Tokudane!, the Japanese morning television show, cut to a commercial break. Women in grape suits danced to a pulsing electronic beat. Animated bunnies clipped a toupee onto an astounded man’s head. Tokudane! returned and the hosts introduced the next segment, which began with a white-robed monk praying in a temple. There were flowers and incense; he appeared to be presiding over a funeral.
The temple was crammed with distraught mourners. The image pulled back to reveal the altar and the source of all this sorrow—nineteen robotic dogs. The camera zoomed in on their broken paws and snapped-off tails. I watched the TV at the hotel breakfast buffet in rapt attention, eating fried eggs shaped like hearts.
Electronics giant Sony released the Aibo (“companion” in Japanese) in 1999. The three-and-a-half-pound robocanine had the ability to learn and respond based on its owner’s commands. Adorable and charming, the Aibo also barked, sat, and mimicked peeing. Their owners claimed the pups helped combat loneliness and health issues. Sony discontinued the Aibo in 2006, but promised to keep making repairs. Then, in 2014, they discontinued repairs as well, a harsh mortality lesson for the owners of the roughly 150,000 Aibos sold. A cottage industry of robotic vets and online grief support forums sprang up, culminating in funerals for Aibos tragically beyond repair.
Once the Tokudane! segment ended, I headed into Tokyo full of heart-shaped eggs to meet my interpreter, Emily (Ayako) Sato. She had suggested we meet at the statue of Hachikō in the Shibuya railway station. Hachikō is a national hero in Japan. Hachikō was also a dog (a real one). In the 1930s he would meet his owner, an agriculture professor, at the rail station each day after work. One day, the professor never came to meet Hachikō; he had died of a brain hemorrhage. Undeterred, Hachikō returned to the station every day for the next nine years, when his own death halted the ritual. Dogs are a solid meeting point from a cross-cultural perspective. Everyone respects a devoted canine.
Sato-san was waiting when I arrived, a woman in late middle age who did not look a day over forty. She wore a power pantsuit and sensible walking shoes. “My secret is walking ten thousand steps each day.” I almost lost her several times as we descended into the labyrinthine bowels of the Shibuya station, swept up in the throngs of Tokyo’s well-dressed denizens. “Perhaps I need to hold up one of those flags that tour group leaders carry, with a skull on it, just for you,” she grinned.
After two turnstiles, three staircases, and four escalators, we reached our platform. “We’re safer down here from earthquakes,” Sato-san announced. This wasn’t a non sequitur. Just that day there had been a 6.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast. I couldn’t speak to anyone in Tokyo without them referencing the psychological impact of the 2011 earthquake, with its subsequent tsunami that roared through northeast Japan and killed more than 15,000 people.
On the subway platform, sliding glass barriers separated the riders from the rails below. “Those barriers are somewhat new,” Sato-san explained. “For one thing they prevent”—she lowered her voice—“the suicides.” Japan’s rate of death by suicide is one of the highest in the developed world. Sato-san continued, “Unfortunately, the workers have become very efficient in cleaning up the train suicides, collecting the body parts and whatnot.”
In the Judeo-Christian view—and thus, the dominant Western view—to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5.)
The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It’s viewed as a selfless, even honorable act. The samurai introduced the practice of seppuku, literally “cutting the abdomen,” self-disembowelment by sword to prevent capture by the enemy. In World War II, nearly 4,000 men died as kamikaze pilots, turning their planes into missiles and crashing into enemy ships. Apocryphal but famous legends tell of the practice of ubasute, where elderly women were carried on their sons’ backs into the forest to be abandoned in times of famine. The woman would stay dutifully put, succumbing to hypothermia or starvation.
Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a “suicide culture.” But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than about fascination with mortality itself. Furthermore, “foreign scholars can look at statistical numbers on suicide, but they will not understand the phenomenon,” argues writer Kenshiro Ohara. “Only Japanese people can understand the suicide of the Japanese.”
For me, observing death in Japan was like gazing through the looking glass: everything familiar but distorted. Like America, Japan is a developed nation, where funerals and cemeteries are big business. Large funeral corporations play a sizable role in both Western and Japanese markets. Their pristine facilities are staffed by professional death workers. If that were the whole story, it would have made no sense for me to visit. But that is not the whole story.
KOUKOKUJI BUDDHIST TEMPLE, a seventeenth-century building tucked away off a quiet street in Tokyo, is home to a modest cemetery, with aged headstones representing generations of families that have come to worship here. A black and white cat lounged on the stone path. We stepped out of modern Tokyo and into a Miyazaki movie. Yajima jūshoku (jūshoku means head priest or monk) emerged to greet us, an affable man in a brown robe with close-cropped white hair and glasses.
In contrast to his archaic surroundings, Yajima jūshoku is a man of new ideas, specifically, how to memorialize cremated remains (my kind of guy). Funeral directors in the United States blanch with fear at the thought of a national “cremation culture,” which would undercut profit margins in embalming and casket sales. In reality, we have no idea what a homogenous “cremation culture” might look like. But the Japanese do. They have a cremation rate of 99.9 percent—the highest in the world. No other country even comes close (sorry, Taiwan: 93 percent; and Switzerland: 85 percent).
The emperor and empress were the final holdouts, still choosing full body burial. But several years ago, Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko announced they would also be cremated, breaking with four hundred years of royal burial tradition.
When Koukokuji Temple reached capacity, the priest Yajima could have invested in an old-fashioned cemetery space. Instead, seven years ago he built the Ruriden columbarium. (Columbaria are separate buildings for storing cremated remains.) “Buddhism has always been state-of-the-art,” he explained. “It is quite natural to use technology alongside Buddhism. I see no conflict at all.” With that, he showed us through the doors of the complex’s newest hexagonal building.
We stood in the darkness while Yajima punched something into a keypad at the entrance. Moments later, two thousand floor-to-ceiling Buddhas began to glow and pulse a vivid blue. “Woooaahhh,” Sato-san and I bleated in unison, stunned and delighted. I had seen photographs of Ruriden, but to be surrounded, 360 degrees, by the luminous Buddhas was overwhelming.
Yajima opened a locked door, and we peeked behind the Buddha walls at six hundred sets of bones. “Labeled to make it easy to find Miss Kubota-san,” he smiled. Each set of cremated remains corresponded to a crystal Buddha on the wall.
When a family member comes to visit Ruriden, they either type in the name of the deceased or pull out a smart card with a chip, similar to the cards used on Tokyo’s subways. After the family keys in at the entrance, the walls light up blue, except for one single Buddha shimmering clear white. No need to squint through names trying to find Mom—the white light will guide you straight to her.
“All of this evolved,” said Yajima. “For example, we started with a touch pad, where you type in your family member’s name. One day I saw a very old woman struggling to type a name in, so that’s when we got the smart cards. She just had to tap the card and can immediately find her dead person!”
Yajima headed back to the keypad controller, and instructed us to stand in the center of the room. “The autumn scene!” he announced, and the formation of Buddhas turned yellow and brown with shifting red patches, like piles of freshly fallen leaves. “Winter scene!” and the Buddhas turned to snowdrifts of light blue and white. “Shooting star!” and the Buddhas turned purple as white spots jumped from Buddha to Buddha, like a stop-motion animation of the night sky.
The majority of columbaria leave no room for innovation. Their design is the same the world over. Endless rows of granite walls, where ashes reside behind the etched names of the dead. If individuality is a priority, you may be allowed to affix a small picture, a stuffed bear, or a bouquet of flowers.
This LED light show could have been a Disney production, but there was something in the sophisticated design of the lights that made it feel as though I were being swaddled in a Technicolor womb.
“The afterlife of Buddhism is filled with treasures and light,” Yajima explained.
Religious scholars John Ashton and Tom Whyte described the Pure Land (the celestial realm of East Asian Buddhism) as “decorated with jewels and precious metals and lined with banana and palm trees. Cool refreshing ponds and lotus flowers abound and wild birds sing the praises of the Buddha three times a day.”
In designing Ruriden, Yajima was creating “an afterlife along the path of Buddha.”
The Buddha lights weren’t always this elaborate. One of the early visitors to the new facility at Ruriden was a light designer, and she volunteered to create the scenes from different seasons. “At first, the lights looked like a Las Vegas show!” Yajima laughed. “This is not a toy, I said! Too much! We canceled that. As natural as possible, I said. The work is still happening to create that atmosphere, as natural as possible.”
Yajima invited us for tea inside the temple and offered me a stool, brought out for visiting foreigners. He believed I couldn’t endure sitting cross-legged on the floor mats for the duration of tea and conversation. I assured him I absolutely could. (I couldn’t. My legs fell painfully asleep within the first three minutes.)
I asked Yajima why he had designed Ruriden the way he did, and his response was impassioned. “We had to act, we had to do something. Japan has fewer children. Japanese people are living longer. The family is supposed to look after your grave, but we don’t have enough people to look after everyone’s grave. We had to do something for those people left behind.”
A FULL QUARTER of Japan’s population is over the age of sixty-five. That, combined with a low birthrate, has caused Japan’s population to shrink by one million people in the last five years. Japanese women have the longest life expectancy in the world; Japanese men have the third longest. More importantly, their “healthy life expectancy” (not just old, but old and independent) is the longest for both genders. As the population ages, the need for nurses and caregivers is swelling. People in their seventies are caring for people in their nineties.
My interpreter, Sato-san, knows this well. She herself is responsible for the care of six people—her parents, her husband’s parents, and two uncles. All are in their mid-eighties or early nineties. A few months ago, her great aunt died at one hundred and two.
This army of the elderly (the “silver market”) worked their whole lives, saved money, and had few if any children. They have money to burn. The Wall Street Journal said that “one of Japan’s hottest business buzzwords has become ‘shūkatsu’ or ‘end of life,’ referring to the explosion of products and services aimed at people preparing for their final years.”
Revenues in the Japanese death industry have increased by 335 billion yen (3 billion US dollars) since the year 2000. A company called Final Couture markets designer shrouds and specialized photographers create end-of-life portraits to be displayed at funerals.
People show up years in advance to purchase their Buddhas at Ruriden. Yajima encourages them to visit often and pray for others, and thereby face their own death. When they die, “they will be welcomed by the people who went to Buddha before you.”
Then there are those who do not plan ahead, who have no close family. Their bodies leave dismal reddish-brown outlines on carpets or bedspreads when they are not found for weeks or months after death. They are victims of Japan’s epidemic of kodokushi, or “lonely deaths”: elderly people who die isolated and alone, with no one to find their bodies, let alone to come pray at their graves. There are even specialized companies hired by landlords to clean what is left behind after a kodokushi.
When Yajima built Ruriden, he “thought of the man who doesn’t have any children and says, ‘What will I do, who will pray for me?’ ”
Each morning, Yajima enters Ruriden and punches in the day’s date. That morning he punched in May 13. Several Buddhas glowed yellow, representing the people who had died on that day. Yajima lit incense and prayed for them. He remembers them, even if there is no family left to do so. For an elderly man or woman with no remaining family, the glowing Buddhas at Ruriden will act as their afterlife community.
Yajima jūshoku may be a powerful priest, but he is also a designer. “When I pray, I also think about creating. How do we create something new, filled with dazzling light? How do we create new Buddhas?”
For him, the act of prayer is essential to creativity. “Every time I pray, the different ideas pop up. . . . I’m not a man who sits at a desk to create a plan. It’s all while I’m praying.”
What if Ruriden fills up with ashes? “If it fills up then I will consider a second or third.” Yajima smiled. “I’m already thinking of them.”
IN THE EARLY twentieth century, Japan’s privately operated crematories were (at least in the eyes of the press) dens of iniquity. The men who operated the crematories were rumored to steal gold teeth from the dead. Even stranger, they were said to steal body parts, which were then processed into medicines purported to cure syphilis. The machines still burned wood instead of gas, which made the process a lengthy one. The family had to leave the crematory and return home while the body burned overnight. Historian Andrew Bernstein explained that “as a precaution against the theft of body parts, gold teeth, jewelry, or articles of clothing, mourners were given keys to the individual ovens, which they had to bring back to the crematory to recover the bones and ashes,” like lockers at a bus station.
The Mizue Funeral Hall, founded as a public crematory in 1938, introduced a more modern approach. The machines used fuel, allowing the families to handle everything in one day (no keys necessary). Advocates argued that crematories should be rebranded “funeral centers” and placed in gardenlike settings as a form of “aesthetic management.” Eighty years later, the Mizue Funeral Hall continues to operate, and still benefits from “aesthetic management.” The sprawling complex abuts a river to the west, gardens and a playground to the south, and a junior high and two elementary schools to the east.
Like Mizue, Rinkai, the crematory I visited, offers the full death experience. That day, four separate funeral halls were set up, with funerals staggered throughout the day. Private funeral company employees arrived long before the families with flower wreaths and other swag add-ons to decorate the room: bamboo, plants, glowing orbs (I was most impressed by the glowing orbs). Social anthropologist Hikaru Suzuki explained that in modern Japan (as in the West) “professionals prepare, arrange, and conduct commercial funeral ceremonies, leaving the bereaved only the fees to pay.”
One of Suzuki’s interview subjects, an eighty-four-year-old man, bemoaned the loss of ritual around death. In the 1950s, he complained, everyone knew exactly what to do when someone died; they didn’t need to pay someone to help them. “Look at young people today in the presence of death,” he said. “The first thing they do is call a funeral company. They act like helpless children. Such an embarrassing situation never arose in the past.” The truly shocking part, his wife chimed in, is that “young people today don’t seem to be embarrassed about it either.” So not only do the young have zero death literacy, they don’t seem to mind.
Of course, the younger generations raise their eyebrows at the superstitions of the old. The same man admitted that his granddaughter (a medical student) made fun of him when he hearkened back to funerals past, where “when a woman was pregnant she wasn’t allowed to go near the deceased. It was said that if a cat jumped over the deceased’s head, the evil spirit of the animal would go into the corpse and make the body rise up.” To prevent the corpse from transforming into an evil cat zombie, well, “the cat was kept away from the dead . . .”
Each of the four halls at Rinkai was set up for the funeral of a different elderly woman. Digital photo frames with portraits of the women were placed at the front of the hall near the casket. In her portrait, Mrs. Fumi wore a blue sweater over a white collared shirt.
In a tiny side room, Mrs. Tanaka lay unembalmed in a lavender cremation casket, dry ice* tucked around her body to keep her chilled. Her family surrounded her, their heads bowed. Her funeral would be held from 10 a.m. to noon the next day, directly followed by the cremation.
The old men assembled in a separate room, smoking, segregated from the general grievers. “I remember funeral halls before the smoking rooms,” Sato-san told me. “Mixing the cigarette smoke with the funeral incense was terrible.”
The crematory itself, where the bodies were taken after their funerals, was like the foyer of a fancy New York office building, everything made of imposing dark granite. This was the shiny new Lexus to America’s old Dodge pickup truck. Ten cremation machines were hidden behind ten silver doors, meticulously polished free of smudges. Grey stainless steel conveyor belts deposited the dead into each machine. It was cleaner and sleeker than any crematory I had ever seen.
Prices were posted outside the crematory: to cremate an unborn baby cost 9,000 yen, a single body part 7,500 yen, 2,000 yen to divide up the bones of a grown person into separate urns. Also posted was a list of items the family was not allowed to cremate alongside their dead loved one, including but not limited to cellphones, golf balls, dictionaries, large stuffed animals, Buddha figures made of metal, and watermelons.
“Wait, watermelons, really?”
“That’s what it says!” Sato-san shrugged.
Three or so close family members, including the chief mourner (most likely the husband or eldest son), accompany a body into the crematory, and watch it glide into the machine. The family does not watch the cremation process itself, but instead joins the reception upstairs. When the cremation is complete, they continue past the crematory to three rooms designated for the kotsuage.
After the cremation, a fragmented (but complete) skeleton is pulled from the machine. Western crematories pulverize these bones into powdery ash, but the Japanese traditionally do not. The family walks into the shūkotsu-shitsu, or ash/bone collecting room, where the skeleton of their loved one awaits.
The family are handed pairs of chopsticks, one made of bamboo, one made of metal. The chief mourner begins with the feet, picking up bones with the chopsticks and placing them in the urn. Other family members join in and continue up the skeleton. The skull will not fit into the urn intact, so the cremator might intervene to break it up into smaller bone fragments using a metal chopstick. The final bone, the hyoid (the horseshoe-shaped bone underneath the jaw) is placed in the urn last.
In People Who Eat Darkness, a brilliant nonfiction account of two women murdered in Tokyo in the 1990s, Richard Lloyd Parry describes the funeral of an Australian named Carita Ridgway. Her parents had flown in to arrange for the funeral of their daughter, and were outsiders to the kotsuage custom.
. . . they made the long drive to the crematorium on the outer edges of suburban Tokyo. They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next. After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita’s remains, as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of legs and arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognisable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita’s calcined skeleton; as the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn. “Rob [her boyfriend] couldn’t handle it at all,” Nigel [her father] said. “He thought we were monsters, even to think of it. But, perhaps it’s because we were the parents, and she was our daughter . . . It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita.”
The kotsuage was not part of the Ridgway family’s culture, yet at the most difficult time in their lives it gave them a meaningful task to complete for Carita.
Not all of the bones may fit in the urn. Depending on the region of Japan where Mom was cremated, the family might take the remaining bone and ash home in a separate smaller bag, or leave it behind at the crematory. The crematory staff pulverizes the leftover bones and places them in sacks, then piles the sacks out of public view. When the pile is large enough, the pulverized bones are picked up by another specialized group, the ash collectors. From there they are placed in large graves in the mountains, eight by ten feet and over twenty feet deep. According to the sociologist Hikaru Suzuki, the ash collectors plant cherry trees and conifers atop the ash pits. “These cherry trees attract many visitors, but few of them recognize the secret of the trees’ beauty.”
Cherry groves offer a more elegant solution than the old method. In the past, the ashes would simply be buried on crematory property. But with the rise of fancier, parklike complexes such as Mizue Funeral Hall, the “dumping the bones out back” idea fell out of favor. Suzuki heard this group of ash collectors referred to as the haibutsu kaishūsha, or literally “person who collects trash.” According to her, the cremators “look down on ash collectors for being mere manual laborers who have no responsibility for the spirit of the deceased.” Having to deal with the corpse and the family is what makes a crematory employee “professional.”
This was a strange distinction, between the cremators and the ash collectors. In my years cremating, those two jobs were one and the same. The body goes into the machine as a corpse, and comes out as bones and ash. In the West, where there is no kotsuage, families suffer great anxiety that they might receive the wrong set of ashes. They obsess over the question, “Is that really my mother in the urn?”** After a cremation, I attempt to remove every last fragment of bone or ash from the cremation machine. Nevertheless, some shards of bone fall into the cracks, and are eventually collected into bags. In California, we scatter those bags at sea. I am both cremator and ash collector, both “professional” and “collector of trash.”
WHEN SŌGEN KATO turned 111 years old in 2010, he became the oldest man in Tokyo. Officials came to his house to congratulate Kato on this impressive milestone. Kato’s daughter would not let them in, alternately claiming that Kato was in a persistent vegetative state or that he was attempting to practice sokushinbutsu, the ancient art of self-mummification of Buddhist monks.
After repeated attempts, the police forcibly entered the home and found Kato’s body, which had been dead for at least thirty years and was long since mummified (but still wearing his underwear). Instead of honoring her father and bringing him to the grave, Mr. Kato’s daughter had locked his body in a room on the first floor of the family home. His granddaughter was quoted as saying, “My mother said, ‘Leave him in there,’ and he was left as he was.” Over the years his eighty-one-year-old daughter pocketed over $100,000 of his pension payments.
What Kato-san’s family did was astounding, not only for the length of their scam but because it demonstrated how much the Japanese view of the dead body had changed. Traditionally, the corpse was seen as impure. Since the body was polluted, the family was expected to be active in performing rituals to purify and reset the body to a more benign and nonthreatening state—imiake, or “lifting of pollution.”
To someone alive today, the list of rituals once performed to decontaminate both the living and the dead might seem endless. A list of highlights: drink sake before and after any contact with the body; light incense and candles so that the fire can cast out contamination; stay awake with the body all night, so no malevolent spirits enter the corpse; scrub your hands with salt after a cremation.
By the mid-twentieth century more people began to die in hospitals, away from the home. More professionals in charge meant the Japanese lost the sense that the dead body was impure. Cremation rose from 25 percent (at the turn of the century) to almost 100 percent. People felt contamination could be avoided by sending the corpse into the flames. The same shift occurred in the United States, but had the opposite result. It is disheartening that in the U.S., the professionalization of deathcare led to a greater fear of the body than ever before. Again, a gaze through the looking glass.
In Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, you’ll find Lastel, a portmanteau of Last + Hotel, as in, the last hotel you’ll ever stay in . . . because you’re dead. It’s a hotel for corpses. The manager of Lastel, Mr. Tsuruo, didn’t lead us through cobwebs by candlelight, as you might expect the proprietor of a corpse hotel to do. He was funny and outgoing, passionate about the facility and what it provides. By the end of my visit, I was whispering into my audio recorder, “I want it I want a corpse hotel I want one.”
Mr. Tsuruo led us into the elevator. “This elevator is not for the public, of course,” he apologized. “Just for the stretcher and the workers.” The elevator looked so clean you could eat off the floor. We exited on the sixth floor, where Lastel had a refrigerated storage room that held up to twenty dead bodies.
“I wanted something here that other facilities don’t have,” Mr. Tsuruo explained, as an electric stretcher shot down a metal track, floated underneath a white casket, lifted the casket from the rack, and delivered it to us at the entrance.
The walls were lined with casket-sized metal doors. “Where do they lead?” I asked.
Mr. Tsuruo motioned us to follow. We entered a small room with incense, some couches. There was an identical set of small metal doors in this room, though they were better-disguised. A door opened, and in slid the white casket.
We continued into three different family rooms, where if you are a relative, you can come at any time of the day (the body is there, on average, for about four days) and call up the body from refrigerated storage. Your family member will be in the casket, their features lightly put into place (with no embalming) and dressed in a Buddhist costume or a more modern suit. “Maybe you can’t make the funeral,” Mr. Tsuruo said, “maybe you’re working during the day, so you come by to visit and sit with the body.”
One of the family rooms was larger, with big comfy couches, a television, and copious bouquets of flowers. It was a place to hang out with the dead, in comfort, with none of the strict time limits imposed by an American funeral home.
“It is 10,000 yen ($85) more to use this big room,” he said.
“Worth it!” I replied.
To have that period to visit the body as often as you like, no reservations needed, seemed graceful and civilized. Antithetical to the “you paid for two hours in the viewing room and you’ll get two hours in the viewing room” rules of a Western funeral home.
On another of Lastel’s nine floors was a bathing room, bright clean and white. There was a tall, elegant washing station for “the last bath on this Earth.” The traditional yukan bathing ceremony has, in recent years, been revived and performed commercially for close family members. The president of one company reintroducing the service said, “The bathing ceremony should [help] fill the psychological void in contemporary funeral ceremonies,” because quickly taking the body away “does not offer sufficient time for the bereaved to contemplate death.”
In my practice as a mortician I’ve found that both cleaning the body and spending time with it serves a powerful role in processing grief. It helps mourners see the corpse not as a cursed object, but as a beautiful vessel that once held their loved one. Famed Japanese home organizer Marie Kondo expresses a similar idea in her mega-bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Instead of purging everything into a garbage bag, she suggests you spend time with each item and “thank it for its service” before letting it go. Some critics found it silly to thank an ill-fitting sweater for its service, but the impulse actually comes from a profound place. Each separation is a small death, and should be honored. This concept is reflected in the Japanese relationship with the dead body. You don’t just let Mother disappear into the cremation machine; you sit with her, and thank her body—and her—for her service as your mother. Only then do you let her go.
Mr. Tsuruo continued our tour by walking us down a cobblestone street, in actuality just a hallway in the Lastel building. The vibe was Victorian-themed Christmas display at the local shopping center. At the end of the hall was the front door of the “house.” Mr. Tsuruo offered us tiny covers to put over our shoes.
“This is the ‘living room type’ family funeral,” he said, opening the door into a normal Japanese condominium (sadly not Victorian-themed like the hallway).
“So this is just someone’s condo? But no one actually stays here?” I asked, confused.
“Yes, they stay here. You can have the whole wake with the body here.”
The condo had everything to make a family comfortable—microwaves, a big shower, sofas. Futon mats were available for up to fifteen people to sleep on overnight. In a big city like Yokohama, actual family apartments are not large enough to accommodate out-of-town mourners, so the family can gather here to hang out with the body instead.
This room flooded me with emotion and inspiration. There is a difficult discussion that rarely happens among American funeral directors: viewing the embalmed body is often an unpleasant experience for the family. There are exceptions to this rule, but the immediate family is given almost no meaningful time with the body (which in all likelihood was swiftly removed after death). Before the family has time to be with their dead person and process the loss, coworkers and distant cousins arrive, and everyone is forced into a public performance of grief and humility.
I wondered what it would be like if there were places like Lastel in every major city. Spaces outside the stiff, ceremonial norm, where the family can just be with the body, free from the performance required at a formal viewing. Spaces that are safe, comfortable, like home.
HISTORY IS FILLED with ideas that arrived before their time. In the 1980s, Hiroshi Ueda, a Japanese camera company employee, created the first camera “extender stick,” allowing him to capture self-portraits on his travels. The camera extender received a patent in 1983, but didn’t sell. The contraption seemed so trivial that it even made a cameo in the book of chindōgu or “un-useful inventions.” (Other chindōgu: tiny slippers for your cat, electric fans attached to chopsticks to cool off your ramen noodles.) Without fanfair, Ueda’s patent expired in 2003. Today, surrounded by the masses wielding selfie sticks like narcissistic Jedi knights, he seemed remarkably calm in his defeat, telling the BBC, “We call it a 3 a.m. invention—it arrived too early.”
The history of death and funerals is also filled with ideas before their time—the Reaper’s own 3 a.m. inventions. One such creation arrived in 1820s’ London. The city was at that time hunting for a solution to the problem of its overcrowded and smelly urban graveyards. Stacks of coffins went twenty feet deep into the soil. Half-decomposed bodies were exposed to public view when wood from their coffins was smashed up and sold to the poor for firewood. This overcrowding was so visible to the average Londoner that Reverend John Blackburn said, “Many delicate minds must sicken to witness the heaped soil, saturated and blackened with human remains and fragments of the dead.” It was time to try something else.
Proposals to reform London’s system of burials began to pour in, including one from an architect named Thomas Willson. If land shortage was the problem, Willson proposed that instead of digging further down to bury the bodies, London should send its dead skyward in a massive burial pyramid. This pyramid would be made from brick and granite and situated at the top of a hill—what is now Primrose Hill, overlooking central London. It would be ninety-four stories tall, four times taller than St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hold five million bodies. I’m going to hit you with that number again: five million bodies.
The pyramid would sit on only eighteen acres of land, but would be able to hold the equivalent of 1,000 acres of bodies. Willson’s Giant Corpse Pyramid (the actual name was the impossibly cool Metropolitan Sepulchre) spoke to Londoners’ enthusiasm for Egyptian artifacts and architecture. Willson was even invited to present his idea before Parliament. And yet, the public did not embrace the concept. The Literary Gazette labeled the project a “monstrous piece of folly.” The public wanted garden cemeteries, they wanted to push the dead outside the cramped churchyards of central London and send them to sprawling landscapes where they could picnic and commune with the dead. They didn’t want a giant death mound (whose weight might have crushed the hill), a monument to rot, dominating the city’s skyline.
All ended in shame for Willson. His pyramid idea was pilfered by a French architect. After accusing his colleague of intellectual theft, he was sued for libel. But what if the idea for the Metropolitan Sepulchre was just the selfie stick of mortality, arrived before its time? Every giant leap we take to redesign deathcare comes with the caveat that the idea might end up in the pile with other chindōgu.
Just five minutes from the Ryōgoku station, right around the corner from the Sumo Hall in Tokyo, is one of the highest-tech funeral facilities in the world. On your lunch break you can hop on the train, walk past the wrestlers in their patterned kimonos, and arrive at Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen, a multistory temple and graveyard.
Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen looks more like an office building than a typical graveyard. The facility exudes a corporate feel, starting with the neatly dressed public relations woman who met us in the lobby. She worked for Nichiryoku Co., overall the third largest Japanese funeral company, but number one in the indoor cemeteries and graves market. “We are the pioneers of indoor facilities,” she explained, “and the only large funeral company that is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”
My DIY bias led me to identify more with the quirky-independent-monk light-up-Buddha team, but I had to admit that Nichiryoku Co. had discovered a market. In the 1980s, the price of land in Tokyo skyrocketed. In the 1990s a tiny grave could go for 6 million yen ($53,000 US). The market was ripe for more affordable, convenient, urban options (say, a cemetery right off the train).
Of course, being close to the train station isn’t what makes the cemetery high-tech. The facility manager took us on a tour, starting with a long hallway with hyper-reflective black flooring and bright white overhead lighting. Lining each wall were individual pods, with privacy coverings made of translucent green glass. The whole impression was that of a 1980s movie imagining “the future,” a design choice I endorsed.
Inside the pods, behind the glass, stood traditional granite gravestones. Each stone had a rectangular hole at the base, the size of a textbook. Fresh flowers sat in a vase, and incense waited to be lit. The manager took out a touch card similar to the one used at the Ruriden columbarium. Simulating what a family member would do, he touched the card to an electronic keypad. “The Sakura card recognizes the urn,” he explained. Glass doors slid shut, hiding the gravestone.
Behind the scenes, magic was happening. I heard the dull whir of the robot’s arm as it plucked our urn from among 4,700 others. After about a minute the glass doors opened to reveal the gravestone. The rectangular hole now contained the urn, with a family symbol and name personalized on the front. “The idea is that many people can use the facility. We can store as many as possible,” the manager explained. The facility can accommodate 7,200 urns, and it is already more than half full. “If you have your own grave, at your own family cemetery you have to change the flowers, light the incense. It’s a lot of work. Here we do that all for you.”
Of course, for the griever truly on the go, there is now an online service that allows for virtual grave visits. Another Tokyo company, I-Can Corp., presents a Sims-like experience in which your ancestor’s virtual gravestone appears on screen in a green field. The user can, according to taste, light a virtual incense stick, place flowers, sprinkle water on the stone, and leave fruit and glasses of beer.
The president of I-Can Corp. acknowledged that “certainly, it is best to pay ancestors an actual visit.” But, “our service is for those who believe that it is possible to pay their respects in front of a computer screen.”
The head monk at Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen, Masuda jūshoku, seemed permanently relaxed, and like Yajima jūshoku, had no problems with Buddhism mixing old and new ideas. (As we left he cycled away on his bike, in full robes, talking on his cellphone). The facility was a partner project between his temple and Nichiryoku Co. Years of planning went into the high-rise cemetery, which opened to the public in 2013.
“Well, you’ve seen the facility, what do you think of it?” he asked wryly.
“It’s more technology-based than any cemetery we have in the United States,” I replied. “And everything is so clean here, from the cemeteries to the cremation machines. Everything is cleaner, and much less industrial.”
“Well, dealing with death has become cleaner,” he acknowledged. “People used to fear the dead body, but we’ve made it clean. And then the cemeteries became like a park, neat and clean.”
Masuda indulged me in a long conversation about cremation trends in both Japan and America. We discussed how the Japanese were moving away from the kotsuage, in which the family personally removes the bones, preferring instead to have the facility’s employees grind the bones down and scatter them. “Traditionally, Japanese people are concerned with the skeleton,” he explained. “They perform the kotsuage, as you know. They like the bones, they don’t want ash.”
“Then what has changed?” I asked.
“There are feelings that come with the bones, responsibility for the soul. Bones are real,” Masuda said. “The people who scatter the ash are trying to forget. Trying to put aside the things they don’t want to think about.”
“Do you think that’s a good thing?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s a good thing. You can try to make death cleaner, but especially after the big earthquake, and with the suicide rate being very high, death has come closer. There are people who take their lives before the age of ten. People are beginning to think about death. You can’t ignore it anymore.”
THERE WAS a time when the Japanese feared the corpse as unclean and impure. They have largely overcome that fear and have begun to see the body in the casket not for what it was, but for who it belonged to—not a cursed object, but a beloved grandpa. The Japanese make an effort to integrate rituals with the body, and ensure the family has enough time to spend in its presence. Meanwhile, countries like the U.S. have done the reverse. Once we cared for our corpses at home. Before the rise of the professional death class we did not have the fear the Japanese had of the dead, and we valued the presence of the corpse. But in recent years we have been taught to see the dead as unclean and impure, and fear of the physical dead body has risen, along with our direct cremation rate.
What’s more, and what sets them apart, is that the Japanese have not been afraid to integrate technology and innovation in their funerals and memorials. We don’t have a single space like Ruriden with its glowing Buddhas or Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen with its robot retrieval system. Our funeral homes are considered high-tech if they offer online obituaries or a photo slideshow during the funeral.
If anything, the Japanese funeral market can prove to Western countries that you don’t have to choose between technology and interaction with the dead body. Even better, you can offer both options to clients at your funeral home and not destroy your bottom line. And yes, more than ever, I want a corpse hotel.
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* Not the rolling fog eighties music video type.
** Yes, it’s her.
