No, a Japanese man wasn't crushed to death by his porn collection
The story does make for a very catchy headline: lonely Japanese man gets crushed to death by his six-ton porn magazine collection.
But that story is incorrect, as a look at Japanese media shows.
The Daily Mail ran the initial story with the headline "Porn really is bad for you! Lonely Japanese man who amassed a SIX-TON pile of dirty magazines died when it collapsed on top of him... and his body wasn't found for six months."
It went viral, for obvious, morbid reasons, and was picked up by Sky News Australia, The Mirror, The Toronto Sun, CBS Philly and LADBible among others.
However, the first report in the Japanese media, from Feb. 28, tells a different story.
A Japanese man in his 50s was indeed found dead in Kanagawa prefecture, according to Nikkan Spa. The man lived alone and had been dead for a month -- not six months -- before the body was found.
He indeed had a big porn collection and the body was found "covered" by the magazine clippings. But there's absolutely no evidence that he died because the pile of erotic magazines fell on top of him.
As the coroner said, the man had a heart attack and fell on top of his porn collection, where he was found one month later. Nothing points to him dying because of six tons of porn crushing on him.
"In order not to become a shame of the deceased, we try to dispose of adult toys in the room so that the bereaved families will not be aware of it," a man from a cleaning crew told Nikkan Spa.
In the first paragraph, the author of the story highlights the fact that many people that in Japan die alone and unnoticed -- a sadly common phenomenon known as "kodokushi" -- usually get discovered as the bodily fluids drip down the room below.
But in this case, the magazine absorbed the bodily fluids of the man's decomposing body.
Topics Porn
