Japan’s population is both aging and becoming more single. That means many senior citizens won’t have family who will follow them into the afterlife. In response, one organization is helping seniors find “grave friends” who’ll accompany them into the Great Beyond.
Jiji reports on a Tokyo non-profit organization, Ending Center (エンディングセンター), that arranges for internment of senior citizens’ ashes. (Cremation is the norm in Japan, despite attempts to end it over a century ago.) It does more than that, however. It holds book clubs and other events for small circles of its clients, who range from ages 60 to 80.
They call themselves “grave friends” (墓友; hakatomo). As long as they continue to live, they’ll keep one another company. Once they pass on, they’ll be interred together at the same location.
Buried together
The idea isn’t new: Ending Center has been doing this for 20 years running. Ending uses an internment method called jumokuso (樹木葬), in which – as the word denotes – remains are interred under a tree. The burials don’t require that the deceased leave behind a successor to own and care for the grave site, which makes it ideal for people without children.
Ending Center has two plots in Tokyo and Osaka. People with contracts with the organization can volunteer to help keep the grounds clean, which provides opportunities to stay busy and spend more time with your new, eternal friends.
A key impetus for making “grave friends” is the ability to talk with people one’s age about life – and the end of life. One 79-year-old told Jiji, “I can talk frankly with them about death. When you get old, you get uneasy about things like end of life care. Society has taboos against talking about death. Here, I can casually get others’ advice around subjects like cancer and life-prolonging treatment.”
Others say it feels good to joke freely about death with friends. At one gathering, a woman in her 70s said everyone enjoyed a glass of wine with the toast, “Let’s have another when we meet again in the afterlife.”
Increasingly old, increasingly single
Japan’s population is both increasingly aging and rapidly declining. New statistics show live births dropped to 729,880 in 2024 – the ninth consecutive year of decline. People are also increasingly childless and unmarried, with singles making up 34% of the population. Nearly half of those are senior citizens.
Unless these trends reverse, services like Ending Center may become more popular. Center founder Inoue Haruyo, a researcher specializing in burial services, says she created the NPO specifically because she recognized that traditional cemeteries, which require descendants to oversee them, didn’t meet the needs of modern society.
Inoue says she thinks such services will continue to draw people in. “Death is frightening for anyone. Knowing you have relationships in this life that will follow you in death brings a sense of comfort.”
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