The World was informed almost immediately when the oldest known person, Misao Okawa, who was  Japanese, died on Wednesday.

But in Japan, many of her elderly peers live alone and die alone. Without any one noticing. Literally.

In March, for example, the body of an elderly man was found on the floor of his apartment in downtown Tokyo. He had been dead for a month.

Neighbours hadn’t noticed the octogenarian’s absence. His bank made the rent payments on time, his family didn’t visit, and the only reason for the body’s discovery was the slight smell that troubled the tenant in the flat below.

In rapidly ageing Japan, more people are dying alone and unnoticed in a country of 127 million where one in four people is over 65. Looser family bonds play a role in their isolation.

For these so-called ‘lonely deaths’, families and landlords in Tokyo are increasingly turning to Hirotsugu Masuda and his clean-up crew to salvage apartments where bodies lie undiscovered for days or weeks.

Masuda says his crew’s services are required 3-4 times a week in summer when bodies decompose faster.

Masuda’s firm works almost exclusively with ‘lonely deaths’, charging between 81,000 yen ($676) and 341,000 yen ($2,845) depending on apartment size.

By the time Masuda’s team turns up, the police would have taken away the corpse. In one case though, body fluids had seeped into the floor. Flies buzzed around a cooker filled with rice. Old calendars and papers were strewn in rooms untouched for years.

Workers wearing protective gear sprayed the apartment with insect repellent, using gloved hands to pack the trash in boxes. Such exercises, which take six hours, are conducted discreetly to avoid upsetting the neighbours. The crew tells onlookers they are movers.

In a country where around 5 million elderly people live alone, the number of decaying bodies found in empty homes is expected to soar. Data shows victims are more likely to be male.

“There’s likely 40,000 of these cases and we think that in 10 years, it’s likely to go over 100,000 cases”, says Hideto Kone an official working in an NGO.

Victims forgotten by families are not given a funeral and their remains are interred in unmarked graves.