In Japan Trying to Make a Few Bucks from Death

choi

Japan and the last commute | Peak Death; As a baby-boom generation ages, businesses struggle to make money out of a rare growth sector. Economist, Aug 6, 2016.
http://www.economist.com/news/as ... -growth-sector-peak

Note:
(a) "IN HIS office behind Tokyo's Aoyama cemetery, Yukihiro Masuda says that these days prospective clients are so much readier to talk about the end of life that he encourages them to try out his coffins. * * * Inside, with the lid closed, it is as acoustically dead as a recording studio, quite soporific"
(i) Aoyama Cemetery  青山霊園
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aoyama_Cemetery

ja.wiipedia.org: 公営 -- because elsewhere it is said to be "東京都立."
(ii) soporific (adj; Did you know?)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soporific

(b) "A 2008 film, 'Departures,' movingly depicted the beauty and dignity of nokan, the (Buddhist-derived) ritual cleansing ceremony for the recently deceased, carried out at home before laying the body in a coffin for cremation. * * * Not long after, the Weekly Asahi 週刊アサヒ, a magazine, began promoting the idea of shukatsu, planning for the end of life, in the hope of interesting readers and attracting advertisers."
(i) Departures (2008 film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departures_(2008_film)
(Japanese title: おくりびと "one who sends off"/ directed by Yōjirō TAKITA 滝田 洋二郎 [滝 = waterfall]; Loosely based on Coffinman, a memoir by Shinmon AOKI 青木 新門, the film follows a young man who returns to his hometown after a failed career as a cellist and stumbles across work as a nōkanshi 納棺師 [also known as 納棺夫]—a traditional Japanese ritual mortician; (Hollywood) Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, 2009)
(A) The above film should not be confused with the 2005 American film The Departed (4 Oscars).
(B) Regarding Coffinman.

The original in Japanese:  納棺夫日記. 桂書房, 1993.
The translation in English:  Shinmon Aoki, Coffinman; The journal of a Buddhist Mortician. Buddhist Education Center. 2002 and 2004.
(ii) shūkatsu 終活
(A) You see, two decades ago in Japan, a term was in vogue: 婚活 (abbreviated from 結婚活動: endeavor to get married)
(B) The "katsu" is Chinese pronunciation of kanji 活.

(c) Japanese-English dictionary:
* nōkan 納棺 【のうかん】 (n,v): "placing of body in coffin"
* okuri-bito 送り人 【おくりびと】 (n): "(See 迎え人) person who sees someone else off (eg at the airport)"
   ^ okuru 送る 【おくる】 (v): " * * * (2) to see off (a person); (3) to bid farewell (to the departed); to bury"  (In Japanese, "to give (as a gift)" will use 贈る (also pronounced "okuru") -- though in Chinese, 送 is also used (as the verb).
   ^ Kanji 人 has Japanese pronunciation "hito," where the syllable "hi" is softened to "bi" when not in the first of the portmanteau.
* kanbatsuzai 間伐材 【かんばつざい】 (n): "timber from forest thinning; thinned wood"  (The "kan," "hatsu" or "batsu" -- more than one Chinese pronunciations for this kanji -- and "zai" are all Chinese pronunciations of respective kanji.)

choi

(d) "This year around 1m Japanese will be born, and around 1.3m will die. By 2040 annual deaths may approach 1.7m.  Call it peak death. * * * [om Japan, death is] a rare growth sector. A huge funeral fair in Tokyo in December, with nokan competitions using volunteers posing as corpses, gave a sense of the scale of the ¥2 trillion ($20 billion) industry. There are niches: stationery companies sell books for 'ending notes'—instructions for post-death practicalities, but also [books] for innermost feelings that Japanese tend to keep to themselves and that atomised families make difficult to express in life"
(i) The peak death is wordplay on peak oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

I tended to believe peak oil until a few years ago, which turns out to be false alarm, thanks to technological advances leading to shale oil and gas.
(ii) atomize (vt): "DIVIDE, FRAGMENT <an atomized society>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atomize

(e) "Aeon, a retail and financial-services conglomerate, has branched out from arranging funerals for employees past and present, and opened its first outlet for the general public in the shopping centre next to its Tokyo headquarters. Fumitaka Hirohara, the head of Aeon Life, its funeral business, claims it was the first place to offer free coffin trials, in 2011 (much to the initial surprise of passing shoppers)."
(i) Æon Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æon_Group
(ii) aeon (or eon; Latin, from Greek aiōn)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aeon

(f) "the funeral business turns out to be not so different from others in Japan: eking out thin margins in a competitive world. * * * In the boom years up to the early 1990s funeral firms charged what they wanted and few [customers] complained. * * * Mr [Yukihiro] MASUDA 増田 進弘 says, firms need to keep prices low (a funeral package can now cost less than ¥500,000) and to differentiate their products. His company, WillLife, offers an eco-friendly send-off. The coffins are made of robust cardboard from the packaging industry (which the parent company is in). Even though they need as much paraffin—70 litres—for cremation as the usual wooden versions, the company plants trees in Mongolia as a carbon offset.  Still, Mr Masuda laments that plywood coffins from China can cost just a third as much as his cardboard ones. The 'China price,' a fixture of life in Japan as elsewhere, applies in death, too."
(i) "WillLife" may or may not be misspelled. The company's own spelling:

WiLLife  ウィルライフ株式会社/ WiLLiFE KK
http://www.willife.com/aboutus/

, where KK is acronym of kabushiki kaisha 株式会社, which, though, Japanese actually pronounce "kabushiki gaisha" where the syllable "ka" is softened to "ga."  I find this website via (ii) immediately below.
(ii) Hiroki Yanagisawa, Stylish Cardboard-Made Coffin And Table. Edgy Japan, June 14, 2016
wwww.edgyjapan.jp/2010/06/20100614-1.html
("a corrugated board called, Tri-Wall * * * Mr Yukihiro Masuda, the CEO or WillLiFE, a subsidiary of Tri-Wall Japan * * * Ecoffin is made from Tri-Wall (inner-part) and kanbatsuzai (outer part) (trees, which need to be chopped down (called thinning) from a forest for its sustainable growth)" )
(A) Tri-Wall Japan is part of
Tri-Wall
www.tri-wall.com/aboutus/index.html
("The name 'Tri-Wall' came into existence in the early 1950's when Abe Goldstein, a small box maker in New Jersey, USA, invented the manufacturing process for a new, heavy-duty corrugated material he dubbed 'Tri-Wall Pak®' ")
(B) corrugated fiberboard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrugated_fiberboard
(Double and triple-wall corrugated board is also produced for high stacking strength and puncture resistance)

* The corrugated fiberboard in US is called simply "cardboard."
(C) But what does double- and triple-wall cardboard look like?

Jim Sutton, Build a Table from a Cardboard Box. Jim's Graphics, undated.
www.jimsgraphix.com/recycle/table_1.htm
(D) The word kanbatsuzai is defined in (c).
(iii) paraffin (n; etymology): "chiefly British : KEROSENE"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paraffin
(iv) Google (cardboard coffin) and you will see coffin made of nothing but cardboard -- no wood cover.