INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Norihisa Tomiyasu opened his first mortuary in 1997 aiming to clean up a profession he says deserved its bad reputation for exploiting
people's grief and overcharging them at some of the most fraught moments of their lives."The industry was so backward,'' he says."I wanted
to make it more socially responsible.''It turned out to be a shrewd career choice
Tomiyasu is founder and president of Tear Corp., a chain of discount funeral homes known for transparent pricing, whose share price has
almost doubled since listing on the first tier of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2014.The funeral business has a bright future in Japan, where
deaths have outpaced births every year since 2007
Almost 30 percent of the population is 65 or older
And this year is a tipping-point of sorts
After 2018, the number of Japanese women of child-bearing age will decline so sharply that by 2025 the population is forecast to drop by
four million people, equivalent to the population of Los Angeles.The slide gets even steeper by mid-century."It's one of Japan's few growth
industries," says Tomiyasu, 57, who wears thick-rimmed glasses and exudes an optimism you might not expect from a funeral director
"Always be smiling" is one of his mottoes.Tear is just one of 8,550 Japanese companies selling funerals and wakes
Yet by expanding to 98 locations, it has become the biggest in the city of Nagoya and the second-largest in Japan (just behind an
Osaka-based company with much older roots, San Holdings Inc.).What's made Tomiyasu an innovator is his marketing strategy: He was the first
in the industry in Japan to list prices on his website for all to see.Want a simple wooden alter and a basic service for family and close
friends That will cost the equivalent of $2,989 -- dry ice, government paperwork and cremation included
More elaborate sendoffs, with flower arrangements and cosmetology for the deceased, bring the price closer to Tear's average ticket, $9,240,
which is thousands less than the industry average of $12,675.Members who sign up in advance receive discounts of about 10 percent
It's an approach, now much copied, that makes a funeral no different than any other big purchase. A Tear Corp driver cleans the back of a
Mercedes-Benz hearse outside the company's headquarters"A lot of funeral home operators around the country saw Tear's success and followed,"
says Takuji Mitsuda, a management consultant at Funai Soken in Osaka
"They were ahead of the curve."The love of a reviled profession once cost Tomiyasu a marriage
While working for an ambiguously named business that performed both weddings and funerals, his fiancee's parents were appalled to discover
his work involved the part dealing with death rather than matrimony
"Transfer,'' they told him, "or leave our daughter alone."Yet now, with aging such a preoccupation in Japan, the cultural taboos against
planning for death -- and working in the trade -- are peeling away
The 2011 tsunami disaster factored in the national reckoning with mortality
And the hit Japanese movie, "Departures," which won an Academy Award in 2009 for best foreign language film, made a powerful case that
undertakers are doing important work helping people deal with loss.Tomiyasu says he found his calling when he was a teenager, working a
summer job hauling funeral alters around for an undertaker.One day, after cleaning up from a ceremony, he watched a bereaved woman pay for
her husband's service, which had cost $30,000
Though the total was more than most people earn in many months of work, the woman bowed deeply and, with a voice full of feeling, said,
"thank you, thank you, thank you,'' as she handed over a thick stack of bills.The woman's gratitude shook Tomiyasu, but the strange
economics of the transaction also left its impression, he says in his 2008 book, "Why I Became an Undertaker.""The funeral business is
probably the only business," he explains, "where people pay and thank you for it."Later, though, he found that dynamic had a dark side
For many operators, up-selling was standard practice
Tomiyasu says he can remember arguing with an employer that they could afford to cut prices by half and still make a profit."Funeral
directors were pushing their product with no thought for people's financial circumstances," Tomiyasu said
"We'd steer people toward buying this or that, and after it all piled up, you'd be talking about a lot of money.''That's not unheard of now,
Data from Japan's National Consumers Affairs Center shows that as the country's death count has climbed, so has the number of complaints
lodged against funeral homes, jumping from 83 in 1996 to 724 in 2015
Excessive billing and unexplained costs were the most frequent claims.Consider the story of a 42-year-old Nagoya woman named Yuki who says
she came away from her grandmother's funeral, last October, feeling ambushed
(She asked that her last name not be used because of the embarrassment it might cause her family.)Even after insisting on an intimate
service, she says the family was surprised the next day to find the ceremony being held in a hall so large there were rows of empty chairs
Five or six monks had been convened to chant sutras
The bill came to $45,200. A Tear Corp
Mercedes-Benz hearse sits in traffic in Nagoya, Japan"Anybody could see it was too much," she said
"But, in that moment, you don't feel like you can say: Don't you have anything more affordable"Tomiyasu says he wants people to be able to
ask those questions, without shame.Last year, his morticians performed 13,465 ceremonies, a number that represents only about one percent of
the deaths that occurred in the country.His expansion plan is simple: Open a handful of new locations each year, using Japan's Census data
to pinpoint promising pockets of old people, which are everywhere.
