10/14/2009

Everyone has heard about Japan’s famously aging population. Naturally it stands to reason that besides health care for seniors, another industry (if you can call it an industry) that will be doing quite well will be burial and cremation services.

One company in Japan has developed a more compact and cheaper alternative to a traditional Japanese graveyard. A warehouse-type building stores remains in much smaller rectangular metal boxes, which are then shelved for posterity.

Monk Ryotoku Ohara said “You can put ashes for two people in one box . . . So 7,000 people maximum in this space, [when] for a normal graveyard you would get 100 graves in this area [of land].”

Japan seems to do everything more efficiently, even after death.

Source: BBC