While many people have wrung their hands over the proliferation of online pornography and its social impact, say this for it: Porn won’t crush you to death next to your kitchen sink.
Yet
that's the unhappy fate of a 50-year-old Japanese man, identified only as Joji, who was apparently crushed to death by his own collection of pornographic magazines
next to his kitchen counter sometime last year. Coroners believe the pile of magazines, weighing over six tons, collapsed on him around six months ago, — but his body was only discovered
last week.
His landlord finally forced open the door to his apartment to find out what had happened to him.
Japanese news media got the porn-slay scoop from an employee of a cleaning
company hired to cart off the pornos in secret, in order to shield the man’s family from embarrassment. (That ship has sailed).
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Various gruesome details, not fit for publication in a
family industry newsletter, would suggest the man was indeed crushed to death by the magazines – rather than, say, having a heart attack and pulling the pile down on him.
The anonymous
cleaner added that every single surface in the man’s apartment was covered with stacks of porno, which altogether weighed in at 13,228 pounds.
Setting aside all the bad jokes about the
wages of sin already inspired by the story, on a serious note, this case is another cautionary tale about the dangers facing hoarders, who suffer a recognized mental illness, or more accurately, one
of several diagnosable conditions, with real attendant physical
dangers.
(They’re even more likely to meet a grim end because many are socially marginal, with scant contact with the outside world.)
For some reason, print media is a favorite item for hoarding. In some cases, massive piles of newspapers and magazines have actually triggered structural collapses, killing hoarders when the floors of their houses gave way.