Japanese owners seek pet funeral services
TOKYO — With an increasing number of pet lovers seeking to mark the passing of their cherished animal friends with a funeral service, the range of relevant services has grown considerably.
Among the options available to bereaved pet owners are services that will come to their home to cremate the bodies of the deceased pets and Buddhist priests who will read sutras for the departed creatures.
Part of the reason for this trend seems to be the increasing identification of pets as family members who deserve a heartfelt send-off when they die.
Yoneko Tanaka, 58, a housewife in Sayama, Japan, lost her beloved 13-year-old golden retriever last spring.
She held a farewell ceremony for her pet with five other mourners including her husband, daughter and son-in-law.
Tanaka called a mobile pet crematory to come to her home. "I wanted to have our dog cremated at a familiar place (to the pet)," she said.
Five of Tanaka's family attended the cremation. They placed incense sticks in front of the incinerator. After the cremation, they picked up the bones and placed them in an urn. The cost of the cremation was about 40,000 yen (about $413), including the urn.
"Because I regarded our pet as one of the family, I had an individual cremation conducted like we would do for a human," Tanaka said.
According to the Tokyo-based Japan Pet Food Association, the number of pet dogs and cats in fiscal 1994, when the association began the survey, was 15.22 million, but the figure now is estimated to have reached 23.99 million in the last fiscal year, indicating that an increasing number of households are keeping pets.
Aiming to meeting the emotional needs of owners who have lost pets they dearly loved, an increasing number of businesses are providing funeral services for pets.
Masamitsu Fujimoto, head of the Pet Visiting Cremation Car Association of Japan, said: "The number of firms operating these kinds of services was around 10 in the Kanto region about five years ago, but today the number has surged to about 100."
The service options available also have diversified markedly.
Japan Pet Ceremony, a Tokyo-based company providing pet funeral services, has a business arrangement with some Buddhist temples, which provide priests to read sutras out in front of the bodies of dead pets. After the pet owner watches the ceremony, the body is cremated. The price differs depending on the temple involved, but the average cost is about 40,000 yen ($413) for a pet.
Various repositories for pets range from charnel houses resembling lockers and pagodas jointly dedicated to the souls of pets to individual graves. Pet owners either pay a lump-sum fee for use of the resting place for the bones of their pets, or they pay an annual maintenance fee.
Fees start from about 10,000 yen ($103) for a joint facility. An exclusive grave or tomb in a pet cemetery can cost hundreds of thousands of yen.
Some service operators, in cooperation with temples, provide memorial services for pets, such as a Buddhist ritual marking the first anniversary of their death.
