t a problem for most of us. It’s just the young and the old who can’t properly regulate their temperature. If our air cons died, we probably won’t. It’s not apocalyptic, it’s just being too old or too young.

13. This says it would cost pensioners 17,800 yen over July and August to drink more water and turn on their aircon to avoid heatstroke. Some elderly are very poor and might balk at spending that. https://financial-field.com/living/entry-223486