Staff from Tail Project organize cleaned-out belongings.
Photographer: Noriko Hayashi for Bloomberg BusinessweekDying Alone in Japan: The Industry Devoted to What’s Left Behind
As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.
Jeongja Han dumps a drawer of pens and lighters into a plastic garbage bag while her client, a recently widowed woman in her mid-50s who asked not to be named, sits on a stool, watching. The woman’s husband died in a car accident a few weeks ago, leaving her to clean out the spacious two-bedroom apartment they occupied for 30 years in Tokyo’s trendy Ebisu neighborhood. They had no children to lay claim to heirlooms or nostalgia, so her directions to Han were simple: “Get rid of everything.”
Han is director of Tail Project, a six-year-old company based near Tokyo that specializes in cleaning out and disposing of the property accumulated by the deceased, a service that’s increasingly in demand as Japan’s population ages and shrinks. For Han, today’s job is relatively simple. She and her crew of three started at 9 a.m., and the small truck waiting on the street below will be full and gone by 1 p.m. Time permitting, Han plans to accompany it to a trading company that buys spent belongings, packs them in overseas shipping containers, and exports them to buyers in the Philippines.