“Yes, they stay here. You can have the whole wake with the body here.”
The condo had everything to make a family comfortable—microwaves, a big shower, sofas. Futon mats were available for up to fifteen people to sleep on overnight. In a big city like Yokohama, actual family apartments are not large enough to accommodate out-of-town mourners, so the family can gather here to hang out with the body instead.
This room flooded me with emotion and inspiration. There is a difficult discussion that rarely happens among American funeral directors: viewing the embalmed body is often an unpleasant experience for the family. There are exceptions to this rule, but the immediate family is given almost no meaningful time with the body (which in all likelihood was swiftly removed after death). Before the family has time to be with their dead person and process the loss, coworkers and distant cousins arrive, and everyone is forced into a public performance of grief and humility.
I wondered what it would be like if there were places like Lastel in every major city. Spaces outside the stiff, ceremonial norm, where the family can just be with the body, free from the performance required at a formal viewing. Spaces that are safe, comfortable, like home.
HISTORY IS FILLED with ideas that arrived before their time. In the 1980s, Hiroshi Ueda, a Japanese camera company employee, created the first camera “extender stick,” allowing him to capture self-portraits on his travels. The camera extender received a patent in 1983, but didn’t sell. The contraption seemed so trivial that it even made a cameo in the book of chindōgu or “un-useful inventions.” (Other chindōgu: tiny slippers for your cat, electric fans attached to chopsticks to cool off your ramen noodles.) Without fanfair, Ueda’s patent expired in 2003. Today, surrounded by the masses wielding selfie sticks like narcissistic Jedi knights, he seemed remarkably calm in his defeat, telling the BBC, “We call it a 3 a.m. invention—it arrived too early.”
The history of death and funerals is also filled with ideas before their time—the Reaper’s own 3 a.m. inventions. One such creation arrived in 1820s’ London. The city was at that time hunting for a solution to the problem of its overcrowded and smelly urban graveyards. Stacks of coffins went twenty feet deep into the soil. Half-decomposed bodies were exposed to public view when wood from their coffins was smashed up and sold to the poor for firewood. This overcrowding was so visible to the average Londoner that Reverend John Blackburn said, “Many delicate minds must sicken to witness the heaped soil, saturated and blackened with human remains and fragments of the dead.” It was time to try something else.
Proposals to reform London’s system of burials began to pour in, including one from an architect named Thomas Willson. If land shortage was the problem, Willson proposed that instead of digging further down to bury the bodies, London should send its dead skyward in a massive burial pyramid. This pyramid would be made from brick and granite and situated at the top of a hill—what is now Primrose Hill, overlooking central London. It would be ninety-four stories tall, four times taller than St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hold five million bodies. I’m going to hit you with that number again: five million bodies.
The pyramid would sit on only eighteen acres of land, but would be able to hold the equivalent of 1,000 acres of bodies. Willson’s Giant Corpse Pyramid (the actual name was the impossibly cool Metropolitan Sepulchre) spoke to Londoners’ enthusiasm for Egyptian artifacts and architecture. Willson was even invited to present his idea before Parliament. And yet, the public did not embrace the concept. The Literary Gazette labeled the project a “monstrous piece of folly.” The public wanted garden cemeteries, they wanted to push the dead outside the cramped churchyards of central London and send them to sprawling landscapes where they could picnic and commune with the dead. They didn’t want a giant death mound (whose weight might have crushed the hill), a monument to rot, dominating the city’s skyline.
All ended in shame for Willson. His pyramid idea was pilfered by a French architect. After accusing his colleague of intellectual theft, he was sued for libel. But what if the idea for the Metropolitan Sepulchre was just the selfie stick of mortality, arrived before its time? Every giant leap we take to redesign deathcare comes with the caveat that the idea might end up in the pile with other chindōgu.
Just five minutes from the Ryōgoku station, right around the corner from the Sumo Hall in Tokyo, is one of the highest-tech funeral facilities in the world. On your lunch break you can hop on the train, walk past the wrestlers in their patterned kimonos, and arrive at Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen, a multistory temple and graveyard.
Daitokuin Ryōgoku Ryoen looks more like an office building than a typical graveyard. The facility exudes a corporate feel, starting with the neatly dressed public relations woman who met us in the lobby. She worked for Nichiryoku Co., overall the third largest Japanese funeral company, but number one in the indoor cemeteries and graves market. “We are the pioneers of indoor facilities,” she explained, “and the only large funeral company that is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”
My DIY bias led me to identify more with the quirky-independent-monk light-up-Buddha team, but I had to admit that Nichiryoku Co. had discovered a market. In the 1980s, the price of land in Tokyo skyrocketed. In the 1990s a tiny grave could go for 6 million yen ($53,000 US). The market was ripe for more affordable, convenient, urban options (say, a cemetery right off the train).
Of course, being close to the train station isn’t what makes the cemetery high-tech. The facility manager took us on a tour, starting with a long hallway with hyper-reflective black flooring and bright white overhead lighting. Lining each wall were individual pods, with privacy coverings made of translucent green glass. The whole impression was that of a 1980s movie imagining “the future,” a design choice I endorsed.