Peak death

IN HIS office behind Tokyo’s Aoyama cemetery, Yukihiro Masuda says that these days prospective clients are so much readier to talk about the end of life that he encourages them to try out his coffins. He gestures at one: a handsome model, lined with white satin, and decorated on the outside with superb red kimono cloth. Inside, with the lid closed, it is as acoustically dead as a recording studio, quite soporific and, for this overweight Westerner, at least, rather snug at the shoulders and hips.

Talking about death is still taboo for some Japanese—and in parts of the country the burakumin, an often ostracised group who are descendants of medieval outcasts, still fill a large share of jobs in the funeral business. But for many others the taboo is broken. A 2008 film, “Departures”, movingly depicted the beauty and dignity of nokan, the (Buddhist-derived) ritual cleansing ceremony for the recently deceased, carried out at home before laying the body in a coffin for cremation. The film’s success led to a wave of job applications to perform nokan. Not long after, the Weekly Asahi, a magazine, began promoting the idea of shukatsu, planning for the end of life, in the hope of interesting readers and attracting advertisers. And then the devastating tsunami of 2011 made many Japanese wonder openly: if I die, who will take care of my funeral, sort out my affairs and carry out my wishes?

Underlying these cultural shifts is the tyranny of demography. Although Japanese are living longer, healthier lives, the huge baby-boom generation born after the second world war is starting to die just as younger Japanese are having fewer children. The population of 127m has already peaked and is set to fall below 100m by 2050. This year around 1m Japanese will be born, and around 1.3m will die. By 2040 annual deaths may approach 1.7m.

Call it peak death. It is already changing families. Traditionally, offspring would handle their deceased parents’ affairs, with neighbours helping with funeral ceremonies at home. But many more Japanese, particularly in depopulated rural areas and coastal towns, are now dying alone, with few to help them into the next world.

The funeral industry and other companies not hitherto associated with end-of-life issues sense an opportunity—a rare growth sector. A huge funeral fair in Tokyo in December, with nokan competitions using volunteers posing as corpses, gave a sense of the scale of the ¥2 trillion ($20 billion) industry. There are niches: stationery companies sell books for “ending notes”—instructions for post-death practicalities, but also for innermost feelings that Japanese tend to keep to themselves and that atomised families make difficult to express in life. End-of-life businesses also offer alternatives to costly temple gravestones, such as scattering loved ones’ ashes in Tokyo Bay (just don’t tell the honeymooners to whom the boat is also offered).

Tech companies are also jumping in. Two years ago Yahoo Japan, an internet giant, launched Yahoo Ending, a service that charges ¥180 a month until you die, then sends an e-mail alerting friends and family once you’ve reached the other side, smoothly closes your internet accounts and sets up an online memorial page. It also offers to arrange funerals, complete with a Buddhist priest.

Amazon Japan offers a monk-for-hire service: with one click you can order a priest to chant sutras (much to the ire of traditional temples, for which funerals and caring for ashes are nice earners). Aeon, a retail and financial-services conglomerate, has branched out from arranging funerals for employees past and present, and opened its first outlet for the general public in the shopping centre next to its Tokyo headquarters. Fumitaka Hirohara, the head of Aeon Life, its funeral business, claims it was the first place to offer free coffin trials, in 2011 (much to the initial surprise of passing shoppers).

Yet most of the businesses that moved into shukatsu have not found the bonanza they were hoping for. Few old people signed up to Yahoo Ending’s services for the simple reason that they are not heavy users of internet services. Younger Japanese balked at a lifetime’s monthly fees. Yahoo Japan closed the service in April. And then the funeral business turns out to be not so different from others in Japan: eking out thin margins in a competitive world. Though the number of funerals is rising, the average cost, once over ¥2m, is falling—deflation and competition are as fierce as in other sectors. In the boom years up to the early 1990s funeral firms charged what they wanted and few complained.

Companies often paid for lavish funerals for their executives and dispatched employees as mourners to the funerals of important customers, even if they did not know them. Now companies are strapped for cash, and employer-employee loyalty has eroded. Besides, more and more Japanese just want a simple ceremony for close family and friends.

Mr Masuda says that traditional funeral companies try to make their money from costly add-ons, such as fancy cars or a DVD of the funeral. But customers want less and less of it. “Companies don’t listen to what customers want,” he says; “they just offer the same old packages.”

Instead, Mr Masuda says, firms need to keep prices low (a funeral package can now cost less than ¥500,000) and to differentiate their products. His company, WillLife, offers an eco-friendly send-off. The coffins are made of robust cardboard from the packaging industry (which the parent company is in). Even though they need as much paraffin—70 litres—for cremation as the usual wooden versions, the company plants trees in Mongolia as a carbon offset.

Still, Mr Masuda laments that plywood coffins from China can cost just a third as much as his cardboard ones. The “China price”, a fixture of life in Japan as elsewhere, applies in death, too.