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Is your crematory booked? Japan offers corpse hotels

In Tokyo number of people over 65 who died alone at home more than doubled between 2003 & 2015

Corpse Hotel
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Customers Hirokazu Hosaka and his wife Minako Hosaka look at the coffin of his mother at the Corpse Hotel in Kawasaki, Japan. Photo: Reuters

Motoko Rich | NYT Osaka (Japan)
The minimalist rooms at the Hotel Relation here in Japan’s third-largest city are furnished with plain twin beds. Flat-screen televisions adorn the walls. Plastic-wrapped cups and toothbrushes are provided in the bathrooms. And just across the hall are the rooms where the corpses rest.
 
Checkout time, for the living and the dead, is usually no later than 3 pm.
 
The Hotel Relation is what Japanese call an “itai hoteru,” or corpse hotel. About half the rooms are fitted with small altars and narrow platforms designed to hold coffins. Some also have climate-controlled coffins with transparent lids so mourners

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