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Do-it-yourself funeral kits

6 Comments
By Casey Baseel, SoraNews24

Do-it-yourself projects aren’t just fun, they’re financially rewarding too. When you consider all the things you can do yourself, it seems like you’re practically throwing your money away by paying someone else to build your furniture, repair your car, or hold your funeral, doesn’t it?

What’s that? You said you’ve never heard of anyone having a DIY funeral? To be honest, neither have we, but there’s now a company in Japan that’s offering to set customers up with a kit to let them handle the ceremony themselves.

Tsubasa, a funerary services company based in Nagano Prefecture, has begun taking orders for its new DIY Funeral Set. The set includes a wooden coffin, with a fold-open window to show the face of the deceased, as well as a pillow, mattress, and blanket. The package also provides an urn for ashes and a silver-accented box to hold the bones left over after cremation, as well as three furoshiki wrapping cloths. Finally, there’s a handbook that explains how to perform the ceremony’s rites to put the soul of the departed at ease.

Priced at 25,800 yen, the DIY Funeral Set is a major savings over the services of a professional funeral hall. Not that we’re planning on dying anytime soon, but a bit of online research shows that the average price of a funeral in Japan is somewhere around 2 million yen, so Tsubasa’s kit is a huge savings.

We should point out that the kit is only meant to give buyers what they need for the funeral ceremony itself. The handbook doesn’t teach you how to use cosmetics to prepare the deceased’s face, so you may still need to contact a mortician for that, and you’ll also need the services of a licensed crematorium after the ceremony.

Oh, and we must also mention that the DIY Funeral Set is really a do-it-for-someone-else funeral kit, since no matter how industrious you are by the time it’s your turn to be the one in the casket, you’re really not going to be in any position to carry out the ceremony yourself.

But provided you’ve got a friend or family member who you think would be willing to do you one last favor, Tsubasa’s DIY Funeral Set can be ordered online here.

Source: Tsubasa

Read more stories from SoraNews24.

-- Yahoo! Shopping now offers funeral services in Japan

-- Increasing number of Japanese ditching traditional attitudes about weddings and funerals

-- Here’s a little tip from a Buddhist monk for anyone spooked by cemeteries at night

© SoraNews24

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

6 Comments
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I’m now collecting wood for my back garden funeral pyre....

0 ( +0 / -0 )

In the UK more people are choosing just to be cremated, to box, no ceremony. Costs about a thousand quid. I'd rather that and any money I did have be spent on a proper piss up wake.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

There is nothing disrespectful about DIY for post-death arrangements. What is disrespectful to the point of obscenity is how coldly money-grubbing the funeral business has become Screw them.

Totally.

The company my family dealt with (not in Japan) was all smiles and sympathy at first but got very nasty, very fast when there was a slight delay over payment details.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

As long as you have someone prepared to pop your body in the coffin - and the emergency service people who are called to the scene when you are found dead should do it - and then someone to help get your coffin to the public crem, you're all right.

I don't know about Japan, but in the UK there is nothing to stop someone transporting a body to the church, crematorium or graveyard by themselves. As long as they have a car or van, they're good to go.

There is nothing disrespectful about DIY for post-death arrangements. What is disrespectful to the point of obscenity is how coldly money-grubbing the funeral business has become Screw them.

7 ( +7 / -0 )

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