The owner of a company transporting corpses of foreign nationals to destinations outside Japan took a phone call from a mortician in Tokyo in January 2023.

Shuhei Matsuki, 43, president of Todaisha, based in Tachikawa in western Tokyo, was told about a “Singaporean mother and daughter killed in a traffic accident in Hokkaido.”

“I would like you to deliver the bodies to their homeland,” the funeral service provider, his business partner, told him.  

Matsuki gave a rough estimate of the cost. He also detailed how long it would take to send the deceased back to their home country.

Hanging up the phone, Matsuki checked the news on the internet for more information. He found an article on “a mother and a daughter from Singapore who died in a collision between a passenger car and a dump truck.”

A rental automobile carrying a family of four tourists collided with a large dump truck on an arterial highway covered by packed snow at Kami-Furano in Japan's northernmost prefecture.

The mother, 41, and her second daughter, who was an infant, had reportedly died four days earlier.

Matsuki contacted a local police station and asked whether he “could pick up their bodies immediately.” He learned that the corpses had undergone postmortem examinations. Their bereaved family members were allowed to visit the bodies as well. 

Confirming that the victims’ death certificates had been issued, Matsuki concluded that they were ready for transport. Matsuki asked an agency in Hokkaido to arrange a vehicle and coffins, so that he could leave for the scene the following morning.

The first meeting of Matsuki with the bereaved family was held at the reception counter at the police station. The husband looked gaunt and grief-stricken since he had lost his wife and daughter in the sudden tragedy.

With the help of an interpreter, Matsuki detailed the procedures to register their deaths and transport their remains. The husband still appeared to be in shock although he was nodding in reply to Matsuki.

Beside the father was his eldest daughter. Matsuki wondered how much the young girl could comprehend and tried to finish his explanation carefully but briefly in order not to cause her undue stress.

Matsuki then headed for the morgue within the police station. There, he discovered the deceased wife in a white casual kimono. The baby was wrapped in a down coat, with a hood put over her face.

Pulling away a sheet, Matsuki realized that neither had suffered any serious injuries on their faces.

BEAR-ILLUSTRATED COFFIN

Matsuki quickly started gearing up for delivering the mother and daughter in coffins.

Towels were densely placed around their faces and bodies to prevent the remains from moving about during the flight.

Dry ice for cooling was applied primarily to the sides of the corpses, except for sections around arteries, to stop the blood from freezing.

A small coffin featuring a bear illustration was specially procured for the infant.

All such preparations were complete within 20 minutes.

Matsuki met again with the bereaved family at the front entrance of the police station. He promised them that he “will be looking after their loved ones with care,” because he wanted to convey his sincerity.

He took an evening flight to return to Tokyo with the coffins.

The next day, Matsuki commissioned a dedicated embalming agent to keep the bodies from decomposing. Blood was removed, and chemicals were injected into the vessels and the abdomens.

At the same time, Matsuki filled in documents necessary for corpse transfer. He submitted a copy of their death registration forms, a packing certificate and other paperwork in English to the Singaporean Embassy in Japan the following day.

CONTAINER FOR ‘HEAD’

Makeup was applied to the embalmed remains. Their coffins were packaged in corrugated cardboard.

The upper surface of their cardboard boxes showed the words “head” and "feet” in black ink to make it possible for air transport personnel to know the top and bottom sides of the bodies.

Matsuki ensured that the images and reports of the makeup-processed faces of the deceased and the scenes of their return by plane were regularly shared via a messaging app. He hoped to give the bereaved family, who had returned home, as much peace of mind as possible.

The bodies arrived in Singapore by air within 10 days of the accident.

“The only thing we could do was deliver the remains to their home as soon as we could for the bereaved family’s mental comfort,” recalled Matsuki.

Matsuki’s corporation dealt with a total of 37 cases in fiscal 2023 in which deceased individuals were returned to their homes overseas.

The number rose dramatically in July 2023, following the downgrading of COVID-19 to a Category 5 infectious disease, the same as the seasonal flu.

The current level is double that for fiscal 2019 before the novel coronavirus pandemic. Deliveries this fiscal year have already topped 20.

Half of the corpses were inbound sightseers from various countries, including Nepal, Singapore, Lebanon, Senegal, South Korea and the United States.

More recently since April 2024, Matsuki sent back non-Japanese visitors from Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, and Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture.

DELIVERY FOR 1 MILLION YEN

Body transfer costs, inclusive of flight fees, can total 800,000 yen ($4,900) to 1 million yen. Corpses placed in coffins in dedicated wooden boxes are treated as large “cargoes.”

Skeletal remains following cremation in Japan can be delivered at a cost between 300,000 yen and 600,000 yen. Bereaved families often demand solely that bones of their loved ones be returned by aircraft to keep the costs as low as possible.

Some relatives request that their deceased family members be buried in Japan, not flown home, for religious reasons.

While it typically entails two weeks or so after death for bodies to reach their homelands, much more time is sometimes needed.

This is due in large part because various municipalities and embassies respond differently to such instances.

Death registration forms must be submitted to transport corpses out of Japan, which are issued by local governments. 

Different forms must be handed to differing municipalities. It is occasionally the first time for some regional governments to deal with transporting a body abroad, so they are not accustomed to the relevant procedures.

For those reasons, the issuance of death registration forms often takes a lengthy period of time. In one case, as long as two weeks were spent in this stage alone.

On top of that, related certificates must be translated into English and the official languages of destination countries. Deliverers sometimes need to use translation agents commissioned by embassies in this phase.

FURTHER INCREASE EXPECTED

Matsuki predicted that transport cases will shoot up further from here on out.

“The number of deaths of non-Japanese in our nation is soaring more rapidly than initially expected,” he said.

Data from the Japan National Tourism Organization showed that 25.06 million visitors from outside Japan traveled to the nation in 2023, recovering to 80 percent of the number in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Buoyed by the weakening yen, visitor numbers exceeded 3 million on a monthly basis in March this year for the first time ever.

According to the Immigration Services Agency, a record high of 3.41 million people from other countries likewise resided in Japan at the end of 2023.

As a growing number of non-Japanese stay and live in the country, an increasing number of fatalities of individuals of foreign nationality are being reported.

The health ministry’s vital statistics showed that 8,925 non-Japanese died in Japan in 2022, 1.33 times that from 10 years ago.

The figure surpassed the 7,000 mark in 2017 and dramatically surged over the last few years.

As an upward of 9,000 non-Japanese are roughly estimated to have passed away in 2023, more than 10 body transport agencies nationwide are struggling to cater to the increasing demand.

No figures sorted by purpose of visit are available to ascertain why dead individuals entered and stayed in Japan. The details, such as whether they were tourists, permanent residents or technical interns, remain unknown.

There are no statistics either that convey the number of remains relocated overseas or buried in Japan.

Yoshinobu Sato, a professor emeritus of forensic medicine at Kyorin University, who once headed a research group under the health ministry’s special science study program, recounted the situation facing Japan’s international corpse transport business.

“Cremation is not a common practice in certain religions, so administrative bodies and funeral providers should thoroughly share appropriate ways of handling such cases,” he said. “As the central government is aggressively trying to attract foreign nationals, it is also important to make preparations with an eye on death-connected procedures for them as well.”

(This article was written by Jin Nishioka and Kazuhiro Nagashima.)