Photo/Illutration People carry a coffin containing an unclaimed body to be cremated by city officials in eastern Japan in 2023. The man died at a hospital after falling on the street. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

As storage facilities around Japan slowly fill with unclaimed human remains, the welfare ministry will conduct the first survey on how municipalities are dealing with the matter, officials said.

The ministry plans to identify the issues local governments face with these unclaimed bodies based on a hearing of officials and experts and compile a collection of case examples by March, they said.

When no one is found to collect bodies that have been identified, the mayors of municipalities where the residents died cremate the bodies and bury their ashes in accordance with the law on graveyards and burials.

Municipal officials have been shouldering an increasing burden of locating and contacting family members and relatives of the deceased.

Contact information is often unavailable and many people refuse to collect the bodies of relatives that they have long fallen out of touch with. 

“We wonder how far we should go in contacting relatives because many are estranged,” said an official of one municipality.

“The handling of the remains is a delicate matter, and we would be grateful if there were some standards,” the official added.

Ashes are generally stored for a certain period in the event someone shows up to claim them before they are eventually moved to a public burial ground.

However, storage areas have been filling up with ashes from these unclaimed bodies, and many municipalities have shortened their allotted storage periods.

There were 10,154 unclaimed bodies whose identities were known in 497 municipalities between April 2018 and October 2021, according to an internal affairs ministry survey covering 1,741 municipalities. 

The number of unclaimed bodies is expected to continue to increase because many elderly people live alone. 

Some municipalities look for relatives after cremation.

In Fukuoka, 29 unclaimed bodies were cremated in accordance with the law on graveyards and burials in fiscal 2023. There had been only one such case in fiscal 2017.

City officials cremate unclaimed bodies about two to three days after they receive reports from police, hospitals and other parties.

They then search for family members and close relatives of the deceased, such as children, grandchildren and siblings, and asks them if they intend to collect the ashes.

Unclaimed ashes are stored at a ward office for about a year and at a municipal columbarium for another year. After that, the ashes are buried in a public burial ground if not collected by anyone.

Other municipalities look for relatives before cremation.

Yokohama officials generally reach out to children, grandchildren, siblings and other close relatives, then cremate the bodies if there is no one to claim them.

In fiscal 2020, the city shortened the storage period for ashes from five to three years, citing limited space.

Some municipalities do not have rules about how widely they should look for relatives of the deceased.

To prevent cremations from being delayed unnecessarily, Saitama officials asked ward representatives at a training session in March not to spend excessive time on these searches.

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