“This is, after all, shameful for me,” he said of the $930 he receives monthly.

In response to the deaths of the first two men, the city this spring made applications available inside interview rooms, though it is still expected that the interviewer hands out the form. It stopped short of placing them next to other forms by reception desks. But a policy of removing recipients from the rolls as quickly as possible went unchanged. The diarist, a former taxi driver, qualified last December after receiving diagnoses of diabetes, high blood pressure and a bad liver brought on by alcohol abuse. He lived in a dilapidated row house whose walls and roof had partly collapsed. Electricity and gas had been cut off.

According to city documents, the man’s case worker began pressing him to find a job within weeks of his receiving benefits. Tadashi Inagaki, a professor at the University of Kitakyushu who is leading a committee to investigate the three deaths, said the case worker’s goal, in keeping with the welfare office’s practice, was to get the man off welfare within six months.

Image The shack where a 52-year-old man starved in Kitakyushu. One man has died in each of the last three years in the city after losing or being refused welfare benefits. Credit... Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Three months after he started receiving benefits, the man signed a form saying he no longer needed welfare. The city said it was voluntary, but an entry in his diary belies that. Writing that he was about to start looking for work, he added: “I was just about to give it a try when they cut me off. Are they telling the needy to die as quickly as possible?”

Takaharu Fujiyabu, a former case worker here who is now a lecturer at the University of Kitakyushu, said the city’s 142 case workers, each handling 73 recipients, must remove five a year from welfare. Promotions are tied to the quota, he added.

Mr. Misaki, the head of the welfare section, said that the link to promotions existed about 15 years ago but added they were no longer tied. He said the quotas would be eliminated next year.

In his first year as a case worker, Mr. Fujiyabu recalled, a woman in her 50s, smelling of alcohol, asked for assistance. “I was told by my supervisor, ‘You know, don’t you think someone like that is better off dead?’”