Man dies under six ton collection of Porn

[ArcaneGamer]

That...is terrible. That poor man. What a way to go. At least when I first heard of something like this happening, it was from a disgruntled wife. He died from dehydration, as well! http://1000waystodie.wikia.com/wiki/Pornicated

 

[Drathnoxis]

What I want to know is how the hell he managed to fund, let alone store, literally tons of porn while also being apparently a total shut-in loner. How do you manage such an equation? The "carmaker" part explains the financial aspect I guess, but if he had a day job, how the hell did his employer or coworkers not contact him? How much does one manga tankoubon weigh? A couple of hundred grams? What, was he collecting pictures of naked chicks engraved in lead slabs?

And one would think that his corpse would start to stink up the place after just a couple of weeks. Unless Japan's aparment complexes have really, really good wallproofing. Well, I guess without sunlight, air or natural decomposers the corpse just mummifies.

I'm going to do some calculations based off of a magazine I have lying around.

Issue 200 of Nintendo Power weighs approximately 250g. 6 metric tons of Nintendo Power would be 24 000 magazines while 6 imperial tons would be 21 786. The magazine is almost exactly 1/2 cm thick. My ceiling is 266 cm high (8' 8.7"), meaning I can fit a stack of 532 magazines high. The magazine is 26.5 cm long and my room is 275cm (9' 0.3"), I could fit 10 stacks lengthwise. The magazine is 20.5 cm wide and my room is 585 cm (19' 2.3"), I could fit 28 stacks widthwise.

Taken all together my room could hold 148 960 issues of Nintendo Power stacked floor to ceiling. That is over 37 metric tons!

 

[Wrex Brogan]

Who buys porn these days? Its all free on the internet, all the porn of all the types you could ever want.

Also, dead for 6 months. As someone who had to go and take a decomposing man from his home this afternoon, I can tell you that a dead person can get pretty whiffy after a short while. Did no one notice the smell? Decomposing flesh has a very distinct smell. Or are the Japanese just far too polite to mention that sort of thing?

To be fair, he was in Japan, and from what little I know of the place apparently physical porn is still quite popular. And of course, given he had six tons of the stuff, I'm imagining he was doing something beyond regular purchases with it all.

And while true, it's... surprising how often dead bodies don't get discovered for months or even years (hell there was a local story where a woman wasn't found for something like 5 years after the fact (automatic bill payments stopped people coming over to check), to the point she was just a skeleton when they found her). It's usually because a) not a lot of people recognize the smell of corpse, b) depending on the apartment/method of death the smell can really get locked in there so you only smell it on entry and c) how active the area is where they live - if nobody walks past the apartment on a regular basis, nobody's really going to notice what's gone on.

 

[FalloutJack]

Porn just got its first taste of blood. Now, it will be on the hunt...

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Also, dead for 6 months. As someone who had to go and take a decomposing man from his home this afternoon, I can tell you that a dead person can get pretty whiffy after a short while. Did no one notice the smell? Decomposing flesh has a very distinct smell. Or are the Japanese just far too polite to mention that sort of thing?

Modern apartments are pretty effective at compartmentalizing smells. We've had a few incidents of people being dead for months in their apartments in Sweden in the last few years and most of the time the neighbors haven't smelt anything or only the occasional faint whiff of bad odor. It isn't impossible, especially not in societies where neighbors don't routinely interact, like Sweden or Japan.

My money is on this being a made up story though. 6 tons of magazines amount to something in the vicinity of 15,000-25,000 individual magazines, depending on their weight. Even if we allow for something insane like buying 10 porno mags a month, this guy still has to collect for over a decade without ever getting rid of any of them.

Add to that the fact that the individual weight of a magazine is only some 150-300 grams and that you'd need, literally, hundreds of kilograms/pounds of magazines to fall on top of you and that your average floor to ceiling stack is only some 400-500 magazines (of which a third will be too low to fall on anything but your shin). Once these stacks fall, the magazines will separate and will not hit you as a collective force, but rather as many small magazines, so you are unlikely to fall, even if you stagger, as the magazines have less mass and density then you human body and will move aside when they hit you. So for this to actually be lethal you'd have to have several stacks fall at once, stacks both beside and behind one another, as to create the necessary force to overwhelm a human into falling onto the floor and then be unable to get up. We are talking something like a few thousand magazines that'd have to fall onto you in several, quick consecutive stacks so that their collective weight added up to over some 150kgs on your arms and chest alone. And that's assuming the magazines just don't fly off to the side once they hit you.

Did I just go too far in analyzing this?

 

[Baffle]

Anyone wondering how this could happen should try to grab an episode of The Hoarder Next Door.

 

[Bad Jim]

Couldn't it be because of the temperature being lower? The bodies will rot a lot slower and there will be less smell. Also it probably depends on the quality and age of the apartment.

Most apartments have a thing called a thermostat, so the body won't get really cold. However if it's cold there won't be an extractor fan making everyone outside aware of the situation.

 

[OreoDoublestuff]

Wait... There are apartments where they leave you alone for six months sans-rent? o_o

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Wait... There are apartments where they leave you alone for six months sans-rent? o_o

Automatic bill paying is a thing. As long as he has money in his account the rent automatically gets paid.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Also, dead for 6 months. As someone who had to go and take a decomposing man from his home this afternoon, I can tell you that a dead person can get pretty whiffy after a short while. Did no one notice the smell? Decomposing flesh has a very distinct smell. Or are the Japanese just far too polite to mention that sort of thing?

Modern apartments are pretty effective at compartmentalizing smells. We've had a few incidents of people being dead for months in their apartments in Sweden in the last few years and most of the time the neighbors haven't smelt anything or only the occasional faint whiff of bad odor. It isn't impossible, especially not in societies where neighbors don't routinely interact, like Sweden or Japan.

My money is on this being a made up story though. 6 tons of magazines amount to something in the vicinity of 15,000-25,000 individual magazines, depending on their weight. Even if we allow for something insane like buying 10 porno mags a month, this guy still has to collect for over a decade without ever getting rid of any of them.

Add to that the fact that the individual weight of a magazine is only some 150-300 grams and that you'd need, literally, hundreds of kilograms/pounds of magazines to fall on top of you and that your average floor to ceiling stack is only some 400-500 magazines (of which a third will be too low to fall on anything but your shin). Once these stacks fall, the magazines will separate and will not hit you as a collective force, but rather as many small magazines, so you are unlikely to fall, even if you stagger, as the magazines have less mass and density then you human body and will move aside when they hit you. So for this to actually be lethal you'd have to have several stacks fall at once, stacks both beside and behind one another, as to create the necessary force to overwhelm a human into falling onto the floor and then be unable to get up. We are talking something like a few thousand magazines that'd have to fall onto you in several, quick consecutive stacks so that their collective weight added up to over some 150kgs on your arms and chest alone. And that's assuming the magazines just don't fly off to the side once they hit you.

Did I just go too far in analyzing this?

He could have been a collector, buying people's old porn collections would be a cheap way of accruing thousands of magazines.

And maybe he had them in boxes and not just stacked loose. A couple of boxes of magazines would have considerably more crushing potential than a stack.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

He could have been a collector, buying people's old porn collections would be a cheap way of accruing thousands of magazines.

And maybe he had them in boxes and not just stacked loose. A couple of boxes of magazines would have considerably more crushing potential than a stack.

I am not saying it is impossible for it to happen, just that it seems very, very unlikely that anything like this could have happened in the way described in the article. If the magazines were in boxes, bundled with rope or otherwise held together they would suddenly have more mass and thus transfer more force.

The pictures in the article (which are supposedly taken on site) clearly show unbundled magazines. The idea that he died of a heart attack and fell into a stack of magazines seems slightly more possible, but the article seems to stray away from that explanation on purpose.

 

[Drathnoxis]

He could have been a collector, buying people's old porn collections would be a cheap way of accruing thousands of magazines.

And maybe he had them in boxes and not just stacked loose. A couple of boxes of magazines would have considerably more crushing potential than a stack.

I am not saying it is impossible for it to happen, just that it seems very, very unlikely that anything like this could have happened in the way described in the article. If the magazines were in boxes, bundled with rope or otherwise held together they would suddenly have more mass and thus transfer more force.

The pictures in the article (which are supposedly taken on site) clearly show unbundled magazines. The idea that he died of a heart attack and fell into a stack of magazines seems slightly more possible, but the article seems to stray away from that explanation on purpose.

Yeah, that's probably more likely. I never looked at the picture.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

And thus we see the logical end to a hoarding story play out. Invest in shelves, let this be a warning...

 

[Thaluikhain]

http://gizmodo.com/that-viral-story-about-a-japanese-man-crushed-to-death-1792986533?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

So, yeah, may or may not be as true as people may or may not have thought.

 

[Sarge034]

I guess we finally know how much a "metric fucktonne" is...

Odd he'd have so much physical porn though, oh well.

 

[Sarge034]

>Edit, double post

 

[Callate]

Who buys porn these days? Its all free on the internet, all the porn of all the types you could ever want.

Japan seems to have something of an aversion to online shopping, and favors "brick-and-mortar" stores. It's still incredibly common to pay for most things in cash.

Also, Japan seems to have more tightly enforced laws about copyright infringement, with steeper penalties that are more difficult to evade, so there isn't quite the same array of "tube sites" that are, erm, "enjoyed" in the United States.

Furthermore, it isn't difficult to buy erotic materials from stores that also feature mostly innocuous goods, and most stores wrap every purchase in multiple layers of bags and wrapping, so it would be relatively easy to discretely build up a surplus of pornography over time without anyone knowing.