Dead Hotel biz

[Taro Toporific]

Death industry reaps grim profit as Japan dies
Sep 11, 2011 | Yahoo! News (Reuters) TOKYO -– Across from a noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb, Hisayoshi Teramura's inn looks much like any other small lodging that dots the port city. Occasionally, it's even mistaken for a love hotel by couples hankering for some time beneath the sheets.
But Teramura's place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travelers. The white and grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins...
....The daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is 12,000 yen ($157). For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city's overworked crematoriums...more...

[Russell]

Daily rate of 12,000 Yen is an arm and a leg...

[Marked Trail]

[Yokohammer]

Daily rate of 12,000 Yen is an arm and a leg...

Badaboom ... tshhh!

Woot!

[Taro Toporific]

Badaboom ... tshhh!

I sure ain't [color="DeepSkyBlue"]cool[/color] with the continuing dead dog-days of this Japanese summer. Maybe I should check in.

[Samurai_Jerk]

Can't you just put them out on burable garbage day? That's what I did with my girlfriend's dead kitten.

[Russell]

Seeing the price difference with capsule hotels for the Living, I can imagine that some people choose to keep their beloved one's corpse at home...

[Russell]

You can't make this up. Taro, where do you find this stuff?

"There's been a rush into the market," says Teramura, who founded cemetery developer company Nichiryoku 45 years ago. Even Japan's second biggest retail chain, Aeon, rail companies and the nation's biggest farmers association, Japan Agriculture are getting into the business, he notes.

Aeon: relabeling the meat?
Rail companies: capitalize on jumpers?
Japan Agriculture: fertilizer?

In Yokohama, the average wait for an oven is more than four days, driving up demand for half-way morgues such as Lastel.

"Otherwise people have to keep the bodies at home where there isn't much space," says Teramura.

One-room mansions, anyone?

One former wedding organizer trying his hand at the death industry is Takayuki Nakagawa. In 2002, he founded Urban Funes, which offers customized theme funerals from a converted wedding chapel in a Tokyo suburb.

For recent events, Nakagawa has asked his staff to collect discarded fruit and vegetable boxes for the funeral of a greengrocer. For another, he asked them to come up with a fitting send off for father and husband who for four decades had blown half his salary on booze and gambling.

Looks like Nakagawa's got lots of creativity.

[Russell]

As for Lastel's Teramura, he's pushing ahead with expansion plans.

He pulls out his mobile phone and shows a picture of an office building he just bought in another Yokohama neighborhood. When he has finished renovating it will be his second Lastel, with room for 40 bodies, more than double the first.

He refuses to divulge, however, exactly where it is in case any NIMBY neighbors get wind of what he is up to and try to kill his latest corpse hotel.

Sounds like a necrophile's wet dream.

[Bucky]