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Embalming helps families say good-bye
In a funeral company’s operating room, Kenichiro Hashizume faces a body bearing wounds from a traffic accident.
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There are now about 50 embalming facilities in Japan, and last year about 34,000 cases of embalming were performed throughout the country. (shutterstock.com/-)
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n a funeral company’s operating room, Kenichiro Hashizume faces a body bearing wounds from a traffic accident. After performing preservation work, he sews up the wounds and applies makeup. About three hours have passed since he began the process of embalming (see below) the body, which makes the person look as if they were still alive.
The bereaved family, stunned from losing their loved one, approached and spoke to the deceased. “Your face looks so calm now. Let’s go home,” one says.
Embalming gives a body a peaceful appearance, so as to ease the final farewell for the bereaved family. Hashizume, 48, is a pioneer of embalming in Japan and even now vividly recalls the first time he performed this task.
It has been 22 years since Hashizume entered this world, which at the time had no Japanese experts. Feeling that “the restoration of a body provides a chance to relieve their family’s sorrow and help heal their wounded hearts,” Hashizume has come face to face with over 5,000 bodies.
Turning point
The oldest son of a funeral business family in Chitose, Hokkaido, Hashizume helped with setting up funerals and other jobs from a young age. However, he disliked being perceived as an “heir,” and after graduating from a university in Tokyo began to work for a major event company.
Two years later, he began to see achievements from his work. By developing a promotional strategy for large-scale events, he helped the company increase the number of spectators to nearly 10 times the previous year, and he was involved in discovering a musical artist now well-known throughout the country. The turning point in Hashizume’s life came at just that time.
“To change how funerals are done in Japan, how about going to study in the United States?” A phone call came from Hashizume’s father, now 73, who had visited the United States on a study tour of the funeral business there. His father had seen embalming with his own eyes, and seemed to keenly feel that this technique, popularized in Europe and the United States, could also be useful in Japan.
But Hashizume doubted whether there was value in doing something that would make him quit the job he had held until then. “Bad memories of being teased and bullied just because my family was in the funeral business kept running through my head,” he said.
It took about two weeks for him to make up his mind.
Hashizume was 27 when he entered a college in the United States teaching embalming. He was their first foreign student.
Not only were there classes in such difficult areas as anatomy and microbiology, everything was conducted in English. Hashizume had to concentrate all the time, or he would not understand anything. The college also had a strict rule that students could not advance to the next term if they failed a test in even one subject.
“At the start I was just frantically trying to keep up in class, but before I knew it I had reached the point where classmates were asking me to show them my notes. I had never studied so hard in my life.”
When he entered his third term, however, Hashizume found out that in Pennsylvania, the state where he was living, he could not be qualified as an embalmer without U.S. citizenship.
Searching for areas where he could obtain qualification without being a U.S. citizen, he sent out his resume to funeral companies to gain practical experience. Despite contacting over 200 companies, however, none would go to the trouble of hiring a Japanese who brought with him troublesome work visa procedures.
But he did not give up, and was finally able to land a job with a funeral company in California. Accumulating experience, he finally obtained the qualification he wanted so badly. Seven years had passed since he came to the United States.
Understanding grief
“In Japan, we should first increase the number of people who can accurately understand the feelings of, and attend to, bereaved families. If that’s not possible, the spread of embalming and such will just end up an empty dream.”
This belief led Hashizume, after returning to Japan in 2001, to contact the embalmer-certifying International Funeral Science Association in Japan (IFSA) and get involved in establishing training facilities in Tokyo and Osaka.
Having nurtured a number of embalmers as a lecturer, he went with them to the site of the deadly 2005 derailment of a train on the JR Fukuchiyama Line in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, that killed 106 passengers.
He also spoke to Self-Defense Forces members who had come into contact with many bodies after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, conveying to them the importance of empathizing with bereaved families.
Though currently retired as an embalmer, Hashizume works to develop future generations and travels all over holding seminars and other events to spread awareness of embalming and “grief support,” a service for consoling bereaved families.
“Coming face to face with death, I’ve come to feel the joy of living more clearly than ever before,” he said. With strength in his voice, he adds, “I live life to the fullest now and want to see, as much as I can, my family and friends when they are full of joy.”
■ Embalming
According to the IFSA and other organizations, embalming spread due to the need for the long-term preservation of bodies for transportation during the U.S. Civil War. There are now about 50 embalming facilities in Japan, and last year about 34,000 cases of embalming were performed throughout the country. There are about 130 Japanese embalmers.
