Putting the Squeeze on the Dead

Ryukai Matsushima, the chief monk at Kudokuin Buddhist Temple, glances around the small graveyard a few hundred feet from his office and surveys a jumble of graves crammed into every available square inch.

With a rapidly aging population of 125 million packed into territory the size of California, Japan is running out of more than just housing and living space. It’s also running out of room for the dead.

“Unless we try something new, all of Japan will turn into a graveyard,” the gangly, crew-cut Matsushima says.

Indeed, Japan is trying something new. The pressure to squeeze more and more human remains into less and less space has produced a blizzard of innovative burial options.

Grieving Japanese are lining up to put their relatives in group graves and burial condominiums. The government is offering cheap lockers. For high-tech mourners, there are indoor revolving graveyards and even virtual tombs on the Internet.

Already, more than 97% of Japanese dead are cremated, most in free or heavily subsidized state-run crematories, up from 50% immediately after World War II.

While many American graves resemble beds--reflecting the Christian focus on a symbolic rebirth of the entire body--Japanese tombs can be tall and compact because Buddhists believe the ancestral spirit remains in the bone remnants.

Even so, graveyard space is evaporating.

The problem is exacerbated by the common practice of burying only first-born sons--who also inherit most of the wealth--and their wives in the Japanese ancestral tomb, with others left to start their own line.

This once rather rigid system has frayed as cities expand, nuclear families break down and more married women balk at spending eternity with the in-laws.

Yet Japan’s leaders have failed to tackle issues with ties to the burial problem, notably the scarcity of land, the changing role of women and the lack of long-term financial responsibility. Most graveyards add to the ill will by refusing to accept singles, childless couples or the divorced, concerned that there will be no offspring to pay the eternal maintenance fees.

A sign of the collective angst can be seen in the film “No Grave for Me!”--a 1998 release about a single woman without an ancestral tomb who searches unsuccessfully for a grave.

“Graveyards are an important part of human existence,” notes Yoko Nagae, an anthropologist and president of gravestone maker Kato Gumi Co. “They say a lot about the way you live. You have a very vague, old system, and with the 21st century set to begin, it needs reform. But everyone keeps postponing the problem.”

One industry response is the expansion of mass graves, where people can rest in the company of strangers. Tokyo’s Kudokuin Temple places ashes in thousands of tiny urns under a large, upright rock. Nearby, individual names are listed on a long wall vaguely reminiscent of Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

A Group Tomb of Your Own

Group tombs are attractive to many because they are relatively inexpensive and, given the limited maintenance involved, tend to accept those without children.

In crowded Japan, however, there’s a line for almost everything. Most of Kudokuin’s 2,930 “members” are still alive, including a few farsighted people in their teens and 20s. The temple encourages members to hold parties and share meals so fellow grave dwellers can forge bonds before their final meeting.

In theory, families could keep their ashes at home on the mantle. Under Buddhist custom, however, the remains must be buried after 49 days, when the spirit is said to pass on to the next life.

Some group-tomb operators try for an individualistic touch. Tokyo’s Tochoji Temple gives clients their own hollow brick 4 inches square and 6 inches deep, which is then mortared into “islands” of 81 bricks in an elegant artificial pond. The brick even has enough room for a personal memento, such as eyeglasses or, in at least one case, a golf ball.

By Tokyo standards, this is a bargain. The one-time perpetual fee is $5,900. Perpetual is relative, however. Legally, that’s half a century. Afterward, the temple can move you out of the pond.

Another option is massive “condominium-style” facilities that stack units eight high and resemble airport coin lockers. The Tokyo government’s communal Kodaida Graveyard houses as many as 5,200 units in a round, white building that looks like a giant spaceship resting on a bed of greenery.

But even in Tokyo, where stranded businessmen sometimes sleep in so-called capsule hotels where a “room” is the size of a large coffin, the thought of spending the hereafter in a government locker apparently holds limited appeal. Only half of Kodaida’s low-cost lockers are occupied, despite 30-year rental fees of “just” $3,750. Don’t forget to have your relatives renew, or you could be shipped to some faraway group grave.

Private operators offering more aesthetic and personable locker systems are doing better.

In two long basements in Tokyo’s 300-year-old Gohyaku Rakan Temple, rows of gold and red aluminum “graves” are lined up. Each of the 2,500 fully subscribed units has a door that slides open to reveal an identical family altar. Beneath, locked shelves house up to 18 adult-sized urns, with each locker selling for $20,000, plus a one-time $4,200 maintenance charge.

A young woman stopped by on a recent weekday and explained cheerfully that she was visiting her deceased father to share the news of her upcoming marriage.

Kodo Saito, a Gohyaku Rakan monk, conceded that the basement aisles sometimes get a bit tight when throngs of people show up on holidays and bow in close quarters. But the graveyard’s location in downtown Tokyo also means visitors can come frequently without being inconvenienced.

In an innovative union of movement and miniaturization, Maneiji Temple’s chief monk, Tsutomu Tanaka, has developed an indoor revolving graveyard. Tanaka says he got the idea while watching a Japanese automatic car-park system. “I said, ‘How about making a smaller version for bones instead of cars?’ ” he explains.

In a hushed, austere room, mourners insert a special credit card into a bar-code reader. A computer then alerts a machine behind the gilt-lined wall. Within 40 seconds an urn appears almost magically just as two golden doors slide smoothly open. Push a button, and it disappears.

Tanaka says it’s “100% certain” that the wrong family ashes won’t appear, adding that his system is protected from year 2000 computer problems. Given Japan’s tight space, Tanaka believes his invention is the nation’s memorial wave of the future.

Kudokuin Temple is trying for the ultimate space solution--the virtual tomb. After cremation, one’s ashes would be scattered and relatives could visit your cyber-tomb on the Internet.

“Some people believe your soul can exist on the Internet,” monk Matsushima says. Back at the temple’s office, he boots up his computer for a test ride. Arriving at the Web site, he lights virtual candles and prompts virtual monks to sing. A click of the “soar” icon allows visitors to fly around the temple.

What Do You Want on Your Tombstone?

So far, only four still-living people are signed up for an Internet tomb.

Undeterred, Kudokuin Temple also has patented a system that memorializes the dead by writing their DNA code on a CD-ROM disc and attaching a lock of their hair. Just don’t confuse this disc with your video games. And given all the cloning going on these days, Matsushima says, the discs would have to be safeguarded.

“I really like technology,” Matsushima adds unnecessarily, driving off in a late-model car complete with TV, electronic mapping and a stereophonic graphic equalizer. “People sometimes say I’m not very monk-like.”

One of the drawbacks to Kudokuin Temple’s approach is the Japanese resistance to scattering ashes. The practice was prohibited until 1991 and still runs into concerns about health, environmental consequences and religious harmony.

Up three flights of grubby stairs in a Tokyo neighborhood, Mutsuhiko Yasuda chairs Japan’s ash-scattering society. Yasuda, a former journalist, says his group’s real battle is defending individual rights as it fights Japanese bureaucrats and self-interested gravestone companies trying to regulate ash-scattering out of existence.

“The ashes are 100% harmless. You can drink water mixed with them,” he said, waving his hands passionately. “We want to expand choice, but the government ignores our effort.”

Which brings us to the industry with the most at stake in the graveyard exodus: the gravestone industry, which isn’t taking this lying down. In an effort to lure mourners, firms are marketing immortality with an individualistic, American-style flair. Tombstones now come in the shape of pool tables, trains and more.

“Our philosophy is to turn your heart or mind into stone form,” says Koji Shimomura, chief planner for Ohnoya Co., Japan’s leading gravestone maker.

Among its more unusual offerings is a tombstone shaped like a snail--the product of a contest it held to promote individualized memorials--for a noted snail expert who discovered a new species under a leaf.

“I never realized there were so many different kinds of snails,” designer Kaoru Washida says. “Some twist left, some twist right.”

Ohnoya also carved a giant marble cue ball and bronze cue stick atop a stylized billiard table to memorialize a passionate pool player who died in a car accident. Other competitors have carved stone motorcycles; an oversized Japanese chess set for a man who invited his friends to play on his grave; and violins, locomotives and ski slopes for hobbyists.

The company is also seeking an edge overseas, linking up with Vermont’s Rock of Ages Corp. Ohnoya President Hideyuki Osawa calls it “the globalization of the tombstone industry.”

But globalization apparently has its limits. Ohnoya’s Shimomura says he welcomes American expertise, not necessarily its exported stones.

Echoing past claims that American beef is indigestible to Japanese stomachs and foreign skis don’t work on Japanese snow, Shimomura said American tombstones absorb too much water. “Stones from Japan suit the Japanese culture and climate,” he said.