Six of the ten elderly people who died in a fire in a Gunma Prefecture nursing care facility last March had been sent to the facility by the Sumida Ward welfare office. Since the fire, the press has talked a lot about this practice of sending poor old people out of cities, where they can’t afford public facilities, to rural areas where the land values and thus the facilities themselves are cheaper. The Tokyo government has carried out an investigation into how to solve this problem, and they’ve come up with an idea.

The Tokyo government wants to increase the number of single rooms in so-called “care houses” by 2,400. Care houses are privately run housing complexes where single seniors–meaning people over 60 years of age–live by themselves. The facilities have baths and serve meals. The Tokyo government has found that rent for these care houses is prohibitively expensive since land agency regulations state that each room of a care house must be at least 20 square meters. The Tokyo government estimates that a 20 square meter room costs about ¥180,000, which is beyond the means of the government itself if it is footing the bill for indigent seniors. So they have asked the land ministry to reduce the minimum standard to 7 square meters, which is the size of a 4.5-tatami room. This, the government estimates, would cost about ¥100,000. In other words, you pay about half for a room that is only one-third as big.

As of 2007 there were only 259 care houses in all of Japan comprising 86,000 resident seniors. Fifty were in Tokyo.