Towards the end of the year, there are quite a few celebrities who have passed away recently.
99-year-old Charlie Munger, 100-year-old Kissinger, and 86-year-old veteran actor Ma Jingwu passed away one after another.
When it comes to death, in Chinese civilization, most of them are a little cautious and taboo.
In Japan, though, it's a little different:
Japan has its own unique funeral fair.
Visitors can not only lie in the coffin and experience it themselves, but also talk to the merchants on the spot, and make the ashes of deceased relatives into diamonds or put them on rockets and send them to space.
What exactly is a funeral fair like in Japan?
In Japan, two major funeral fairs are held every year.
One is the Future Business Expo, or FBF for short, which is held every year in June.
In 1996, Japan began to host the first expo, when 50 companies participated in the exhibition, and a total of 3,393 people visited the expo.
In 2020, the pandemic was interrupted, and the number of visitors in 2021 and 2022 decreased significantly.
Until 2023, the 26th edition of the expo was held as scheduled, with 160 companies exhibiting for a total of 2 days and a total of 11,815 visitors.
Another big expo is what we're going to focus on today:
That's the Industrial Exhibition (End-of-Life Industry Exhibition)!
Although this exhibition is not as long as FBF, it is only the 9th year this year.
However, it has grown into the largest and most important exhibition in the Japanese funeral industry, and it is also one of the most important windows into the world's understanding of Japanese funeral culture.
Some Chinese companies have begun to participate in the exhibition.
At its peak, the fair attracted 350 exhibitors.
The 9th edition of the exhibition in 2023 lasted for 3 days and attracted a total of 12,019 users.
CNN, The Washington Post, Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun and 37 other companies have reported on the show.
So what kind of exhibition is the Japan Funeral Expo?
To put it simply, everything about funerals and funerals can be found in this exhibition.
From the care of the elderly, to the undertaking of funerals, and the disposal of ashes, the equipment, machines, services, and information required for each link are readily available.
How much importance do companies attach to this exhibition?
This can be seen from the composition of the exhibitors.
There are 353% of companies have sent company executives to this industry event.
During the period, professors and teachers from various universities and abbots of temples were also invited to give lectures on the spot to discuss the development of the funeral industry.
If there is one thing that impressed me the most about this funeral expo, it is undoubtedly the development of Japan's pet funeral industry.
As Japan's declining birthrate intensifies, more and more people are choosing pets as their family members instead of having children.
However, birth, old age, sickness and death are natural laws, and how pets can be treated as "family" after death is a matter that troubles many Japanese.
At this exhibition, the service of pet funeral companies is very warm.
When a pet dies, people can directly place an order online, select **, and make an appointment.
The company's staff will then come to your home to provide services.
First of all, he will carefully tell you to prepare some things that your pet likes to eat before, and you can use it with your pet.
The equipment for carrying out cremation is also very convenient, and it is a mobile cremation vehicle.
Before the final ceremony, the staff also set aside a period of time for a final farewell.
After the cremation is completed, the staff will patiently explain the composition of the ashes, which is the skull and which is the leg bone.
The ashes are then placed in an urn and handed over to the employer.
You can even store your pet's ashes in the cemetery.
In fact, the whole process is not particularly different from the way people are buried.
In addition, different from our common burial and cremation, many new and peculiar funeral methods have emerged in Japan in recent years.
For example, this company mainly promotes tree burials!
As the name suggests, many people's first impression when they see tree burial is that they will bury their ashes under the tree, but in fact, there are various forms of tree burial in Japan.
The company launched tree burials that allow you to choose the location of burial in 23 regions across the country.
For example, Shiba Garden, located in Tokyo, is located near the landmark Tokyo Tower.
Shiba Park, Japan's oldest park, is easily accessible and is a 5-minute walk from the subway station Akabanebashi Station.
Because every inch of land in Tokyo is expensive, the cost of buying a cemetery here is not something that ordinary people can afford.
In this tree burial cemetery, there are no large tombstones, they are all small lying monuments, and 36 pillars of ashes can be buried per square meter.
This is already the most environmentally friendly way to preserve ashes.
On the other hand, depending on the burial area, the cost varies depending on the burial area, but it is around 500,000 yen, which is a very good value for money compared to 1.5 million yen for a set of tombstones.
Of course, if you think that the cost of 500,000 yen is too high, there are cheaper sea burials!
This exhibition is a company that specializes in sea burials.
The so-called sea burial process is also very simple, after the customer makes an appointment with the company, they will take the ashes to sea on the company's speedboat.
After the ceremony of laying flowers and offering wine, the ashes are finally scattered into the sea and returned after a round cruise.
The company will issue a "Certificate of Loose Bones" to certify the completion of the burial ceremony at sea.
The biggest feature of sea burial is that it is cheap, if you choose to complete the sea burial ceremony by the company's employees.
The minimum cost is 55,000 yen, about 2,670 yuan.
After the ceremony, the Certificate of Loose Bones will be sent to the family by post.
Some people will say that the sea burial method is too casual, and you can't find a place to pay your respects.
As a result, a Japanese company has developed a new project, that is, to make the ashes into diamond jewelry, which can be carried with you to express your sorrows.
However, this method has extremely high requirements for the process, and Japan has not yet been able to realize it, so it is only produced as a professional company that sends the project to the United States.
After receiving the ashes, the carbon in the ashes is separated and recrystallized to make a rough diamond, which is then finely polished to make jewelry.
A set down, ** is very high, one carat costs 2.48 million yen.
Of course, this method is not acceptable to everyone, and some old people think this method is too scary!
This is a sea burial, and a tree burial, some people will say, why don't you go to heaven!
Don't say it, there is really a funeral in Japan that flies into the sky, and that is the "balloon funeral".
Kobo is a company that specializes in "balloon funerals", where they put the cremated ashes of the deceased into small balloons and then put them in a large balloon.
Then choose an open field with a diameter of 5 meters, and cast it if there are no high-rise buildings, power lines, or obstacles around.
The balloon will fly for 3 hours, reaching the stratosphere about 40-50km above the ground, and under the influence of air pressure, the balloon will expand to 3 times the size of the previous one, and then it will **, and eventually the ashes will be scattered in the air.
Afterwards, the family will also receive a "Balloon Funeral Certificate".
Balloon funerals typically cost 240,000 yen, but it is known that more than 300 funerals have been held so far, and more than 100 people have made reservations.
Of course, if you don't think it's high enough, as long as you have the money, you can also send the ashes to space.
It is indeed very attractive to people who have a dream of aerospace and yearn for **, and some Japanese companies have begun to seek cooperation with Musk's SpaceX.
As early as 2016, it was reported that Japan had entered a "multi-death society"!
In Japan, where the number of deaths is expected to peak in 2039, climbing to 1.67 million, the population is declining and aging.
The advent of a multi-dead society should be good news for the funeral industry.
Today, the market size of Japan's funeral industry has reached 18 trillion yen, and it is very likely to exceed 2 trillion yen in the future.
But the arrival of the epidemic has changed people's understanding of funerals to a certain extent.
Especially in the early days of the epidemic, Japan also implemented a relatively strict control system.
The elderly who died during the epidemic were unable to invite many friends to attend the memorial.
Most people opted for smaller-scale funerals that were limited to family members, and with that, the cost of the funeral dropped considerably.
In addition to the reasons of the epidemic, the connection between people in Japanese society is not as close as before, there are more and more single-core families, everyone has fewer friends themselves, the relationship at work has become estranged with job hopping and resignation, and the relationship between colleagues is relatively cold.
In Japan, it has traditionally been assumed that family members and children and grandchildren should be responsible for the afterlife, but with the aging of the population and changes in living patterns, the elderly may be nearly 100 years old when they die, and their children are already 70-80 years old.
Elderly children and other relatives who are supposed to be responsible are unable to afford it financially and physically.
There is a growing number of elderly people living alone and those who remain unmarried for life.
When the health is good, I can still cope, but when it comes to nursing care and dealing with the aftermath, who can I rely on except my family?
Even if there are professional nursing staff to deal with it, who can handle the funeral after death, and who will sweep the grave?
According to a survey by a funeral company, in 1996, the average number of attendees for funerals was 180, but in 2005 it fell to less than 100, and in 2013, the average was only 46, a sharp drop of nearly three-quarters in just 17 years.
In a 2005 survey conducted by the Japan Fair Trade Commission on the nationwide funeral industry, 67Eight percent of companies surveyed said they were "down in attendance" compared to five years ago, compared to 86 in the 2016 survey8%。
In the future, there are more and more elderly people who will not be able to take care of their graves and do not want to cause trouble to their children, so more and more people are choosing cheap funerals such as sea burials.
Nowadays, more and more people choose to be buried directly after cremation, omitting some specific religious ceremonies.
A Japanese organization conducted a questionnaire survey in 2020, and the survey results showed that 70% of people said that they might choose direct burial in the future.
In terms of cost, the cost of a general funeral is around 1.91 million yen, while a direct burial costs only 360,000 yen.
Another concern is that there is a shortage of people in the funeral industry today.
Although it is a blue ocean industry, like most people in China, the funeral industry is not a job to be proud of.
In 2008, "The Undertaker", which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, tells the story of Japanese funeral practitioners.
The wife's incomprehension and the cynicism of the deceased's family have made the protagonist doubt his choice.
Stills from "The Undertaker".
Japan's funeral industry is also facing a shortage of manpower, especially in the future, the problem of declining birthrate will be more serious, and the labor force will be smaller.
Many companies have also launched online consultations, chanting robots and other ways to solve this problem.
The funeral industry may seem dull, dealing with the deceased every day, but when the deceased is given dignity after death, the industry realizes its true meaning.
As the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami said, death is not the opposite of life, but eternal as a part of life.
To think about death is to think about how to live, and perhaps this is the greatest meaning of this fair.