A blurb about the funeral process

Happy holidays everyone!


We're in that few days of December after Christmas and before New Years' when not much happens and generally things are fairly quiet.  Of course with that comes the end of the western holiday season, but I hope you had a good one this year.  This year has been tough for a lot of reasons and many people have suffered some hardships in recent months, and so it's not more important than ever that we stick together and offer each other our support.


This was going through my mind today as I attended the memorial service for a funeral.  It was a surprise this morning when I woke up to learn that a family member of one my friends here had passed away. Needless to say, I wanted to pay my respects, so today was a mini-adventure in the culture of Japanese funerals.


A Japanese funeral service is somewhat of an enigma from a foreigner's perspective; it has every bit as much ritual as a western funeral service might but the customs themselves are wildly different.  This is somewhat elaborated on in the video below, but because my point was made rather shoddily, here's a bullet point list of the big ideas concerning  the Japanese funeral system:

•  99.81% of deceased Japanese are cremated. Chalk it up either to lack of natural land, perhaps?
• Because most bodies are burned, there is no embalming process for the vast majority of bodies.
• The average Japanese funeral is about 2.3 million yen, or about $30,000.  This comes from a combination of land scarcity and also from price gouging - Japanese families often choose not to negotiate or haggle over prices because it may be seen as disrespecting the recently deceased.
• Each of the persons in attendance of the memorial service offers up koden, or funeral money, given as a gift to the family.  It is given in a plain envelope, sometimes with black and white ribbons for decoration. Guests are also given a gift back.

When bodies in Japan are cremated, the remains are transferred into an urn by the family members, who pass the bones to each other using chopsticks. This is why using your chopsticks to directly share food with somebody while eating is considered bad form; during a cremation is the only time that it is OK to transfer directly from chopstick to chopstick.

Here's a short video on the topic:

Stay warm and safe as we head into the new year.  Until next time!