Toshihide Matsumoto permanently closed his family grave in June.
For the 65-year-old Hyogo Prefecture-native, 10 of his ancestors — including his sister and father — were buried in a local cemetery in the city of Himeji in a grave that had been in his family for centuries, but he decided it was time to part ways with it earlier this year.
“My mother used to tend the grave, but after she injured herself in 2019 she couldn’t watch over it anymore,” he says. “She agreed with the idea of closing the grave, and since I didn’t want to put the burden on my child (in the future), I made the decision to close it up here and now.”
Predeceased by his wife in 2018, and with his 90-year-old mother in a nursing home and his only daughter living far away in Tokyo, Matsumoto feared that after he was gone, there would be no one to take care of the grave.
Seeing other people’s abandoned graves made Matsumoto feel sad, and he decided that in order to prevent his family grave from facing the same fate, he should do something about it while he still could.
Upon discussion with a grave-closing consultation service and agreement from his remaining family, he decided to opt for an ocean burial service, scattering his ancestors’ and his wife’s ashes in the sea earlier this year.
As the number of reported abandoned graves around the country grows, an increasing number of people in Japan are choosing to nip the issue in the bud and close up their family grave once and for all — an effect of diminishing traditional family structures and more people moving away from their hometowns, amid the rapid graying of the population. This has spurred an influx of businesses looking to seize upon this trend as an opportunity for new ventures, while the ways in which Japanese people pay respects to the dead continue to diversify.
Increasing numbers of Japanese people are no longer tied to the idea of a traditional family grave, where one gravestone holds the remains of multiple ancestors going back generations.
Rising number of grave closings
Although there is no public data that shows the number of grave-closing cases, the number of reburials — instances of ashes being relocated — gathered annually by the government is a good indicator, says journalist and consultant, Mitsuko Kikkawa, a specialist on end-of-life issues.
According to recent figures, there has been a significant increase in cases of reburials over the past few decades — while the number was around 60,000 to 70,000 per year during the 2000s, it has consistently surpassed 100,000 since 2017, with the most recent report from 2022 showing that there were over 150,000 cases in that fiscal year.
“(Grave closing) is not just the act of getting rid of the grave — you always need to do something with the urn inside, that is why you’re ‘moving’ the grave,” Kikkawa says.
Families must decide whether they want to succeed the grave in a different form by moving the ashes to a place that is more convenient, whether it be to a new grave in a different city or in a family ossuary. Alternatively, they can choose to part ways with it altogether, opting to scatter the ashes or place them in a communal ossuary where they can eventually return to the earth.
With the fact that purchasing a new plot of land for a grave is expensive, and with the proliferation of knowledge on the various options available, more and more people — including Matsumoto — are choosing something different from the traditional gravestone, says Kikkawa.
“Through media coverage, more people are finding out that there is a wide array of options, and combined with emerging businesses that promote these various options, it definitely proliferated the trend,” she said.
Guidance and support
One such emerging business — the one that Matsumoto used to help reach his decision — is House Boat Club, a company that runs a consultation service that offers guidance and support as to how people can go about moving or closing their family graves.
“We saw a significant increase in customers who are single and found that a lot of people who sign up for ocean burials didn’t want to keep something physical,” said Masatoshi Akaba, the head of the 17-year-old company that started as an ocean burials provider.
Two years ago, it began offering a two-in-one package deal, through which the company would help customers close their grave and then scatter the ashes into the ocean — a service that saw a huge demand.
Given this success, the firm launched a consultation service in May that offers customers various options for what to do with their relatives' ashes after closing their family grave. This service resulted in a huge increase in business, a testament to how much demand there is among Japanese people today, says Akaba.
Adapt and diversify
Nōkotsudō, or ossuaries, are another popular alternative that people are seeking out, and Henjoson-in temple on Mount Koya, in Wakayama Prefecture, is seeing an opportunity and an uptick in demand amid the recent trend.
Known as a sacred place within Japanese Buddhism with 1,200 years of history, Mount Koya is being chosen by many as a location to purchase a place in an ossuary not only for its historical and spiritual significance, but also because people can rely on the temple to look after their ancestors, says Shoten Meguro, deputy chief priest at the temple.
“Relying on established temples (like Henjoson-in) that can be trusted to look after people's ancestors every day does generate a sense of relief,” says Meguro.
At Henjoson-in, customers can purchase a place in an ossuary and, depending on the plan, can place up to eight “spirits” in their allocated box.
Everyday, Buddhist priests make their rounds of the ossuaries at Mount Koya, which can be viewed remotely on their live YouTube streams.
The temple even allows pets to be included in the same ossuary, a unique element that has gained much interest from pet-lovers, since most graves and ossuaries in Japan do not allow that.
Although its history is rooted in Japanese Buddhism, its acceptance of all living things means that anyone, regardless of their religious beliefs, sexuality or nationality, can be commemorated at Mount Koya. This has also opened up options for the LGBTQ community in Japan, says Meguro.
Akaba from House Boat Club also added that in Japan, where same-sex marriage isn’t legally recognized and customs like family graves are only inclusive of the traditional family model, the emerging alternatives to a family grave are introducing ways that minority communities can be laid to rest with the people that they want to be with.
“We just want people to be able to have freedom of choice in deciding how they want to commemorate the people close to them,” says Akaba. “Our job is to offer various options.”
Kikkawa agrees and says that this diversification of what graves look like is nothing new — traditions around graves have changed across the course of history, adapting to the lifestyles of the people who lived during those times.
“The one thing that doesn’t change is the feeling of respect for the ones who came before us, and so even if the form changes, graves will always continue to exist in one way or another,” she says.
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