Choice in Economic Contexts

Conceptualizations of Death in a Commercial Context: The Funeral Business in

Present-Day Japan
Daisuke Tanaka
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 CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF DEATH
IN A COMMERCIAL CONTEXT:
THE FUNERAL BUSINESS IN
PRESENT-DAY JAPAN
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Daisuke Tanaka

ABSTRACT

In this study I explore how practices and creativity in the commercial

context conceptualize death in the changing styles of funerals by depicting
the supply of contemporary funeral services. The cases are primarily
based on ethnographic accounts derived from my fieldwork in Japanese
funeral homes. I focus on the work and efforts of the funeral industry that
make innovative services to shape and shift a set of cultural values and
practices in the funerals of today.

INTRODUCTION

The central aim of this paper is to analyze the mechanism of the concep-
tualization of death through observations of contemporary funeral services
and the funeral industry in Japan. Through an ethnographic investigation of
a specific funeral business, I focus not only on routine work in a funeral
home, but also on creativity in the provision of new services as the fruits of

Choice in Economic Contexts: Ethnographic and Theoretical Enquiries

Research in Economic Anthropology, Volume 25, 173–197
Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0190-1281/doi:10.1016/S0190-1281(06)25008-X
173
 174 DAISUKE TANAKA

the successful conceptualization of consumer images, attitudes, values, and

norms associated with death. Although I concentrate on funeral practices,
or death rituals, I will largely avoid ritual studies in anthropology and keep
historical observations on transitions of the funeral industry to a minimum.
This is not because I deny the significance of these related works, but be-
cause I do not want to consider rituals merely as culminations of history and
folk customs. Instead, I want to shed light on these rituals as dynamic social
and commercial interactions between suppliers and consumers that are
subject to rapid change at any time.
Taking a macro view, I present the question: ‘‘How do commercial prac-
tices reify certain contemporary ideas dispersed in a society?’’ But as I set my
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focus on this question, I intend to limit myself and delve into a consideration
of the relationship between contemporary funeral services and the concept
of death as a semimicroscopic issue. In the past, funerals were centered on
static and numerical characteristics of the ontological cycle, where to a
considerable extent public philosophy was predetermined and restricted. On
the other hand, today’s commercial funerals have plastic and dynamic
characteristics – they are a means of the positive embodiment of death and
an expression of specific concepts. The funeral industry is today a provider
of concept-oriented services. This phenomenon not only reveals the dy-
namics of the industry, which permeates even the most significant aspects of
death, but also provides an effective key to overcoming the dichotomous
scheme that would vaguely categorize the problématique of death and in-
dustry into physis (nature) and technê (technology/culture).
The funeral homes of today not only mediate between culturally con-
structed values and repugnance for secularization, but also sometimes pro-
vide a set of renewed or customized concepts and practices for their
customers just as other service industries do. This means that they dem-
onstrate industrial driving forces to absorb, converge, and shift the cultural
styles of death through the bilateral relationship between suppliers and
consumers, which can be seen as one social circuit to embody certain and
visible styles of death. This is what I wish to pursue in this paper: industrial
power to conceptualize and make state-of-the-art styles of death in the form
of commercial services.

STUDYING THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY

Before proceeding further, I would like to briefly discuss the genealogy of

studies on the funeral industry, in order to place my arguments within its
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 175

broader field. Strictly speaking, the academic study of the funeral industry
virtually originated not in neutral inquiries, but in the active criticisms of
North American and British consumers who felt they were paying too much
for funerals. The pioneering figures of critical studies on the U.S. and U.K.
funeral industries began to appear in the first half of the 20th century (for
instance, see Bowman, 1959; Gebhart, 1928; Wilson & Levy, 1938). Al-
though some studies focused on pure academic implications from a fairly
neutral stance,1 they generally reflected a kind of apprehension or uneas-
iness regarding the secularization of death which surged among people as
the influence of the funeral industry increased.
This uneasiness had become linked with a trend toward thinking more
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positively about death. In academic trends other than the funeral industry
studies, such thoughts stimulated scholars in various disciplines to classify not
only their behavior, but also their attitudes, images, and meanings of death
based mainly on medical and terminal phases. For example, Kübler-Ross’s
(1969) On Death and Dying probably exercised the most sensational influence
on the formation of the so-called Death Awareness Movement among both
the academics and the nonacademics. The core of her research was to for-
mulate clinical knowledge and practices for both dying persons and medical
professionals by classifying psychological attitudes according to terminal proc-
esses, such as ‘‘denial,’’ ‘‘anger,’’ ‘‘bargaining,’’ ‘‘depression,’’ and ‘‘accept-
ance.’’ And indeed, it was also an academic trial to shape a more desirable,
acceptable, and practical concept of death and dying by gathering clinical data.
As for the funeral industry studies, Mitford’s (1963) best-seller book, The
American Way of Death was published in the middle of the Death Aware-
ness Movement in the 1960s with the consumeristic criticisms of invented
traditions and expectations of a more desirable death. Both Mitford and
Kübler-Ross encouraged society to consider death in new ways, and the
former coherently appealed to her readers to reflect on both the mode of
death and the way of living by the use of a critical perspective that made the
point that Americans had been carrying out a custom referred to as tra-
ditional without realizing it (1963, p. 17). However, as journalistic criticisms
based on a ‘‘commercialization-equals-secularization’’ premise came to the
foreground, the idea that the industry was worthy of objective scientific
study faded. General books that pursued Mitford’s consumerist perspective
subsequently appeared, but scientific efforts themselves tended to rely on
sophisticated analyses designed to counter the blatant criticisms of the fu-
neral industry. This role was mainly assumed by sociologists, and such
studies in the 1970s and 1980s largely shared the focus on organizational
structure or internal communication from a labor-sociological perspective.2
 176 DAISUKE TANAKA

Several studies attempting to minutely grasp the work of funeral homes

through long-term fieldwork have appeared more recently, with the emer-
gence of a new trend aiming at the exploration of a broader ‘‘sociality of
death’’ (for instance, see Charmaz, 1980; Clark, 1993; Howarth & Jupp,
1996; Kearl, 1989). The interesting point is that these works were completely
new efforts, not continuations of themes and approaches taken by earlier
studies, and they did not entertain dogmatic criticisms of commercialization
and secularization that had prevailed until the 1960s. Howarth (1996) car-
ried out fieldwork in London’s East End by becoming a funeral home em-
ployee and carefully documented the ways in which attitudes toward death
become manifest in modern funerals. She gave priority to funeral profes-
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sionals’ perceptions and organization of death rituals and did so in a way

that made sense of their roles (1996, p. 7). In other words, she paid more
attention to the subtleties of internal labor than to the interactions between
funeral professionals and customers.
On the other hand, Suzuki (2000), who conducted fieldwork in a
mutual-aid cooperative (gojokai)3 in northern Kyush % u,% Japan, analyzed
standardized modern funerals (which she later termed ‘‘McFunerals,’’ or
‘‘McDonald-ized funerals,’’ 2003), various funeral services that have arisen
in response to such standardization, and the changes in human relationships
in funerals.4 The notable point in her work is that she paid attention to
tripartite interactions between consumers (or social relationships), produc-
ers (or commodities and services), and cultural values as models with which
to investigate the changing concepts of dying, death, and the deceased in
contemporary Japan (2000, pp. 6–7). I fundamentally share Suzuki’s per-
spective and model, yet my focus here is especially on practices to make
services in commercial relationships between consumers and producers.
Namely, here I abstract the effect of a diachronic transition of social re-
lationships, such as the change in kinship community and its reciprocal
network, and concentrate my analysis on industrial forces to shift cultural
values and conceptualize death. This is partly because Suzuki’s concluding
analysis centered on the process of the construction of new forms of de-
pendence in social relationships (2000, pp. 203–221), though she suggested
that there are some influences from the above tripartite interactions on the
changes of the practice and meaning of funerals. Suzuki did not fully clarify
the range of concepts of death values in contemporary situations, and her
analysis of cultural values in today’s Japanese funerals is, ultimately, neither
more nor less than the following description in her concluding chapter:
‘‘What makes a good funeral is the beautification of the deceased’s life;
honoring their contributions; appreciating their kindness, their generosity,
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 177

and their social achievements; and learning from their good deedsy The
dead are now at the mercy of the living, because it is the living who evaluate
the deceased’s life’’ (2000, p. 214). In regard to this point, I am paying
greater attention to what is goodness/beauty and how these are constructed
in funerals by trying to account for the relationship between the contents of
cultural values of death and commercial practices.

GENERAL OPERATIONS
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From August 2004 until the time of this writing I have been carrying out
fieldwork by serving as an employee of Nichihoku Co., Ltd., which has its
head office in Suginami Ward, not far from central Tokyo. Nichihoku is
listed on JASDAQ, the Japanese version of NASDAQ, but a listing on the
stock market in the funeral industry is very rare. I chose this large company
as the subject of my study to balance out my earlier research in a small-scale
community-based funeral home before 2004. I joined this company as a
new member of its Funeral Department and worked as a ‘‘sub,’’ an assistant
to the funeral director who oversees the staging of funerals. Namely, subs
are apprentices learning the operation of a funeral business. Once they
are satisfactorily accepted by the others, they will progress through other
stages, gradually being entrusted with a more across-the-board job as a
director.

Image Strategy

The work of a funeral home does not quiet down with the completion of a
funeral. It continues without break on a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week mode, and
the schedules of the respective jobs overlap. This is because in principle
funeral homes never refuse client requests, and the job starts as soon as an
employee speaks with a client to provide an estimate, regardless of when a
death occurs. As such, many funeral home personnel are on duty even late
at night. Furthermore, because funeral homes with ‘‘designated funeral
home’’ accreditation from hospitals are generally required to arrive at the
hospital mortuary within a half-hour after a death, many have a night-shift
rotation system. Today’s hospitals, especially public hospitals, often decide
on a designated funeral home by public bidding, but until fairly recently the
main business of funeral homes was conducted directly between them and
the hospitals, and maintaining relationships with hospitals was at the heart
of management.
 178 DAISUKE TANAKA

However, the trend of trying to get orders by paying frequent visits to

hospitals has rapidly decreased in the past 10 years. Mr. Kōichirō Watabe,5
one of the funeral directors of Nichihoku, comments,
It was said in earlier days that a funeral home would never go broke if it had been
designated by a hospital. Butywe all know that in this day and age, business cannot be
stable with only that. It’s just not worth the money because it requires personnel costs
for the night-shift. That’s why even Nichihoku does no business like that, and many
funeral homes are doing the same, you know. In place of that, Nichihoku is spending at
leastywelly50,000,000 yen6 each year on advertising. This is a very large amount!
Small funeral homes are probably just hanging out tiny billboards or listing themselves
in the telephone book, but Nichihoku even does TV commercials. At any rateyyes, a
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funeral home is a hard business to operate.

Indeed, there are difficulties in operating a funeral home that are different
from other businesses. This is because directly and actively appealing to
clients to ‘‘have a funeral’’ can be seen as an act of asking the client to die
soon. Until the late 1980s, an exposure of the funeral industry through the
media other than obituaries was almost a tacit taboo.
But the situation has changed. Even from the time when many funeral
homes were community-based, and in particular since the 1980s, funeral
homes and mutual-aid cooperatives with much capital have arisen, and the
technique of appealing to a large, unspecified number of clients, rather than
only to a narrow range, gradually took precedence. At the same time, as did
Nichihoku, many companies decreased, or even discontinued, business with
hospital practices that ran up operating costs. Instead, they tried to spread
the image of their companies, aiming for mass appeal.
In that sense, Nichihoku emphasizes image strategy and regularly takes
out large newspaper ads, airs TV commercials, and also has produced and
broadcast its own introduction show on cable television. It has even devel-
oped an advertisement appealing to consumers with images of sweet little
girls, flowers, and such words as ‘‘sincerity’’ and ‘‘just for you,’’ without
showing the somber aspects of death and also by gently pleading, ‘‘Let us
take care of everything if anything should happen.’’ These images mediate
between the commercial solicitation and the beautification of death.

Networking and Accumulated Knowledge

As with other business categories, countless elements must be mastered.

Besides the types and handling of funeral accessories, the location of
temples, ceremonial halls, and crematoriums, the knowledge of religious
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 179

doctrines, the difference of funerals by religious sects, regional customs, how

to host, and how to treat clients in such traumatic situations as the loss of
loved ones, there are myriad items of importance that must be recognized,
and it is hard to define what is important and what is not. But I would say
that the ability to coordinate many services at once is one of the most
important abilities of a funeral home staff member.
For instance, the usual roles for a funeral include the caterer, the florist,
the taxi company and the photographer. At times a funeral home is required
to find and negotiate for a service that is not usually associated with fu-
nerals, such as audio equipment services, if requested by a client. There are
many other responsibilities, and a funeral home must maintain relationships
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with local authorities who are involved in the procedures for submitting the
death registration and also with religious personalities, mainly the priests of
Buddhist temples. In a Buddhist funeral, the priest is formally regarded as
the ultimate authority regarding the funerary ritual, though the funeral staff
and the mourners’ sadness are other matters. Yet the disintegration of re-
lationships between the general public and Buddhist temples appears to be
progressing, and it is thus safe to say that the overall authority of Buddhist
priests has generally diminished. Because of this transition, it has become
fairly common for funeral homes to give working opportunities to priests,
though opposite situations seem to exist, especially in rural areas. The re-
lationship between funeral homes and Buddhist priests has become some-
what of a give-and-take relationship.
I have not attempted to delineate the entire range of funeral industry
work, but we cannot classify any of it as unskilled labor. Besides, knowledge
of the enormous variety of jobs that are carried out in day-to-day affairs is
passed down from the director to the subordinate or from a skilled to an
unskilled worker in accordance with the legitimate peripheral participation
theory of Lave and Wenger (1991). Just as funeral homes assume the quality
of an apprentice system, it is also possible to think of their organization as a
community of practice with shared objectives. However, there is an extra
sense that must be developed by the individual funeral professionals because
it is often necessary to provide on-the-spot services, such as giving sugges-
tions to the bereaved on the type of funeral and finding a style that matches
the many needs of the client by relying on highly personal experience and
knowledge. The accumulation of such information by trial and error shapes
a consumer’s abstract needs into certain beautified concepts and styles of
death that are gradually but constantly renewed and reflected in the business
of funeral homes.
 180 DAISUKE TANAKA

NEW PRACTICE, NEW SERVICES

The Altar: Innovating Visions and Concepts

What kind of new services, then, have been produced or innovated? In other
words, what kinds of funeral practices have evolved, been renewed, received
innovation, and formed into new styles? Probably the most noticeable
transformation in the form of funerals in recent years is the change to a
funeral altar, and this also means a shift in the spatial dramaturgy of the
funeral.
Before Japan’s high-growth period, the center of activity – the focal
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point – in a funeral was actually the funeral procession; it was not practiced
in a closed space with an altar installed in the center. However, as human
relations within local communities gradually attenuated and as the mean-
ing of funeral shifted from ‘‘sending off by the community’’ to ‘‘visit of
condolence’’ (Murakami, 2001, p. 144), the ritual space also shifted from a
lineal scene of movement through the funeral procession to a point scene,
that is, a fixed space such as a home or a funeral hall. A person’s death came
to be observed in a fixed place in which an altar takes center stage. When
more importance was attached to the funeral procession, most funeral
accoutrements were associated with the procession; thus the altar hardly
had any decor (Yamada, 2001, p. 120) and was considered to simply be
another funeral item of an importance considerably lower than that of
today.
However, funeral homes ‘‘rediscovered’’ the altar as a good with the
potential to become a very symbolic item, and by giving it a sense of luxury
a new practice was developed. Placing an altar, an item with low importance
among funeral items, at the center of the funeral came to be by the orig-
inality and ingenuity of the funeral industry, and once the new style of altar
had become sufficiently accepted by people, consumers started to demand
more luxurious altars. To fulfill these demands, the funeral homes created
altars that were more finely crafted and sculpted. Over time, these items
have come to constitute the motif of rebirth to the world after death through
visual representation. Fig. 1 shows a plain wood alter (shiraki saidan), which
is still the most popular altar today, with its characteristic design combining
the image of death leading to the afterlife, and traditional and religious
images.
However, the ‘‘innovated’’ version of the plain wood altar has recently
emerged and is becoming widely popular. It is a ‘‘fresh flower altar’’ (seika
saidan – Fig. 2). Nichihoku has handled only fresh flower altars from the
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 181
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Fig. 1. A Plain Wood Altar (Shiraki Saidan) (Photographed by the Author).

Fig. 2. A Fresh Flower Altar (Seika Saidan) (Photographed by the Author).

 182 DAISUKE TANAKA

time it first entered the funeral industry, and it has set up a special division
within the company so that the production of flower altars would not be
subcontracted to vendors. With these business efforts, the chance Nichihoku
took in becoming specialized in flower altars has so far turned out to be
successful. This is not a mere conversion of materials from wood to flower.
As far as Nichihoku is concerned, from the beginning the company was
sensitive to increasing criticism that plain wood altars were old-fashioned
and that the high price per altar, as if they were disposable goods and could
not be reused (even though they could), was an indication of a money-driven
business.
At the same time, many bereaved families I have met, and also people
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who have begun to consider their own funerals, wished to crown their de-
parture with flowers. Some cite reasons such as ‘‘they’re pretty’’ or ‘‘they’re
natural’’ for wanting a flower altar, but the ability to customize an altar with
flowers of their choosing is also a strong factor in the popularity of such
altars. Namely, flower altars not only strike a fresh note, but also provide
the potential for greater flexibility than plain wood altars to match pref-
erable aesthetic tastes, to reflect private metaphorical motives, and to shape
the concept of death desirably in the form of customized services. Today,
not only through the display of fresh flowers, but also in playing the favorite
music of the deceased, funeral homes are striving to meet client needs by
constantly developing new ideas to make the entire ceremonial representa-
tion of ‘‘a death that is uniquely me (or him, or her)’’ which is now almost
cliché in funeral homes’ advertisements.

Commercializing Exchanges: Between Professionalization

and Secularization

However, new funeral practices are not limited to arranging space. There are
also other more promotional innovations in the industry today. For exam-
ple, many facilities have introduced funeral prebooking and also member-
ship systems. For example, Nichihoku has a membership system called the
Flower Club, and for people who join (by paying an initiation fee of 30,000
yen)7 the company will provide free estimates in advance that are decidedly
lower than what it would cost to arrange a funeral postmortem. Also,
members receive newsletters and free invitations to various events. They can
therefore clarify their wishes for their own funerals. A membership system in
Japan handled by mutual-aid cooperatives rapidly expanded after World
War II. Each member would save a prescribed amount of money each
month, and in return a funeral equivalent to the savings would be provided
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 183

on his or her death. But the prebooking service of today is different because
it seeks to retain clients with a membership fee and without the saving
system. With this strategy, the consumer’s desire to choose the contents
and form of the funeral before death coincides with the client-retaining
strategy of the funeral home. For example, Mr. Masakazu Abe, a salesman
of Nichihoku’s funeral division, gave a sales talk in negotiations of funeral
prebooking with his customer as follows,
You might think such money talk is quite indecent behaviorybut I’d like you to simply
consider what kind of funeral is suitable, and it is exactly the same as you deciding your
own way of handing miscellaneous affairs in daily life. It is a bit unreasonable and
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nonsensicalyif you can decide and make good with your life EXCEPT with your
funeral, isn’t it? I think now you can seize a good opportunity to think about your own
life by choosing what style of funeral matches you the most. You don’t have to be tied
down by stereotypes. You don’t have to be interrupted by someone. Plus, you can avoid
giving your family or someone else worry. We will seek it together and offer the best.
Butyit’s a bit late after you have passed away.

These cases of innovations in more commercial aspects provide intri-

cate problems for us. How does the funeral industry mediate consumers’
mental rejections of involvement with money talk in death and funerals? As
one potential answer, we may indeed be able to attribute it to an institu-
tional but obscure inertia within the monopolized forces of the industry
under the process of professionalization. However, we perhaps must argue
again whether we can regard today’s funerals as ‘‘Mcfunerals,’’ conceptu-
alized by Suzuki as having strong rationalization and professionalization at
their cores (2003, p. 51), mentioned above. Funeral home personnel are
often very professional, almost like artisans, especially if they are partic-
ularly skilled or experienced, and surely they do try hard to sell package
plans to customers and to stay on schedule. But this does not mean that
funeral homes as suppliers completely determine the delivery and quality of
their services. There are actually numerous, flexible, and fragmented options
in one package set up by a funeral home. They do not mind breaking the
fixed frame of the package service, and they sometimes strategically suggest
such deviation as acquiring consumer satisfaction and additional profit.
Furthermore, perhaps it is helpful to consider another essential factor in
commercial transactions: the price. According to statistics compiled by the
All Japan Federation of the Societies of Funeral Businesses (Zen-Nihon
Sōsaigyō Kyōdō Kumiai Rengōkai) and the Japan Consumer’s Association
(Nihon Shōhisha Kyōkai) in 2003, the average expenditure to a funeral
home is 1,504,000 yen8 (2003, p. 26) per funeral, though funeral prices are
showing a tendency to decline today because of severe competition. Due to
 184 DAISUKE TANAKA

the amount of money involved and contemporary consumer senti-

ments, semipermanent and high-handed standardization will never be per-
mitted.
Whether there is an interrelation between the level of prices and the extent
of standardization is a difficult question, and we surely can find some ex-
amples of relatively expensive commodities and services like cars, houses,
and communications in which contents and lineups are somewhat stand-
ardized. But as I explained above, the core of funeral services is different
from such tangible, material, and inflexible services. Therefore it is not very
appropriate to solely adopt the concept of rationalization and standardi-
zation with a nuance of Fordism. If these elements are the only driving
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forces behind the creation of new funeral practices, fresh flower altars and
prebooking services both should not have shown such a tendency to expand.
A plain wood altar can be reused, and it can always be prepared in a
warehouse. On the other hand, it requires considerable time to make a fresh
flower altar and efforts to obtain flowers to meet a customer’s request.
Prebooking and membership systems also require efforts and expenditures
to manage the system.
However, we cannot hastily conclude that customers now can make all
choices freely. In general, consumers have pecuniary limits. And they some-
times cannot help depending on suggestions from a funeral home, especially
when they have only a vague conception of death and funerals or when they
fall into confusion caused by deep grief. On the other hand, there are also
some styles of funerals such as living funerals (seizensō) and nonreligious
%
funerals (mushukyōsō) which have appeared due to the initiative of con-
sumers in their reactions to the current tendency of funeral professionals to
possess and control the knowledge of funerals (Suzuki, 2003, pp. 64–68).
What we must do is not give a privileged position to either supply or de-
mand, but to recognize their variable and situational power relationship.
From this viewpoint, the renewal of services and the concepts of death
indeed come from unremitting collision and mediation between supply and
demand forces. Although this is in a sense contradictory, it means that the
major source of innovations in funerals comes from the fact that ‘‘death’’
and ‘‘money talk’’ are ultimately irreconcilable while today’s broader cul-
tural framework of mental rejection against secularization of death will
survive. In this sense, laying stress on the private domain of consumers in
today’s funeral services is not only the result of transitions in social rela-
tionships, but also a commercial strategy to diminish the odor of pecuniary
aspects, as Mr. Abe’s painstaking sales talk shows.
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 185

HANDLING THE REMAINS

Deathwork and Professionalism

Thus the work of a funeral home is paradoxical because the hints of any
service considered commercial must be carefully concealed while the com-
pany representative sincerely expresses his presence as being solely to serve
the client. The prime example of that skillful concealment is when the re-
mains of the deceased are handled. In any event, being an industry that
handles death and remains highlights the great difference between the fu-
neral industry and other industries. Funeral homes must treat the deceased
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and the bereaved family in a matter-of-fact way. Their conduct must be both
objective and respectful, and they must express quiet sympathy with no loss
of control in the face of death, qualities demanded of them throughout their
dealings with relatives and friends of the deceased (see Unruh, 1979).
This can be regarded as the kind of work in which arbitrarily manipu-
lating or oppressing emotions to raise the satisfaction level of a client is
deeply embedded in the work itself, what Hochschild (1983) terms emo-
tional labor. However, it is premature to simply conclude that the stress
caused by oppressing the fear and disgust felt in regard to a dead body,
along with the struggle to execute the work, is especially troubling for fu-
neral home personnel. Handling a dead body does indeed elicit an emotion
that differs among people, but the matter is much more complex. Even as an
employee, I have not yet found the words, or even the thoughts, to express
the emotion. However, the constant, undeniable awareness of death in daily
work sets the funeral business apart from other industries, and I have ob-
served in my fieldwork that this shared awareness and the practice of dealing
with death and handling corpses are important elements that build the pro-
fessionalism of funeral home personnel.
Again in regard to their professionalism, Howarth, referring to Millerson
(1964), states that ‘‘skill based on knowledge,’’ ‘‘training and education,’’
‘‘demonstration of competence by passing a test,’’ ‘‘maintenance of integrity
by adherence to a code of conduct,’’ ‘‘a professional organization,’’ and ‘‘the
provision of a service for the public good’’ are of major importance in the
industry (1996, p. 18). Although I do agree in consideration of my own
experiences, the greatest source of professionalism for funeral home per-
sonnel seems to be handling death itself. In a way it is absurd, and though
they half-jokingly mock themselves by describing their professional status as
death-handlers, they also derive a feeling of pride from their profession. For
 186 DAISUKE TANAKA

them, handling death is undertaking the body itself, and they must deal with
the bodies as everyday work.
There exist not only negative or dark emotions, but also a mix of complex
emotions, such as somber respect for the dead body, reactions to prejudice
against them and their co-workers, and pride as the people who control
death beyond the mortuary. And these emotions also lead to confidence that
the work can be carried out only by them and to their sense of achievement
in creating a funeral by steadily managing duties that have been broken
down into segments. However, these emotions are not automatically or
instantly built within an individual. They are gradually cultivated through
the routine of services within the network of staff and clients, between the
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staff and service providers, and also among the personnel. Moreover, the
conceptions of ‘‘to die,’’ ‘‘dead person,’’ and ‘‘a desirable way to die’’ are
endemic aspects of the day-to-day work, and these are constantly exchanged
in the work area.

Embalming

The above-mentioned description is about their internal work to handle the

deceased. Because this is indeed the core of deathwork, diverse knowledge
and information have been accumulated on how to handle the remains in
their history of 140 years. Then how are their efforts crystallized into new ser-
vices? Among relatively new methods,9 embalming is an interesting practice.
In Japan, where most bodies are cremated, embalming has not been as
widely practiced as in the United States. Nichihoku also does not include
embalming in its basic package, but some of the other major funeral homes
have established special embalming departments, and this is gradually
spreading across the industry. However, there are very few Japanese em-
balmers, so specialists are sought in the U.S. for work in Japan. For North
Americans, embalming is probably nothing new and is a practice almost
incidental to a funeral service. But this is not so in Japan. The practice of
decorating and cleaning, such as washing or applying makeup to a dead
body (see also Suzuki 2000, pp. 179–202) has been a long-honored tradition
in Japan. On the other hand, embalming basically comprises the extraction
of blood from the body, injection of a compound liquid with a preservative
and other drug solutions in it, and adjusting the skin color. At times a
damaged part of the body will be restored with putty. At least for most
Japanese, embalming is not only a state-of-the-art technique, but also
something scientific and even medical that has been introduced to Japan
from different areas. Yamada (2003) remarked on this point as follows,
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 187

Globalization of culture is not an exception, even in the funeral field. As funerals are
done as part of an economic act of using the funeral home, various technologies, in-
formation, and ideas are becoming easily accessible, and these started to cross the bor-
dery.Embalming may not sound familiar to many of you, but it is a technology of the
antiseptic preservation treatment of the corpse that is conducted as part of the funeral
process in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Embalming has been practiced in
Japan since 1988, and in the year 2000, a total of 10,187 remains were embalmed.
Because deaths total up to a million people or less per year, the number of embalming
cases has come to account for 1% of the number of all deaths. Embalming is not just
something related to the funeral, but it is a direct treatment technique on the body of the
dead, which is the true basis of funeral ritual and the concept of life and death. Tra-
ditionally, the funeral industry in Japan has considered the spread of embalming in the
United States to be due to the background of the idea of revival in Christianity, or burial
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under the earth, and it was generally believed that embalming would not be embraced in
Japan. However, when embalming was actually introduced, it came to be practiced in
1% of the total annual deaths in just over 10 years. (pp. 37–38; author’s translation)

In Japan, almost all remains are cremated. Therefore even if the remains are
embalmed, they will later be incinerated. We can say that the cremation and
the burial are basically the same in the sense that the remains go to a place
where they cannot be seen. However, the ‘‘viewing’’ as done at American-
style funerals, a practice in which a beautifully groomed dead body is laid
where it is visible for the family members and mourners to greet and say
their farewells, is not often seen in Japan. At most, the face can be seen
through the window of the coffin.
Then why is there a need for embalming? Many bereaved family members
I encountered in my fieldwork research showed their interest clearly
not in ‘‘preservation,’’ but in ‘‘restoration’’ of the body. At the same time,
I realized that most of them use surprisingly almost the same expressions:
‘‘I simply want to get back his (or her) real and natural figure.’’ Of course
these responses include situations where a person has became so weak
through a long-term struggle against disease and his or her appearance has
drastically changed, or where the body has become so damaged that people
cannot bear to view it. But, in other words, they all wish to make the
deceased look as if he or she is alive until the moment of becoming bones
and ashes. For clients who request embalming, the reality of death and the
dead person should be adjoined to the horizon of a life that secured his or
her naturalness. In this respect, embalming in Japan is not only an imported
know-how, but also a new technology to provide reality and naturalness,
both of which are conceptualized as the desirable way of death, through a
restoration of the remains. And this naturalness does not mean a naked,
damaged, and ugly figure of the dead body, but a created, desirable, and
beautiful appearance of what he or she should be.
 188 DAISUKE TANAKA

DISCUSSION

Dignity, Aestheticism, Authenticity, and Scarcity

I have described the work of the funeral home and the modern aspect of the
funeral services regarding the formation of commercial network, advertising
strategy, visual production, customer acquisition, form of contract, han-
dling of the remains, and embalming. And the value that has been man-
ifested in these cases was reified in verbal expressions such as ‘‘beautiful,’’
‘‘new,’’ ‘‘real,’’ ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘unique,’’ ‘‘customized,’’ ‘‘private,’’ ‘‘my (your,
his, her) own,’’ and so on. Because these expressions are simple, they might
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give impressions that are less dramatic than expected. But the problem is not
simple, considering that they accompany the value judgment that specifies
an ideal form of both death and commercial service. These expressions of
value are not separate from one another; they are often united and used
synonymously. However, as an appropriate classification for discussion, I
divide them into four groups: ‘‘dignity,’’ ‘‘aestheticism,’’ ‘‘authenticity,’’ and
‘‘scarcity.’’ This classification is not to show that the funeral service in
practice will need to converge into one of a categorical one-to-one rela-
tionship, but is a model for discussing the issue stated at the beginning of
this paper on the relationship between contemporary funeral services and
the concept of death. Let me describe the contents of the four groups,
referring to the presented cases.
First we will start with dignity. This is a classic problem in the study of
death and of course has been a major aspect of human death rituals and
arrangements for far longer. It can be seen as a prohibitive norm connected
to the ethics of death. This is the same in the present, and the consumer
side’s rejection of secularization, seen everywhere in the presented cases,
typically indicates this. Therefore, the elements where funeral homes have
the most difficulty in bringing out creativity also exist in this point.
The friction caused by this, however, sometimes becomes a driving force in
the creation of new funeral services. For example, with fresh flower altars,
the fact that the flowers are used only once appeals to the customers. Also,
prebooking systems appeal to the public because they can be used to avoid
suspicions of having been sold an especially expensive funeral service amidst
confusion in a moment of grief. These were innovations for customer sat-
isfaction. By considering the dignity of death and the dead, and also of the
customer as well, the funeral industry mediates the friction of death and
industry. In both, past practices are far better in terms of efficiency (as
mentioned before): compared with fresh flower alters, plain wood alters not
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 189

only save a lot of time and money – no need to purchase and arrange flowers
each time – but they can also be reused almost indefinitely, and prebooking
systems need extra manpower and an electronic system to manage. How-
ever, these innovations tap into new sources of profit by introducing a new
aesthetic sense – beautifying death – and by promoting the idea that think-
ing of death while alive is not ethically wrong.
Second, there is the matter of aestheticism. In past funerals, the aesthetic
sense was mainly exercised in aligning funeral items according to religious
principles, or in correctly carrying out the ritual practice according to a
traditional regional order. Therefore, the manifestation of aestheticism in
the past was realized through an impulse similar to correctly placing to-
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gether the pieces of a puzzle, one by one, instead of actively searching for
creativity. On the other hand, the focus of aestheticism today is to display
that the ‘‘practice is actively selected.’’ A typical example of this is the active
presentation of the funeral space, and by allowing the consumer to select
which flowers to be used and how the positioning of the lighting will be and
what songs will be played, the consumer’s aesthetic sense will be stimulated.
These aspects, in some sense, indicate the quality of the funeral industry as a
cultural industry. Normally, a cultural industry usually has a category re-
lated to art at its core, but if we look at this industry in a wider perspective,
as an industry that focuses on creativity and whose output qualifies as a
cultural commodity (Throsby, 2001, pp. 112–114), then the funeral industry
clearly contains the qualities needed to be considered a cultural industry.
Third, I consider authenticity. Two elements are closely united. First, is
the dependability of occupational knowledge possessed by expertise. The
funeral industry has obtained traditions and practices that have historically
been the property of communities, and it has been growing by utilizing them
as knowledge rather than by accumulating them simply as information. This
cycle has further improved the expertise of funeral homes and encouraged
differentiation between the supplier and the consumer. In other words, the
present situation, in which holding a funeral without a funeral home is quite
difficult, is significant not only in a practical sense, but also at the mental
(knowledge) level. The other element is the value of the reality and natu-
ralness of death and the remains, as shown in the case of embalming. This
does not refer to the ‘‘gruesome’’ aspect of death, but to the restored and
desired form of death. In this respect, we can say that there is an increase in
the tendency to actively relate the life experiences and the death of a person
to one another.
Finally, we must consider scarcity. If we simply interpret this value as
uniqueness, it is true that the value of scarcity was expressed in funerals
 190 DAISUKE TANAKA

before the development of the funeral industry, in terms of rewarding the

dead. However, in today’s funeral this value is expressed in the commercial
context of ‘‘a customized service just for me.’’ In reality, the customization
of service is not conducted randomly without constraint. However, although
consumers are afraid of derogating from socially appropriate common sense
because they are conscious about funeral trends around them, they try to
gain satisfaction in feeling that ‘‘it is not off-the-shelf, and that I (or we)
have in fact selected it.’’ As stated in the presented cases, this sense is related
to a strong desire for self-expression in funerals. Furthermore, this sense can
also be regarded as a desire to actively express the scarcity value of ‘‘in-
valuable self’’ in the final phase of life. However, before the funeral industry
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emerged as an industry with knowledge and ability, or when it was a source

of goods and manpower, we should be aware that funeral was not a place to
manifest self-expression.

Knowledge and Ability

These four values not only closely relate to one another as stated above, but
they create a certain style of funeral practice by interchanging the meanings
or by prioritization. Moreover, not only are these concepts the source of
desired concepts that can be reflected in the funerals, but they also play the
role of regulating the range of the concept. However, to sufficiently answer
the question this paper raises and to highlight the present qualities of the
funeral service, we need to further consider the elements stated above, es-
pecially on the quality of knowledge possessed by the funeral professionals.
This is because without having their knowledge and its utilization – in other
words, expertise as a basis – there would be no differentiation between
consumers, and as a result it is impossible to gain profit, and the industry
would not have been formed.
Regarding authenticity, I explained above that the funeral industry not
only absorbs information, but also uses it and actively converts it into
knowledge. Information and knowledge are often discussed as synonymous
words, but I would like to clearly separate the two and position information
as an intermediary form of knowledge. As Bateson (1979) stated, ‘‘Infor-
mation consists of differences that make differences’’ (p. 5), information is
an accumulation of vaguely perceived content, but it also includes an el-
ement that allows for further differentiation. The task of transforming in-
formation to knowledge could be called a task to add order, value, and
meaning (Burton-Jones, 1999, pp. 5–7). Therefore knowledge reifies a con-
cept that has a certain direction by closely relating to behavior with a
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 191

purpose, or playing a role as a belief (Dretske, 1981; Nonaka & Takeuchi,

1995, p. 57–58). However, this is only a general scheme of information and
knowledge, and thus we must further deepen the implication of this scheme
to impact the context of commercial activities related to the funeral services.
In the time before the funeral industry was developed, the people who
provided the authenticity of the knowledge on funeral practice were mainly
Buddhist monks and the elders of the local regions. According to the ter-
minology used by Giddens, they were positioned as ‘‘the guardians of tra-
dition,’’ and the reasons why they had great power in the maintenance and
updating of traditional knowledge were because they were believed to be the
agents, or the essential mediators, of its causal powers (1994, p. 65). Are
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experienced funeral workers, then, the guardians in the present age? In

modern Japan, it is difficult to find a grand old man of the region, but
religious people – Buddhist monks for example – still exist, and these are
nearly always present at funerals. About 95% of services in Japan today are
‘‘Buddhist rites,’’ with monks reading the sutras and ritually following
dogmatic interpretations (Zen-Nihon Sōsaigyō Kyōdō Kumiai Rengōkai,
2003, p. 4), and concerning this point, the religious belief or the tradition
itself is still associated with the funeral practice. In consideration of this, it is
difficult to think that the funeral professionals obtained the positions of
guardians, but it is more appropriate to regard them as standing in line with
one another even to this date. However, a commercial context now sur-
passes a traditional context with regard to creating a new funeral practice
and a new concept of death. In a sense, it is based on a very natural differ-
ence of the two. In other words, the commercial context, especially in the
service industry context, has a flexibility to constantly encourage the flow
from information to knowledge, or to provide the knowledge in the form of
updates of the concept and the service.
Referring to Giddens once again on this point, he states that ‘‘expertise is
tied not to formulaic truth but to a belief in the corrigibility of knowledge, a
belief that depends upon a methodical skepticismyexpertise interacts with
growing institutional reflexivity, such that there are regular processes of loss
and re-appropriation of everyday skills and knowledge’’ (1994, p. 84).
I agree with this perspective and believe that there is a clear difference
between knowledge of tradition and knowledge possessed by present funeral
professionals in terms of context, authenticity, and utilization. The funeral
industry has the ability to spread a new concept of death not because it took
the role of providing formulaic truth as monks and elders did in the past,
but because its activities assume the corrigibility of knowledge to provide
segmented truth for each customer. We can thus assume that the funeral
 192 DAISUKE TANAKA

industry will continue to provide an innovative practice and styles of con-

cept that match the era, instead of creating a tradition or a custom. How-
ever, this does not mean that the funeral industry is separated from
tradition. It absorbs even traditions as information and transforms them
into knowledge in a commercial context. This point is graphically indicated
in the case of the transition of the funeral altar, for instance. On the other
hand, it takes into account past traditions, practices, and information sep-
arated from religion (such as information about embalming in North
America or a new customer acquisition strategy) on the same level. The
power to take in such nonconforming elements one after another and to
connect them to service can be considered as the core ability of funeral
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businesses today.

CONCLUSION

We have been looking at the various types of innovations in the funeral

industry and the environment in which they have been created. If we observe
this on an extremely superficial level, commercial innovation may simply
refer to the creation or updating of some type of consumer product, but
innovation in the funeral industry, as explained earlier, is deeply related to
the level of a quite private motif and belief that a customer carries. This is
because the funeral industry handles death, one of the critical events in life.
However, it is necessary for us to once again recognize that funeral workers
are indeed commercial experts. Regarding the implications of ‘‘being an
expert,’’ the following three points can be said. First of all, as stated above,
what the funeral industry proposes and provides is not formulaic truth, but
a propositional truth. Second, when that is reflected in the funeral service, its
basis is performative concept, not referential concept. And third, on the
basis of the legitimacy of funeral experts, there is an active trust rather than
a passive trust on the part of consumers – in other words, a trust that is
formed on the basis of a sense of actively selecting, and reflecting (see Lash,
1994, p. 202).
I do not wish to put any arbitrary priorities on the four main values
mentioned above, however, but most strongly related to this ‘‘sense of
wanting to actively select and reflect’’ are the above-mentioned values of
scarcity and a strong desire for self-expression in a funeral. In past studies
on increased desire for self-expression or privatization in death and funerals,
discussions frequently focus on an overall social transition based on an
assumed classification of traditional/modern/postmodern (for instance, see
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 193

Mellor, 1993; Suzuki, 2003, pp. 53–54; Walter, 1994, 1996) and are usually
grounded in the idea of reflexive modernity or ontological security (Gid-
dens, 1990, 1991, 1994). Furthermore, these approaches are basically ap-
plications of the following propositions, concisely expressed by Beck (1994),
to such events as deaths and funerals: ‘‘The more societies are modernized,
the more agents (subjects) acquire the ability to reflect on the social con-
ditions of their existence and to change them in that way’’ (p. 174). They use
the same framework in the discussion of ‘‘chaos/nomos/cosmos’’ by Berger
(1967, pp. 23–24, pp. 79–80) to acknowledge that there is more anxiety in
death today than in the past. The point of an argument by Berger con-
cerning this can be summarized as follows. The order of meaning as the
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common standard that is shared in everyday life, i.e., nomos, always stands
back to back with chaos, where creating meaning will be impossible at all
times, and especially death as an event brings instability to nomos. In a
traditional society, a ‘‘meaning world’’ (i.e., cosmos) generally uses some-
thing sacred as a shield against chaos, but the weakening and dismantlement
of cosmos as a result of modernization also raises fears of ‘‘meaningless-
ness’’ (Berger, 1967, pp. 22–23; Beckford, 1989, p. 90).
These discussions do not shortsightedly assume that some type of Zeit-
geist exists autonomously, completely separated from individuals, nor do
they simply force the issue of death into a thin veneer of a scheme of ‘‘the
past was good and the present is bad.’’ But their investigations are largely
based on an extreme macro perspective of industrialization, modernization
and social transformation. Thus it is difficult to directly address their dis-
cussions with a micro subject, such as the commercial context of the funeral
industry and the funeral service, and it is not the object of this paper to do
so. However, if those explorations have any influence on this paper, it would
be in the following two points. One is that if, as they indicate, anxiety for
death is relatively high compared to the past, then the funeral industry plays
the role of providing meaning, value, and concepts to counter that anxiety.
The other is that the provision and consumption of modern funeral services
is, as repeatedly stated above, conducted on a teleological level to construct
a ‘‘desirable death’’ concept rather than just on the level of an exchange of
goods and manpower.
These two points are not only about self-expression; they can also be
related to all the values attached to the funeral service. In the background of
these funeral industry activities, we can see the satisfaction of a need for self-
actualization through the consumption of a desire that Lears called thera-
peutic ethos (1983). The pursuit of fulfilling life and continuous growth in
consuming behavior and the existence of a desire to maintain the sense of self
 194 DAISUKE TANAKA

by obtaining new products and services are certainly evident in the funeral
service situation we have been discussing, though I hesitate to make the claim
that death has become a fashion, such as clothes or music, especially con-
sidering the importance of the event of death. But if a funeral service is what
reflects the concept of the way of life and death, the aforementioned cases
obviously show that the concept of death did not come to exist a priori,
coincidentally and ambiguously, and that it can also be generated through a
causal relation with creativity in active commercial practices.
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NOTES
1. For example, Kephart (1950) tried to analyze relationship between class divi-
sions and behavioral differences in funerals that were described in connection with
sociological themes in those days, such as drinking habits, sexual behavior, and so on
(p. 635).
2. A study by Pine (1975) shed light on the role of a funeral director and the
complex and informal human relationship that surrounds funerals by fully utilizing
his own position as heir to a funeral home. Turner and Edgley (1976) tried to place
funerals in a framework of sociological dramaturgy analysis and developed an ar-
gument that the behavior of expression in various aspects roughly defines human
relationships (p. 389). Furthermore, Barley (1983) focused directly on the occupa-
tional codes of funeral directors, which inform their attempts to counteract com-
plications they believe might thwart the presentation of a flawless funeral (p. 4). Such
investigations of the funeral industry appearing from the 1970s to the early 1980s are
unique because the authors tried to actively incorporate major sociological para-
digms of that time, such as the AGIL schema of Parsons (Parsons, Bales, & Shils,
1953) and the dramaturgy theory of Goffman (1959).
3. Mutual-aid cooperatives (gojokai) are also private companies that provide
comprehensive funeral services, and they are almost the same as funeral homes in
this regard. In this paper, ‘‘funeral home(s)’’ is almost synonymous with ‘‘mutual-aid
cooperative(s),’’ unless I do not mention especially the latter. What mainly sets
mutual-aid cooperatives apart from funeral homes is that the former usually have
not only a section for funerals, but also one for weddings, and they fundamentally
rely on their depositors, that is, members who pay a monthly reserve. See also Suzuki
(2000, pp. 53–55).
4. Further, two exhaustive historical examinations of the establishment of and
transitions within the funeral industry in the United States carried out by Laderman
(1996, 2003) shed much light on the general public view of life and death from the
aspect of modern funerals.
5. This is a pseudonym, as are all other personal names of company employees
appearing in this paper.
6. About US$430,000 at an exchange rate of 116.41 yen to US$1 in 2006.
7. About US$250 at the above rate.
8. About US$12,920 at the above rate.
 Funeral Business in Present-Day Japan 195

9. The popularity of ash scattering (sankotsu) is also a new trend. This was orig-
inally carried out by various civic societies without the help of the funeral industry,
but nowadays it is also often incorporated as a service.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe my deepest gratitude to Donald C. Wood, the editor of REA, for his
extraordinary editorial support, persistent encouragement, and creative
comments. I am also grateful for the thoughtful critiques of an anonymous
reviewer for REA and Hikaru Suzuki. However, the final responsibility for
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any inaccuracies and shortcomings is mine. Equally invaluable has been the
support provided by the staff of Nichihoku Co. Ltd, and all the bereaved
families in my field research. Fieldwork upon which this article is based was
funded by a Research Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (17-10954), The Toyota Foundation (D03-A-100), The Matsushita
International Foundation (03-305), and The Shibusawa Foundation for the
Promotion of Ethnology.

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