The hotel for the dead
Behold, hotel for the dead!
Staff of the hotel preparing a ‘room’ for a lodger.
Funny enough, many fun seekers always stray in, asking for rooms, but Mr. Teramura’s place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travellers. The white-and-grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins.
“We tell them we only have cold rooms,” Mr Teramura quipped, when asked how his staff responded to unwary lovers looking for a room.
According to National Post, the daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is ¥12,000 ($154.33). For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city’s overworked crematoriums.
Death is a rare booming market in stagnant Japan and Mr. Teramura’s new venture is just one example of how businessmen are trying to tap it.
Mr. Teramura, 71, decided a decade ago to widen his business beyond graves to funerals and he opened Lastel last year.
Behind its flower boxframed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
Building new urban crematoriums to deal with the surge in bodies is near to impossible because nobody wants the furnaces in their backyard, explained Mr.
Teramura. That not-in-my-backyard crowd is forcing cities to make do with the facilities they have, even as the body count mounts.
In Yokohama, the average wait for an oven is more than four days, driving up demand for half-way morgues like Lastel. “Otherwise, people have to keep the bodies at home where there isn’t much space,” Mr Teramura said.
It also provides a captive audience to which he can market his be worth ¥1.96-trillion by 2015.
As for Mr Teramura, he’s pushing ahead with expansion plans. He pulled out his cellphone and shows a picture of an office building he just bought in another Yokohama neighbourhood. When he has finished renovating, it will be his second Lastel, with room for 40 bodies, more than double the first
Employees of the hotel help in carrying out the ritual, make the necessary manipulation of the body in preparation for the cremation. During their stay at the "visitor" can visit the relatives, there can also invite a monk who will read the prayer.
