Itai Hoteru Are Open 24/7

By | 3 February 2024
–thanks to 2July17 New York Times 




No Bronx roach motel cliché

–rather this is a Tokyo reality:

half the minimalist hotel rooms

are furnished with traditional twin

beds, flat-screen TVs, plastic-wrapped

cups, toothbrushes — and across the hall

the other half, fitted with plain small altars

and narrow platforms designed to hold coffins,

is where all the corpses rest. Checkout time for both

living and dead is without exception no later than 3 p.m.

Premium suites may have climate-controlled sarcophaguses

with transparent lids so mourners can peer inside. Part mortuary,

part inn, these establishments serve a growing market of Japanese

seeking an alternative to a big old-style funeral in an island country

where the population is aging rapidly, community bonds are fraying,

crematories are not able to keep up with the sheer amount of business.

By custom, families take the bodies of loved ones home from the hospital,

sit an overnight wake followed by a service the next morning in the company

of neighbors and colleagues and friends. Then, in the afternoon, the body is sent

for burning. The ashes are kept at home before burial for 49 days, when according

to the Buddhist bardo, the passed are believed to arrive at the next world. But as strong

communal ties weaken, lower cost practical ceremonies are more and more the province

of nuclear clans. Demand for corpse hotels’ll increase till the supply of baby boomers disappears.  


An Itai Hoteru - or corpse motel - in Japan.
This entry was posted in 111: BABY and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.
Poet and aphorist Gerard Sarnat is widely published internationally in print and online. He has been nominated for the pending Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Star Award, won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry’s publications include 2023 San Diego Poetry Annual, 2022 Awakenings Review, 2022 Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County Celebration, 2022 Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology, Young Ravens, Fjords, Turtle Island, MIPOesias, Ocotillo Review, Gravity of the Thing, American Writers Review/ San Fedele Press, San Francisco Creative Writing Institute, Israel Association of Writers in English, In Parentheses, Sacramento Review, Pocket Samovar, Black Sunflower, Free State, The Broken City, Sandy River Review, Three Rooms Press/Maintenant, New World Writing, Songs of Eretz, New Verse News,The Font, BigCityLit, HitchLit Review, Lowestoft, Washington Square Review, The Deronda Review, Jewish Writing Project, Hong Kong Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Arkansas Review, Hamilton-Stone Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by Oberlin, Yale, NYU, Slippery Rock, Northwestern, Pomona, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Grinnell, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, Universities of British Columbia and Toronto and Chicago and Virginia presses. He is a Harvard College and Medical School-trained physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with progeny consisting of four collections (Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham To Burning Man, Disputes, 17s, Melting the Ice King) plus three kids/ six grandsons — and is looking forward to potential future granddaughters.

http://gerardsarnat.com/

More by Gerard Sarnat on Cordite Poetry Review →

Related work:

Comments are closed.