Assisting people's 'departures'

By Eishi Miyasaka / Yomiuri Shimbun Photographer

YAMAGATA--There was a time when Asami Okuyama was embarrassed to tell people her occupation.

Now she does so with complete confidence.

For the past five years, Okuyama, of Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture, has been working as nokanshi, a mortician who prepares the bodies of deceased people before putting them into their coffins for their funerals.

This occupation was the focus of the movie "Okuribito" (Departures), which in February won an Academy Award in the Foreign Language Film category. The movie, directed by Yojiro Takita, features a man who returns to his hometown in Yamagata Prefecture and becomes a nokanshi.

Okuyama was an adviser to the movie, and a local newspaper and other media featured her after the movie won the Oscar.

Okuyama's work begins with preparing the face of a deceased person for viewing. Then she cleanses the body of the deceased and dresses it in funeral garments. If the deceased is male, she shaves the face. Makeup is applied to the faces of both sexes. Okuyama finally puts the body into a coffin. The work is conducted with the family of the deceased in attendance.

To preserve the modesty of the deceased, nokanshi have to put the funeral garments on the body without baring it. There is an undeniable beauty in the graceful, flowing movements of a nokanshi at work. Okuyama usually takes about one hour to finish dressing a body.

"Just by my shutting the eyes of the deceased, I can see the faces of the bereaved family relax," Okuyama, 28, said.

Her daily tasks are much harder than one might imagine. She travels around the prefecture in a van, sometimes crossing the border into Akita or Niigata prefectures. The van carries a coffin, dry ice and her black bag containing absorbent cotton, a nail clipper, makeup kit and other items.

She had to buy the van last year when her old vehicle became ready for the scrap heap just three years after she bought it, having racked up an astonishing 250,000 kilometers in that period.

Okuyama gets job requests at all hours. One night, requests from funeral homes came one after another, and she was not able to head home until about 5 a.m. after visiting four houses to prepare the deceased.

The bodies sometimes reflect the social situation of the deceased. Last spring, Okuyama treated the bodies of many deceased people who had committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas they had created by mixing household chemicals. Last winter, meanwhile, the number of bodies of middle-aged men she dealt with increased. The deceased were dispatched workers who apparently had lost hope and killed themselves after being laid off from their companies, Okuyama said.

To avoid contracting hepatitis from the dead bodies she treats, Okuyama is vaccinated regularly.

Her parents had opposed their daughter's choice of career, but their attitudes changed after "Okuribito" won an Oscar, Okuyama said. One day, she overheard her parents speaking proudly about their daughter to their friends, showing them a newspaper article about her.

"I felt my work was finally recognized by my parents, to some degree" she said.

In the past, when people asked Okuyama about her occupation, she felt unable to say she was working as a nokanshi and instead said she was working in a funeral services-related business.

"I can now tell people openly that I'm a nokanshi," she said.