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The story
A Yomiuri Shimbun survey has found that more than 40% of Japan’s 20 designated major cities with public crematoriums risk having cremation demand outstrip capacity by 2040 at the latest. Yokohama and Hiroshima are already over capacity, and Chiba City reportedly sees cremation waits of 7 to 10 days in winter. The underlying cause is the approaching “mass death society,” in which deaths are rising as the baby boomer generation ages. On 5ch, users traded personal accounts of waiting six days to cremate a family member, suggestions that reviewing cooling times could speed up furnace turnover, and comments noting that many people don’t even know how crematorium reservations work — with reactions split between emphasizing how dire the shortage is and how much room there is to fix it.
A Yomiuri Shimbun survey has found that more than 40% of designated major cities operating crematoriums risk facing capacity strain (逼迫, “hippaku”) by around 2040 at the latest. The cause is the full onset of the “mass death society” as the baby boomer generation ages, with facility renewal costs also straining municipal budgets.
Yomiuri asked all 20 designated major cities with public crematoriums whether — and when — their annual cremation volume might exceed capacity (as of this June).
Yokohama and Hiroshima both answered that they were “already over capacity.” Five cities said it would happen “by the 2030s”: Saitama (around 2030), Chiba (around 2033), Kawasaki (around 2036), Sagamihara (around 2035-36), and Sakai (around 2035). Two cities, Okayama (around 2040) and Fukuoka (around 2035-40), said “by 2040.” In Chiba, cremation waits of roughly 7 to 10 days reportedly occur in winter, when deaths rise.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Is this 'mass death society' thing even real?
Joint cremations might seriously become more common
Fuel use probably won't differ much, so costs would drop
If each furnace runs 3 cycles, 44 furnaces = 132 cycles
Looks like it should be enough at first glance
But deaths cluster in winter, so maybe that's why it can't keep up
My dad died last summer, and we had to wait a full 6 days before he could be cremated
Yokohama's situation is pretty dire too
Nope.
Cremation takes the same amount of time regardless of whether you want the remains or not.
it'd have the side benefit of keeping bears from coming down into neighborhoods and farmland too
No way that happens
Burial takes up more space
and digging graves takes a lot more labor too
Actually, burial used to be the Japanese tradition,
but right around when the baby boomers were born, population growth and urban concentration meant
there was no land to bury people in, plus sanitation issues, so cremation spread instead
We switched to cremation because there was no room for burial — we can't just go back to burial now
The funeral home brought fresh dry ice every day until the funeral
Crematoriums actually have openings early in the morning or in the evening.
Funeral homes say 'this is the only slot we could get,' but that's because once you hold the funeral service first and then go to the crematorium, the arrival time ends up falling in a narrow window — and that particular window is just booked up.
Same as train rush hour
Crematoriums are stuck on the receiving end, so they can't really cut the peak themselves
If it were 'kotsusou,' common in the Tohoku and Chubu regions, there'd be more room to spread things out
Kotsusou means cremating first and holding the funeral afterward
In regions that do kotsusou, the first furnace slot of the morning is the crowded one
Any resident of the city, ward, town, or village can book the crematorium directly — some even let you book online.
Make the reservation yourself, then find a funeral home that can arrange the service to match that time.
When a funeral home tells you 'this is the only slot available,' that's a lie.
why can't they handle something as easily predictable decades in advance as population demographics?
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
'Not my job to deal with it' → kick the can
It's because they're looking even further ahead lol
Once the peak passes, demand drops back down after all
Cremation used to take about 2 hours, but these days with higher-powered furnaces it's more like 1 hour
The places heading toward a crunch are probably just short on furnace power
The burning itself is fast, but it's cooled naturally, and that's what takes time.
A crematorium worker explained that if you use a fan to force-cool it, the finer bone fragments get blown away.
These days everywhere uses air cooling, but forced cooling gets the cooling time down to about 15 minutes
In that case
they could probably boost furnace turnover by setting up a separate cooling area and bone-collection space
It's probably just that things haven't gotten bad enough yet to justify going that far
The baby-boomer-echo generation is coming up next, so more like 40 years
Even if crematoriums end up decommissioned later for having too much capacity, at least the sites are easier to repurpose than old nuclear plant sites lol
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Most crematoriums are run by municipalities, and building new facilities or renewing furnaces requires years to a decade of planning and budgeting. Population trends themselves are predictable over the long term, but if furnaces are added and the death-rate peak then passes, the facilities become excess capacity — which makes local governments cautious about investing. Indeed, the thread features both the criticism that “this was predictable decades ago” and the counter-view that “they’re just not moving because they’re already anticipating demand dropping after the peak,” suggesting this isn’t simply a case of bureaucratic inaction. Commenters also pointed out that wait times depend not just on the raw number of furnaces, but on funeral homes’ reservations clustering around preferred time slots, and on how cooling time after cremation is managed. The Yomiuri survey covered the 20 designated major cities with public crematoriums, and did not include smaller municipalities outside that category — so the article doesn’t tell us how much regional variation there might be in the actual severity of the shortage.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Crematorium Capacity at Risk of Strain in Over 40% of Designated Major Cities… as Baby Boomer Aging Brings Full Onset of ‘Mass Death Society’“.
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