The emergence of post-mortem cleaning services

The management of mortality, which in Japan was typically the exclusive duty of the deceased’s next of kin, is increasingly being outsourced to the service industry due to massive demographic shifts, chiefly, the declining rates of both marriage and childbirth. The number of Japanese men aged 50 who have never been married or had children increased from 2.6 percent in 1980 to 28.3 percent in 2020. In terms of the proportion of childless women the same age, Japan, at 27 percent, has the highest rate among developed countries.Footnote ³ As a result, the number of middle-aged and older solo-dwelling people for whom post-mortem care must be arranged without relying on family relations is rapidly increasing.

To meet this demand, various mortuary services, known as the “end-of-life businessFootnote ⁴ ” (syūkatsusangyō 終活産業), have emerged. One type is a cleanup service for the remnants of the deceased.Footnote ⁵ The Japanese term for this service is ihinseiri 遺品整理, translating as “sorting out the belongings of the deceased.” The number of ihinseiri companies registered under the Association (ihinseiri-shi nintei kyokai 遺品整理士認定協会) in Japan increased from 2,560 in 2015 to 12,541 in 2021 (“Surge of companies” 2021). The dominant ihinseiri business model is the independent, small, owner-operated enterprise. Often, operators were previously in the waste collection and transport business, or in the moving and transportation industry, but expanded into ihinseiri services due to the growing demand. In cases of unaccompanied death, where corpses go undetected for a certain period of time, special cleaning techniques and treatment are required. This includes applying insecticide to treat flies and maggots, cleaning and disinfecting fluid stains, and removing the smell of the dead body – all of which happen before sorting out the belongings of the deceased, collecting mementos, finding items to be included in memorial services, disposing of waste, and arranging items for resale. Ihinseiri work is thus typically a demanding, demeaning, and undesirable occupation.

People performing dirty work seek social affirmation to retain their occupational esteem (Perry Reference Perry1978; Thompson Reference Thompson1991). There are different ways they do so. Ashforth and Kreiner (Reference Ashforth and Kreiner1999) delineate how those who do so-called dirty work maintain a positive self-identity in the face of pervasive stigma by forging group solidarity and a collective occupational identity, and by clearly demarcating boundaries. In the case of Japanese specialist cleaners, a positive occupational identity is not the result of group solidary or work-based socialization, but is constructed by some pioneering cleaners through their writing and artistic work.

The Japanese cleaning workers examined here seek to change the feeling rules related to their occupation in two ways. First, ihinseiri operators frame themselves as a “family replacement business,” highlighting that they provide the service on behalf of the bereaved family. Kimura, the owner of an ihinseiri business who started offering online training courses for cleaners in 2013, stressed that an ihinseiri cleaner deals not with “things” but “emotions.” It is not manual labor, he argues, rather, the cleaners are “professional mourners” and experts in their field who are “substituting for family members.” This affective dimension – the ability to deal with grieving relatives – is indeed considered the most important skill in the ihinseiri profession (Kimura Reference Kimura2015). As such, ihinseiri businesses and cleaners adopt positive feeling rules borrowed from the intimate domain of family life to mitigate the negative feeling rules associated with cleaning jobs.

Second, and more importantly, ihinseiri cleaners are dedicated to the emotional labor their work entails. They pay close attention to family members, neighbors, and, most importantly, to the deceased themselves. Furthermore, many cleaners have reflected on and shared their feelings about their work through books, blogs, artworks, and by speaking to the media. The first such example was Taichi Yoshida’s book “What an ihinseiri expert saw!! Helping you move to heaven” (遺品整理屋は見た!!：天国へのお引越しのお手伝い), which was published in 2006. His detailed work stories instantly attracted considerable attention, inspiring a TV drama series titled “What an ihinseiri expert saw” (遺品整理屋は見た), a novel, and a film, both titled “Life Back Then” (アントキノイノチ),Footnote ⁶ and several comic books. Yoshida was a pioneer in the field. In 2002, he established the first ihinseiri business in Japan and distinguished his new enterprise from already existing “disposal brokers” by paying attention to the aspect of “emotional care” the service provides. He defines and describes the mission of his business as follows:

Following Yoshida’s success, a variety of non-fiction books written by specialist cleaning workers have been published. These writings, alongside other forms of artistic works, powerfully refined what post-mortem cleaning work means. They also brought the feelings associated with the deaths and cleaning work, which hitherto had not been widely accessible, to public attention. In doing so, they introduced new feeling rules and affected existing feeling rules. Facing how the neighbors of the deceased feel is one of major challenges that the cleaners reflect on, which I will turn to now.

Navigating feeling rules in the neighborhoods

Ihinseiri workers have to face the strong negative feelings of the deceased’s neighbors. According to the accounts of some cleaners, neighbors often express disgust, annoyance, deliberate indifference, or embarrassment to the death of someone living close-by. Some avoid eye contact with the cleaners, while others vent their irritation at them. They find it upsetting that an unattended lonely death has occurred in their neighborhood, and instead of expressing gratitude to the cleaners, neighbors and landlords air their frustrations (Taicho Reference Taicho2014 [2012]: 55).

Anthropologist Jason Danely, who analyzes the unwitnessed death in Japan describes the awkward response of neighbors: “His voice was low and tired, sounding more annoyed than concerned” (Danely Reference Danely2019: 214). He continues, “For my Japanese neighbors, the possibility that another solo-dwelling older person (dokkyo rōjin) had just died around the corner was not shocking, as it was for me, but rather produced a mood of grim dysphoria for a world that had become disarticulated from the home. What made the event unhomely was its unwitnessing, which all of us were implicated in and which placed our existential survival in question” (Danely Reference Danely2019: 216).

To understand the existing feeling rule, namely, why “lonely death” provokes such pronounced feelings of not only disgust but also embarrassment among neighbors, it is crucial to take into account its specific historical and cultural construction in Japanese society. In 2010, public television broadcaster NHK aired a sensational special documentary on “Disconnected Society” (muen shakai 無縁社会), which dealt extensively with the phenomenon of disconnected death (NHK disconnected society project team 2010). In this program the phenomenon was projected as a sign of the demise of traditional values and the breakdown of the collective bonds of various institutions – from family to community relations, as well as the safety net of the company, all caused by the lost decades of economic stagnation and precarity in contemporary Japan. A sense of unease and anxiety, and of urgency to avoid instances of “disconnected” lonely death, became a widely shared feeling rule. Thus, the main focus of various policy interventions to prevent such isolated deaths has been the rebuilding of human relationships and revitalization of traditional models of mutual assistance and moral obligation within the neighborhood community.Footnote ⁸

As such, neighbors are mobilized to surveil each other to prevent lonely deaths from occurring in their neighborhood. The negative image of kodokushi is expressly utilized as an incentive to construct efficient local welfare networks and appeal to the moral responsibility of the surrounding community (Dahl Reference Dahl2020).Footnote ⁹ But despite community members’ best intentions, some solo dwellers find it humiliating to become subjects of social surveillance and prefer to cut themselves off from neighborly relations. This can create a new tension between isolated individuals and the surrounding community (Toyota Reference Toyota2022a: 104–5). The incident of lonely death is, therefore, perceived as a failure of community self-governance. It is shameful not only for the immediate family members but for the entire neighborhood, too. The residents complain to the local neighborhood authorities (chonaikai), but they also distrust and blame each other, which can cause fissures between residents and hinder community feeling. In addition, local residents are anxious about being perceived as a part of a “bad neighborhood.” The strong, and often twisted, expressions of grief and guilt on the part of landlords and neighbors thus become legible through the specific “feeling rules” in such neighborhoods, and it is this that the cleaning workers have to deal with.

The pronounced reactions of neighbors must also be understood against the backdrop of historically shifting notions about the visibility of death. Before the 1970s, dying at home was common in Japan, and death and the dead were visible to family members.Footnote ¹⁰ Dying on the tatami Footnote ¹¹ floor at home was considered the ideal way of concluding life. Between 1965 and 1974, 80 percent of funerals were still held at home with the support of the local community (Tsuji Reference Tsuji2006: 394). Since then, however, the number of hospital deaths has gradually increased and since 1976, it has become more common for older people to die in hospital than at home. Over the decades, the percentage of at-home deaths has declined markedly: 82.5 percent in 1951, 70.7 percent in 1960, 56.6 percent in 1970, 38.0 percent in 1980, 21.7 percent in 1990, and 13.9 percent in 2000 (these percentages were extracted from National Demographic Statistics by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). As the medicalization of death and hospitalization of the dying has become a general practice, the great majority of deaths now occur away from the everyday living space. Death has become invisible and odorless, at least for family members and neighbors. Allan Kellehear (Reference Kellehear2007: 7) has called this the “well-managed death,” that is, dying in the hands of professional institutions.

The phenomenon of lonely death, however, has made dying visible again. It is full of penetrating odors that affect the wrong people, including complete strangers, rather than the family. The landlord notices that rent payments are overdue or neighbors wake up to the intolerable stench of a decaying body. The cleaning workers often mention seeing neighbors passing by the site, pretending as if nothing has happened. Their awkward behavior may indicate that they wish to absolve themselves of any responsibility or shame associated with the incident. Neighbors fear that such an event will devalue not only the property in question, but also the surrounding properties in the residential area. The cleaning workers have to cope with this public gaze, anxiety, and impatience.

When a lonely death occurs in a rental property, the landlord is responsible for commissioning the cleaning of the flat and the disposal of the belongings. They must also bear the costs if no next of kin can be found. Even residents in nearby rooms may feel “polluted” and eventually move out, which leads to an increase in vacancies and a sharp drop in rental income. Often, landlords and management companies therefore ask the cleaning service provider to make sure that the fact of a lonely death does not become known to neighbors (Kojima Reference Kojima2019: 46).

Some property managers additionally request that a rite of exorcism be arranged. This purification service is conducted by a Shinto priest, who is believed to be able to expel evil spirits from a place. Ninety percent of requests for exorcisms are made by property management companies (Kanno Reference Kanno2020: 174). This is because they are obliged to notify the next tenant or buyer about instances of lonely death that took place on the premises (for the past three years for renters and for all time for buyers) (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism 2021). To make the properties more acceptable for the next occupants, the company requires formal confirmation that an exorcism has been carried out. A priest should perform the ritual and issue a certificate (Kanno Reference Kanno2020: 177–87). The rite of exorcism can be expensive, but property managers consider the socio-cultural and psychological costs of not having it performed much higher.

The neighborhood feeling rules regarding lonely death are so strict that single older men, who are considered a high-risk group for kodokushi, often face difficulty in finding a rental property. A recent survey conducted by the Association of Japan Rental Property Management (2018) indicated that 80 percent of rental property owners are disinclined to rent out to older people. While property insurance mechanisms against kodokushi are currently being developed to protect owners and landlords against potential losses, neighbors tend to treat single older males vigilantly. This excessive surveillance toward potential lonely death victims has pushed some older male retirees to leave Japan entirely to avoid the public gaze and humiliation (Toyota Reference Toyota2022b).

Faced with such negative feelings, cleaners normally comply with the feeling rules of the neighborhood. Takaesu, a cleaner, explains in his book that it is part of professional etiquette to refrain from telling neighbors exactly what they are doing inside the concealed space. Rather, they pretend that “I am doing a renovation of the room or piping repairs” (Takaesu Reference Takaesu2020: 14). As the rooms are completely shut, workers have to wear googles and a special mask that can withstand toxic gases and must be fully protected from head to toe when entering the site to prevent infection. In this way, the cleaning workers erase the traces left by the dead and revive the rooms into livable spaces, all without being seen themselves (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The bookcover was illustrated by Hanazawa, a cartoon artist, who took part in cleaning the death scene along with the author Takaesu to achieve a realistic illustration. Copyright: Asuka Shinsha.

While cleaners comply with the feeling rule in the neighborhood, they do not simply reinforce it. Through their publications, blogs, books, and art practices, workers make their experience visible to the general public. In his writing Yoshida (Reference Yoshida2011 [2006]: 244) detailed the procedure workers followed to eliminate the smell of death: “We can’t open the windows because the neighbors complain. So we use a machine to generate ozone to crush the odour and make the airborne odour particles once they are in a state of nothingness, and if the dead smell comes out of the wall again, we crush it with ozone. We repeat 20 times a day. After two weeks of doing this, the odour is finally removed.” Although it is difficult to measure whether residents’ feelings toward a neighbor’s lonely death in Japan are changed by such accounts, Yoshida’s detailed revelation is meant to make readers understand and sympathize with the cleaners, if not changing then at least complicating existing feeling rules. In sum, the feeling rules regarding lonely deaths among the neighbors are deeply ingrained due to economic, social, and cultural reasons. The cleaners are sensitive toward feeling rules, they carefully and politely comply with them when they are directly interacting with their customers. Yet when they reflect on their own experience they make it clear that these feeling rules require careful emotional labor (of cleaners) to be sustained and are not automatic. Such a public awareness is likely to entice new public feelings. In the next section I shall delve into another way that the cleaners alter public feelings. Instead of navigating existing feeling rules, they create previously unaccessible information (primarily about details of the cleaning work associated with lonely death) based on which new feelings emerged. They do so by detailing their firsthand experiences of dealing with others’ lonely deaths and bringing in autobiographical reflections.

Unpacking the category of lonely death

Instances of lonely death trigger fear and anxiety. For most people, however, lonely death remains an abstract, dark image. People are well aware that lonely death is on the rise and that they may even die alone themselves, but very few people have direct experience with someone’s lonely death. The looming presence of the phenomenon exacerbates the feeling of fear. The personal experiences and reflections of cleaning workers regarding specific instances of someone’s lonely death have helped to demystify such totalizing imagery. Miyu Kojima, a 27-year-old female cleaning worker, has played an important role in changing the public feeling rules regarding lonely death.

To raise public awareness of the reality of lonely deaths, Kojima (Reference Kojima2019: 6–9) started creating models of interiors – miniature scenes where solitary death has occurred – in meticulous detail (see Figures 2 and 3). She has never had formal art training; she is entirely self-taught. After she displayed these miniatures at ENDEX, the mortuary industry trade show in 2016, they caught the attention of public media and went viral online. In 2019, she published a book, Rooms Where Time has Stopped (時が止まった部屋 Tokiga tomatta heya), which combined images of the miniatures with texts that explain her work experiences. The book was discussed widely in the media, including outside of Japan (Michael and Tanaka Reference Michael and Tanaka2019). In her interview, Kojima explains that she treats the deceased with respect, as if the person was a member of her own family. People frequently ask her whether the job makes her feel scared, to which she answers: “I don’t get squeamish if I think of the deceased as a member of my own family and not as an unknown person,” or “Why should they haunt me? I am there to clean the room where they lived and died, and in this way, I am helping them to depart” (Kojima’s narratives in 2021 NHK TV documentary, Beyond Kodokushi). She mentions that she sometimes cries together with the family of the deceased.

Figure 2.

The miniature scenes created by Miyu Kojima. Copyright: Kosuke Okahara.

Figure 3.

Diorama showing cats left behind. Created by Miyu Kojima. Copyright: Kosuke Okahara.

Kojima reports in her book that she is able to handle lonely deaths because of her personal background. She grew up witnessing her father’s excessive drinking (Kojima Reference Kojima2019: 24). Because he was often unemployed, the family had to rely on her mother’s income. Her father’s personality changed when he was drinking, and sometimes she had to intervene physically to protect her mother from his violence. It was Kojima who suggested to her mother that she divorce him, which she did, and her father went on to live alone. When her mother visited him one day by chance, she found him unconscious, having suffered a stroke. Kojima was in a café with friends after school when she received the call from her sister. When she arrived at the hospital, she saw her father unconscious in bed, tears streaming from his eyes. Soon after, he passed away at the age of fifty-four. It was only then that Kojima (Reference Kojima2019: 134), a high-school student at the time, came to regret that she had always avoided her father and never developed a relationship with him. She recalls that, when she was of pre-school age, he had been a good dad. He used to work for a delivery firm and sometimes let her ride in his truck. Occasionally, he joined the family for picnics by the riverside. She was troubled by the thought that he might have lain dead for weeks or months had her mother not visited him that day. This experience of remorse pushed her to enter the specialized cleaning sector in 2014 at the age of 22.

Given that the job is extremely demanding both physically and emotionally, Kojima (Reference Kojima2019: 133) notes that she is often asked why she chose it. She agrees that people’s incredulity “is not surprising because most of my colleagues, 99 out of 100, leave this job soon after,” but points to her personal background to explain her interest. Initially, her mother was against her choice of occupation, but Kojima convinced her by showing her a job advertisement that spelt out its meaningfulness. Such advertisements appeal to readers’ hearts, detailing that the nature of the job requires profound consideration for the feelings of both the deceased and bereaved family members. One explains that: “The precious aspect of this work is not simply cleaning the room but to clear people’s minds and move forward in the time that seems to have stopped since the moment of death” (Kojima Reference Kojima2019: 136).

When cleaning up a site, Kojima often comes across photographs of a happily smiling man surrounded by family members or friends at the very scene of his lonely death. She says, “I am always perplexed when I see this displacement, this bright side and dark side in life. The deceased’s life was never completely unhappy or lonely” (Kojima Reference Kojima2019: 85). By seeing the dead as real, specific individuals, she is able to soothe her own grief over her father’s death. In the TV documentary she narrates that she hopes her father would be proud of her.

A 2021 NHK documentary, “Beyond Kodokushi (孤独死を超えて),” based on Kojima’s experience and her book, showed that most of those who die alone did in fact experience intimate familial relations at some point in their lives. Interestingly, this film is quite different from the NHK documentary that aired 11 years earlier. While the 2010 program set alarm bells ringing, emphasizing the breakdown of family relationships, and spurring fear of the phenomenon, which it presented as an aggregate social problem, the documentary from 2021 centers around concrete human experiences. An important part of the cleaners’ experience is mourning, which creates a sense of relatedness to the dead. Through the act of mourning, the lonely dead ceases to be a figure that is completely removed and deserving of fear. Mourning changes the feeling rules about lonely death, a topic to which I shall now turn.

Relating through mourning

Ritualized mourning is an essential part of post-mortem cleaning work. Workers might sprinkle salt in the room and over the belongings, bow to the bed, join hands in prayer, and burn incense. Even though the corpses of the deceased are no longer present, cleaning workers say they still interact with them. Kojima usually bows and joins her hands before entering the area to pay respect to the space where the deceased lived and died. When the cleaning is done, she burns incense and offers flowers to the soul that has left its body behind as a way of conveying her final condolences before she shuts the door. As cleaning service workers often encounter deaths for which no one has or will send condolences, Kojima (Reference Kojima2019: 138) feels that it is part of her job to make sure that the soul of the deceased can depart peacefully.

People are pragmatically aware that any solo dweller could pass away any time and that everyone does, ultimately, die alone. That a lonely death is so feared in Japan is not simply about the fact itself that a person has died alone. Rather, it is the absence of grief and care toward the material remains and spiritual aftermath of the dead that is so troubling. For this reason, the workers’ practice of mourning for the deceased is regarded as an important gesture as it relieves the anxiety of the public. This resonates with Allison’s analysis that conceptualizes Kojima’s craftwork of miniaturizing death scenes as “promiscuous care” (Care Collective 2020: 40 cited in Allison Reference Allison2023: 148). By imitating the scenes with astonishing levels of accuracy, “Kojima is trying to retrieve something in the remains that communicates – the humanness of the deceased” (Allison Reference Allison2023: 146). However, I would like to go beyond the analysis of the cleaners’ care labor in order to tackle the question of its social effects. In other words, how does the symbolic connection created by the cleaners between themselves and the deceased change the public’s general feelings toward lonely death?

For the Japanese public, a general feeling rule of fear prevails when it comes to the space and belongings of the deceased. They are considered emotionally discomforting due to the perception of lingering spirit. The cleaning workers are often asked questions such as, “What would you do if a spirit appeared? Aren’t you scared?” Some cleaning workers provide alternative viewpoints. Yoshida explains:

Some workers further articulate the intense interaction with the lingering spirit beyond the conventional feeling rule of fear. Masaomi Yokoo, who wrote about his experience in 2016, has talked about the “voiceless voices” of the deceased:

In addition to feeling connected to the dead, some cleaning workers also feel connected to family members of the deceased, especially when they observe how grateful the family members are. Yoshida (Reference Yoshida2011 [2006]: 248–49) noted, “Some workers cry together with bereaved family members, which is very emotional … Young workers decide not to quit the job because [they feel] that their labor is immensely rewarded by the deep appreciation.” Furthermore, Yokoo felt that performing ihinseiri tasks brought about a stronger sense of human connection compared to the sales sector in which he had previously worked: “When I hear a thank you after a cleaning job even if the words of gratitude are the same as I have received before, it feels quite different. I know that these are sincere words filled with deepest feelings. And receiving these words is a great incentive for me [to stay on this job]” (Yokoo Reference Yokoo2016: 3).

Yokoo (Reference Yokoo2016:3) feels that his emotional relatedness to the cries of these individuals drives him to communicate their “silenced voices” to the broader public. He became interested in post-mortem cleaning at the age of 33, after experiencing his own grandmother’s lonely death and seeing the heavy emotional burden laid on family members. Yokoo has actively reached out to the public to convey his sense of professionalism toward his work and its social significance. Costas (Reference Costas2022: 8) noted that “Dignity is about the state of being worthy. It entails both developing a sense of self-worth and being treated as worthy by others.” Through conscious emotional work, these workers provide dignity to the invisible and voiceless deceased, while simultaneously establishing their own sense of self-worth and claim for social recognition.

Similarly, Takaesu (Reference Takaesu2020: 3), another cleaning worker, mentioned that the main motivation for writing his second book was “a sense of mission to convey the voiceless voice of the deceased.” Takaesu worked as a post-mortem cleaner for over 10 years. After finishing his high school degree in culinary arts in Okinawa he worked as a chef in Tokyo. Having undertaken general domestic cleaning work, he became a special cleaning worker in 2002. After he was featured on televised news reports in 2009, he was approached by a publisher and released his first book in 2010. In it, he describes the death site in graphic detail, even including several photos, as well as the conflicting emotions – the anger and grief of landlords and the bereaved family – at the site in an honest and straightforward manner. He also discusses the hardships of his own life, including the death of his younger sister when he was a child. The book raises awareness of the actual conditions after a death and what is left behind, in particular, what landlords and the bereaved family have to manage. Though the burden is left with them, Takaesu (Reference Takaesu2020: 180) noted that, “the actual client of this cleaning service work is the deceased, and the deceased is keeping us alive, as our livelihoods rely on them.”

In contrast to the other workers, he uses the pen name, commanding officer of special cleaners (Tokusou Taicho 特掃隊長), has a university degree, and has worked in the business since he graduated in 1992. In his blog, he shared that, having experienced severe depression at the age of 23, he was motivated to enter the profession by “the reaction to his own feelings of unhappiness and curiosity about unusual business” (Taicho Reference Taicho2014 [2012]: 8). He began blogging in 2006, at the suggestion of his manager: “I typed out what came into my mind without worrying about any contradictions that might follow” (Taicho Reference Taicho2014 [2012]: 8). Soon the blog was receiving a steady audience of readers with whom Taicho was excited to communicate:

Taicho (Reference Taicho2014 [2012]: 9) describes his work as follows: “I have experienced many deaths and glimpsed many lives. By cleaning away the visible, I have witnessed many invisible ones. While I have been reminded of the transience of it all, I have erased death and carved out a trail of life, turning death into life.” He explains that he has always been disturbed by his own instinct to explore what life and death means, thus writing blogs became like a “treasure hunt for life.” (Taicho Reference Taicho2014 [2012]: 9) His deeply philosophical blog posts attracted interest, and in 2012 he was approached by a publisher and asked to turn his blog into a book. Reflecting on the nature of his work, Taicho wrote:

The interpersonal and reflective accounts of these cleaning workers provide a space for the public to encounter, grapple with, and reflect on inevitable social changes. Their narratives reflect and engage with public emotions and help to confront not only the growing public anxiety toward lonely death but also existential questions about the nature of life and meaningful work. It is in this process of social interaction that dirty cleaning work is transformed into dignified work.