The ageing society of Japan is facing a mass-death era of close to 1.6 million death per year.
If you know Japan, most of the land is inhabitable due to mountaineous and vocanic regions or forests that have not been handled well in the past half a century.
Why do we want online memorial service in Japan?
What are the differences between Japan and US/Europe?
Why has it not picked up in the market?
Abstract:
In the past 30 years, Japan’s ageing society has been grown and growing.
According to the numbers, Japanese government has been watching these numbers since the 1970’s.
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/www1/wp/wp00_4/chapt-a1.html
In 1970, there were 7.39M people at the age of 65+, which was 7.1% of the total population.
By 2000, there were 21.87M people over 65+ which consisted of 17.2% (1 out of 6 people were 65+).
Simultaneously, the decrease in birthrate became more concrete.
By 2000, population of ages from 0 to 14 were 18.6M people. There were 3.27M more elderly people.
Japan has now reached the age of Ultra-Aging Era in 2010, where people over 65 consist of over 23%.
By 2020, ages of 65+ people have risen to 33.34M thus accumulating to 26.9% of the total population of Japan. On the other hand, this also means that many children born during these era will live up to the age of 80+ years due to social infrastructure benefits and society’s well-being.
New technology has come
Ageing society has created high death rate in the recent years.
More people are living in the cities than ever before due to convenience of living including medical care.
In the suburbs and more in the rural area, people who need medical attentions are not being treated well as they can due to lack of clinics and hospitals.
This includes obstetrics and gynecology where young cannot give birth or even pay for a check up, creating both young and old moving out of small towns and shifting towards larger cities.
These larger cities have places to work as well. There is a job market for both young and middle ages.
As for the elderlies, there are nursing homes close to their sons and daughters where they can come for a visit when needed.
Due to people living where more convenient, they abandon their rural homes where they were born.
They find nursing homes for their parents post-retirement when needing support.
This means that they would have to “close” their family graves if they can and depart from the temples where they ask their services to be held.
They might just keep the temple but close their grave and move their ancestors’ remains to a mausoleum or ossuary. This cuts cost of maintenace as well and when the contracted time is up (about 30 years), the bones (not ashes) are placed in a vault with others and not in a separate stall (booth).
We also see these small graves in groups instead of a old fashioned grave yards.
Confronting all the issues of the ageing society, there are issues of social welfare as well simultaneously due to running out of natinal funds. Ageing society is not a sustainable system where people spend more than they accumulated in their lifetime.
There were also misuse of the funds in the past where the government had to sell off facilities at a dirt cheap price to civilian companies. These facilities were used as “sanatoriums” for the companies that paid for social welfare as a training centers with hotels in a resort area.
We are now in the era of WEB3 in 2025. AI has come to challenge the world of old society.
Still, people are using WEB2 based systems in memorial areas since many do not understand blockchain technology. These peoplel are the frontline funeral servicing companies where there are no tech savvy personnels.
Funeral industry in Japan has been very parochial and conservative in technologies for the past 40 years in Japan. The industry still use fax machines as the main method of sending information.
Japan is 99.97% cremation country.
Those are buried (not cremated are “privilated” and we have many unsolved issues with religion.
People don’t realize that there is no place in the urban communities and you have to go way out of civilization for burial, where bears can come and dig up
The first delay was the implementation of PC from proprietry word processing machines.
Many did not trust and stilld don’t trust the spreadsheet app and still use abacus or calculators to verify the results across Japan, not only in the funeral industry.
The industry still relied on the yellow page phonebook listing and not registered in Yahoo and such.
NTT, the telephone company, distributed yellow page phonebook to each household until last year!
Then Google came with scraping data.
People still did not use Google ads but relied on telemarketing (not robo-calls).
I’m not saying that telemarketing is bad, it is actually very good to leave an impression (both good and bad).
Many companies were slow in utilizing the social media.
BTW, usage of Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn in the death industry can fire back in 2025.
These SNS do not understand the context of the Japanese death industry and the wordings.
Meta has to learn quite a lot regarding the blackboxed ancient Japanese funeral industry secrets.
Most companies still don’t have a homepage to represent their companies.
We’re in 2025 and just X and Instagram? Some even don’t have any SNS presence.
(I deleted my Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/X account on Dec. 31, 2024 due to these companies not understanding the Japanese death industry issues, having to delete my post regarding death, mourn, funeral, sadness.)
Now we are left behind in the AI era.
The industry’s closed society created a havac of no real information on funeral services in Japan.
There are many different Buddhist sects with different rituals across Japan.
Funeral services are very parochial in servicing area. People might encounter different ritual even towns five miles apart or just crossing a river under a same Buddhist sect.
Such information have never been disclosed thus AI has no knowledge.
AI is not aware of many Japanese laws regarding burial and death issues causing a lot of hallucinations in the answers. AI gains knowledge from people’s post in their blogs with opinions. These opinions many not reflect other areas where rituals differ thus causing an error in cognition in the society.
Why do we want online memorial service in Japan?
What are the differences between Japan and US/Europe?
Why has it not picked up in the market?
There has been few memorial services but most of them are WEB3 based services.
Many of them rely on the company’s ability to sustain the business operation.
I have spoken to many companies that have entered the market and they all say that “We can keep on doing this for many years!”
NO, YOU NEED TO DO IT FOREVER!
All of these companies end up folding their operation within a year since they simply cannot make money thus leaving the first customers in the dark.
It’s a memorial site and people come and visit to pray, mourn and cherish.
It’s not an entertainment system that you can just cut off.
Why do we want online memorial service in Japan?
WE LACK THESE OPERATONS IN JAPAN.
PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND BLOCKCHAIN CAPABILITIES.
BLOCKCHAIN ARE REGARDED EVIL AND HIGHLY TAXABLE (BTW, still very much regulated in cryptocurrency and some of us in the industry, such as myself are talking with politicians to waive the laws and deregulate.).
WE WANT A PLACE FOR DECENDANTS TO SEE WHO AND WHAT WE WERE AS AN EVIDENCE OF LIFE.
What are the differences between Japan and US/Europe?
There is no such as digital orbituary system in Japan.
You can’t search for people who have died in your town or anywhere for privacy issues.
In matter of fact, peoplel do not post orbituaries to the public.
These are usually done by old medai, such as newspaper for the well-known and celebrities.
Why has it not picked up in the market?
Simply put, no one really needed or actually are aware of such system.
No one has actually thought of it as a new business in the death industry, especially where it matters if you are a stone masonry business that takes care of graveyards (both public and private, including temples)
Is there a market for that in Japan?
That’s the million dollar question.
The answer to that is YES.
But we need to nurture and dwell on it.
Having said above, due to people “closing” the family grave, if they can (there are many high hurdles that need to jump over, especially finding out who’s 6 feet under (actually about 2 feet) in the storage area of placing urns under the tombstone), there is no place for the new remains (bones) to store thus people turning to scattering services, if possible.
Scattering is not the final solution.
At the crematorium, the remains are still in big chunks of bones.
Japanese are known to cherish bones and pick them up using chopsticks and placing them in the urn — ritual differs from eastern and western Japan where they pick up all or just parts of the remains.
If scattered, there is no place to actually pray or look into, unless you hold a Buddhist altar at home.
Having these altars, you would have to invite guests, including relatives to your home for each ceremony and that’s not feasible now in Japan in small housing in the cities.
As for scattering, people still want to have something to remember of their loved ones, including pets.
Many cemetaries don’t allow humans and pets together.
Don’t give up yet!
There are many places both real and virtual that you can rest in peace with your beloved pets.
This is the main reason where you want a virtual memorial site, where you can be with someone you really love together (sometimes not your partner or blood-tied family).
In the next 6 months, I will be challenged with many tasks of contacting temples, graveyards, stone mason, funeral parlors that would be willing to join my team.
The bigest challenge is for these people to understand the WEB3 technology, a jump from the stoneage situation to 21st century, or having Mozart to play Rock the Casbah with Clash.
Most of these people have no idea of the difference between the web page, domains and emails. It’s all interent for them.
Thank you for reading until to the very end!
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