TOKYO, Dec 12: The partially mummified body of an elderly man was found in shrubbery beside a big department store in the teeming Japanese city of Osaka after going unnoticed for nearly two months, police said Friday.

More than one million people a day pass by the small bed of trees and bushes outside the nine-storey store.

Normally people do not enter the stone-walled raised shrub plot, a spokesman for the Osaka Shinozaki police station said, trying to explain why the body had lain undiscovered for so long.—AFP