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The story
On the morning of the 9th, a 74-year-old female worker repairing a chimney at an apartment building in Takikawa, Hokkaido, fell roughly 8 meters from the roof to the ground. She was taken to the hospital, where she was later confirmed dead. She had been wearing a helmet, but not a safety harness. On 5ch, the thread drew reactions of shock that elderly workers are still forced into high-altitude jobs, pointed out that Japanese law sets no upper age limit for such work, and discussed the Hokkaido-specific heating setup that explains why an apartment building would even have a chimney.
On the morning of September 9th in Takikawa, Hokkaido, a woman in her 70s working on the roof of an apartment building fell roughly 8 meters to the ground and was confirmed dead at the hospital she was taken to.
Just after 10 a.m. on the 9th, a female construction worker (74), a Takikawa resident, was working on the roof of a two-story apartment building in Nishi-machi, Takikawa, when she fell roughly 8 meters to the ground.
The woman (74) was taken to the hospital, where she was later confirmed dead.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Even I have to admit, what a rough country this is 😌
You never hear about him falling to his death from a chimney
It happens all the time
They find the bodies of dads dressed as Santa stuck in chimneys all over the West
That guy can use the flying technique (a reference to Dragon Ball's "Bukū-jutsu" levitation move), remember
Must've landed head-first
8 meters is about the height of a three-story house's roof, so that's actually pretty high
Re: #31
"Roof" includes the eaves too, so there is such a thing as working underneath the roof
Even just tripping and falling can kill you if you hit the wrong spot — that's how fragile humans are
Old people can take a horrific fall from just a small stumble indoors
Having a 74-year-old — a woman, no less — do this kind of work says a lot about whoever's in charge
Heizo Takenaka:
"People today will end up working until they're 90"
https://president.jp/articles/-/30182?page=1
W-well, she did have a helmet on, so…
The only legal restriction is that you can't be under 18.
There's no upper limit, so technically even a 115-year-old could do it.
By the way, if it's your own property and you're not classified as an employee, Labor Standards Act rules don't even apply.
don't most companies restrict it to under 65 or so through their own internal rules?
The generation that was raking it in is already dead
It's probably just the basic national pension (not a generous corporate one)
Is this the one?
I wonder if any of the laborers ever fell
The crazy part is they passed red-hot glowing metal hand-to-hand all the way up like this for riveting
There's no way they could get away with that today
Because all the other employees were women in their 80s…
Probably just a Hokkaido thing?
Since it's Hokkaido, heating often comes from something like a "Lumpen stove" (an old-style potbelly stove common there),
so maybe that's what the chimney's for?
Kind of like a central heating setup.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s Industrial Safety and Health regulations require a safety harness for any work done at a height of 2 meters or more, so the fact that she wasn’t wearing one may point to a regulatory violation. At the same time, there is no legal upper age limit for working at height itself — the only restriction under labor law bans workers under 18, leaving any age cap up to individual companies’ internal rules. The thread split between those questioning a labor environment that forces elderly people to keep doing fieldwork, and those blaming site management for letting her work without a harness. Some were also surprised an apartment building would have a chimney at all — that comes down to chimneys used for heating in cold regions like Hokkaido, a quirk of local housing rather than anything strange. Posts consisting of political arguments or baseless industry-bashing unrelated to the accident itself were excluded.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Hokkaido] 74-year-old female worker falls to death from 8 meters — was repairing chimney on apartment roof, wore helmet but no safety harness.”
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