From Here to Eternity Read online

  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.