Is there a way to ignore the ‘Unreachable statement’ error?

No. It’s a compile time error. So you must get rid of it before running your class.

What I usually do is put a fake if statement in front of it. Something like:

if(true)
    return;
// unwanted code follows. no errors.
i++;
j++;

With this code, you will not get a Unreachable statement error. And you will get what you want.