Hong Kong funeral expo shows new ways to deal with the dead
For the seven million citizens of Hong Kong, living comfortably in the one of the world’s most densely populated cities is difficult enough, but dying presents is own set of challenges. Around 43,700 people died in the territory in 2010. By 2020 that number is expected to rise to almost 53,000. A majority will be cremated, since land shortages forced most people to abandon burials in the 1980s and cremations became acceptable.
But now the city’s public columbarium, where relatives can keep ashes in an urn in a 30 cm (one foot) crevice in a wall, has run out of space. As a result, Hong Kong residents have been forced to store their loved ones’ remains in funeral homes, privately-run storage facilities, or their own homes.
“In recent years there are more than 100,000 people waiting for columbarium space,” said Tiu Tong Ng, Honourable President of Hong Kong’s Funeral Director Association. “Usually it take three to four years to obtain this kind of space. The government has to solve this problem,” he told the Asia Funeral Expo, which opened in Hong Kong Thursday.
Read the full story by Stefanie McIntyre here.
View a slideshow of the Asia Funeral Expo here.
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Paris death salon shows life and new trends in funeral industry
“Care to try out the coffin?” Surprised but intrigued, the young man lays himself down on the ivory satin fabric and holds his breath as the heavy lid closes over him. At the Salon of Death, everything is permitted.
For the first time in Paris, death is the star at a free exhibition taking place underneath the famed Louvre museum.
“It’s good to talk about death in the heart of the capital, because we’re a society pretty much based on consumption and leisure,” said Jean-Paul Soltani, who makes funerary monuments in the northwestern region of Brittany. “And here, we’re right next to the museum where they’ve got pharoahs’ tombs!”
Funeral parlors, organ donation societies, embalming techniques, and lots and lots of marble — it’s all on display at the Salon of Death, in a surprisingly clinical atmosphere. Organizers hope some 25,000 visitors will stroll through the Salon to admire the rows upon rows of biodegradable coffins or the luxurious funerary urns.
Or rest one’s head in a coffin, as the case may be. “There you go, I did it,” said one young man who braved the experience. “It felt like chasing away a little devil.”
A publisher’s stand displayed a selection of funeral requiems on CDs and non-religious books such as “Knowing How to Die” by the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca or “Reflections on the Guillotine” by French writer Albert Camus. At another stand, a former journalist explained how his company helped people who have had near-death or out-of-body experiences to meet and talk about what they lived through.
Read the full story here. Or the original French article — La Mort tient salon au coeur de Paris.
A Buddhist burial in the rain for Japanese tsunami victims
Ten flimsy wooden coffins were laid on two sturdy rails at a hastily prepared cemetery of mostly mud as Keseunnuma began burying its dead from the tsunami that ripped apart the Japanese coastal city. Desperate municipalities such as Kesennuma have been digging mass graves, unthinkable in a nation where the deceased are almost always cremated and their ashes placed in stone family tombs near Buddhist temples. Local regulations often prohibit burial of bodies.
The number of dead in Kesennuma was 551 as of Saturday, far too many for local crematoriums that can typically manage about 10 bodies a day but are now facing shortages of kerosene. Another 1,448 in the city of about 74,000 are missing from the tsunami two weeks ago that has left more than 27,500 people dead or missing across Japan.
“This disaster has created a tsunami of tears,” said Shuko Kakayama, master of the Jifukuji Buddhist temple, which lost 300 members to the tsunami that also heavily damaged temple grounds.
Kakayama, who presided over the funeral of one temple member and prayed for all souls laid to rest, said there was a time when Japan permitted burials. But the government has for decades sought cremations due to a lack of cemetery space in the densely populated country.
“If we are returning to the earth, then we are returning to nature,” Kakayama said.
Read the full story by Jon Herskovitz here.
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JAPAN – BEACON OF CORRECT SPIRIT
“Tsunami Survivor Adoption Program”
A tsunami slammed into Japan’s northeast coast on March 11, killing well over 10,000 people. The 1,000’s of survivors huddle in makeshift shelters. Food, clean water, medicine, toiletries, warmth, comfort, medical and trauma care and other essential supports for survival are in scant supply, in some places non-existent. They are in the darkest of dreams from which they cannot awake, haunted by the loss of loved ones, their familiar home which is in a pile of rubble scattered across a six-mile signature of ravaging horror…Whole generations of family have become tortured ghosts wandering the coastline of the Northwest, evaporating until the sun sets and rises again. At all times, survivors demonstrate impeccable conduct to the shocked world looking on – reminding them of their failings by contrast, inspiring them with new insight on the potential nobility of the human spirit…
It’s true: the government, the survivors, the ninky? dantai who provide disaster relief services faster than the government, the indescribably self-sacrificing workers (Tsun Tzu is the only name appropriate) combating the nuclear plant shambles to protect Mother Japan, and faint smatterings of the outside world community lend a helping hand. After all, in any confrontation to the reminder that we will each face a “final moment”, we are all members of the same family, the frail, evil but simultaneously wondrous and inspiring specie, Homo sapiens.
The code of jingi (justice and duty – where loyalty and respect are a way of life) is the essence of the Japanese people. Worldwide, nothing resembles it.
The multiple, escalating, compound disasters Japan faces are incomparable to any in history. They will survive, rebuild, even fortify beyond their past dignity as a people.
New strategies are needed, which is why I pen this blog. I ask every able-bodied Japanese citizen to reach out their individual hand and home to a survivor. Bring them into your home. Within your means, care for one or more survivors. Work collectively to establish a network of such volunteer homes, a transportation network to bring those survivors to their new “adopting home”. Greet them with love and kindness and nurturing support as you can. Do this as immediately as possible. New and great risk will beset them unless you act with aggressive action to make this possible and tangible. I beg you as a previous Japanese life which memory is alive within me, Kotoamatsukami. Blessings and hope and love and respect for you…
Dominic.MacCormac@MedstrataSystems.com
Egyptian Copts hold funeral after Christian-Muslim strife kills 13
Thousands of Egyptian Christians attended an emotional funeral service on Thursday for people killed in the worst Christian-Muslim violence since Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power. Six coffins lay by a church altar during the ceremony, victims of the violence on Tuesday in which 13 people were killed and 140 wounded. A seventh coffin arrived later. Some held aloft signs with slogans that included: “No to sectarianism, no to murder,” and “Farewell to the martyrs of Christ.”
“We will sacrifice our souls and our blood for the cross,” a crowd of mourners chanted at the end of the service as they poured out of the Samaan al-Kharaz Church, built in a cave above the Cairo slum of Manshiet Nasr. It was not clear how many of the dead from Tuesday’s violence were Christian and how many Muslim.
The strife poses another challenge to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which says it wants to hold elections within six months so it can relinquish power.
A number of activists have called for a march on Friday from Cairo’s central Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the protests that ousted Mubarak, to show solidarity with Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Many Egyptians took pride in the Christian-Muslim solidarity displayed during the revolution that toppled Mubarak on Feb. 11 and hoped the uprising had buried tensions that have flared up with increasing regularity in recent years.
Read the full story by Sarak Mikhail here.
For more background, see also:
Lasers and iPods for a Singapore funeral of a lifetime
Death need not be a grim affair, especially for the living. At a new columbarium in Singapore, the deceased can depart, rock concert style. Unlike most traditional Buddhist funeral ceremonies that follow cremation, there is no incense and no monks offering prayers at the Nirvana Memorial Garden columbarium, where the urns holding the remains of the dead are stored.
Instead, curtains draw automatically to reveal the deceased’s urn which is placed atop a pedestal, machine-generated smoke fills the prayer hall and a booming recorded voice, accompanied by chants, speaks words of comfort and talks about death.
The columbarium boasts a $2 million sound and light system. Its resident Buddha statue pulsate gently with LED lights and, as a final touch, a ray of bright white light shines on the urn of the deceased symbolising the ascent to heaven.
The so-called “six star” columbarium is Singapore’s first luxury final resting place and the brainchild of Malaysian-based NV Multi Corp which has other similar projects in Southeast Asia.
Hindu wins battle for funeral pyre in Britain
A devout Hindu declared himself “overjoyed” on Wednesday after winning a court fight to be allowed to be cremated in Britain on an open-air funeral pyre.
Spiritual healer Davender Ghai, 71, was granted his last wish by the Court of Appeal which ruled the controversial ceremony could be carried out without a change in the law, which prohibits the burning of human remains anywhere outside a crematorium.
But the judges ruled in his favour only after Ghai agreed that the pyre would be surrounded by walls and a roof with an opening, the Press Association domestic news agency reported.
Ghai believes that a pyre is essential to “a good death” and for the release of his spirit into the afterlife. He wants a permit for an open-air cremation site in a remote part of Northumberland in northern England.
Read Stefano Ambrogi’s full story here.
With Europeans discussing restrictions on certain traditions such as the wearing of Muslim face veils, do you think this Hindu tradition is acceptable in a western society?
Does it stop short of some red line that the Muslim veil crosses? Does it make a difference that a Hindu is seeking respect for a religious tradition rather than a Muslim?
Poll – Should Ted Kennedy have a Catholic funeral?
Our post “Catholic comments on Ted Kennedy, pro and con” showed readers were deeply split on whether the late senator should have a Roman Catholic funeral. The naysayers argued that his support for choice on abortion and other disagreements with Church doctrine disqualify him from a religious ceremony. Those for a church funeral argued that he helped advance many causes championed by Catholic social teaching.
Those opposing a Mass of Christian Burial for Kennedy predominated, but not all readers take the time to write a comment. One-click poll questions sometimes give a different picture from comment pages. So here’s a simple question:
As the old saying goes, Let he (or she) who is without sin, cast the first stone.
Nobody’s perfect. We all have faults. Teddy was a devout Catholic. Who are we mere mortals, to decide whether or not he should have the funeral of his choice. This is not American, nor is it Christian.
Christ would have forgiven him, and Teddy did an awful lot for a lot of people. Have some respect for the dead, for humanity’s sake.
from AxisMundi Jerusalem:
Israel’s burial crisis and the afterlife
Far from the spotlight of peace talks and military conflicts, Israel is facing a different kind of land crisis: it is running out of space to bury its dead. Most Jewish cemeteries in major cities like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, are filled beyond maximum capacity. Gravestones are packed together leaving little room for mourners to gather.
You can read about a new system of multi-tiered burial chambers being used in the Jewish state to solve the issue of land. It's actually an ancient system, used thousands of years ago by Jewish sages, that was modernised by two Israeli architects and given approval by the country's chief rabbis.
Ancient Sanhedrin tombs and their modern-day revival
Adding to the problem of dwindling burial space for Israelis, each year about 1,500 Jews from around the world choose the Holy Land for their final resting place. For some, the choice could come from the allure of being buried in the Jewish state. For others, it stems from the Bible. And you can always find some group that offers to help make it happen.
Israel's Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said in an interview with Reuters that it is written in the Talmud -- a collection of ancient Rabbinic texts -- that "the earth of the Holy Land cancels all the sins of the person who passed away so he can go directly to heaven and paradise without sin".
One of the most sought after -- and expensive -- cemeteries is Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, just outside the Old City walls. Many Jews pay thousands of dollars to be buried at the Mount of Olives because the Bibilical Prophet Zecharia said that the Messiah, upon arriving in Jerusalem, will first ressurect those buried there.
Vedic tradition is the only practical solution- cremation with religious rites.
A relevant topic of global importance, indeed. Predictions are that by 2050 the worlds population will grow to a mammoth 9 billions. Even if 60 % of them were to buried, it’s a lot of precious real estate that needs to be downgraded into a burial ground. Last time I heard the land is shrinking and not expanding. The Hindu think tank, thousands of yrs ago, had foreseen the after death ground reality and made it a religious obligation to take the cremation route. Wake up people , a serious land problem that’s going to overwhelm us all in not so distant future.
Funeral may show if Michael Jackson converted to Islam
One of the many rumours that swirled around Michael Jackson in the final years of his life was that he had secretly converted to Islam and taken the name Mikaeel. The “King of Pop” does not seem to have spoken about this publicly himself, and that scene in Bahrain when he went shopping badly disguised in an Arab woman’s abaya could be put down to his well-known penchant for dressing up. So unless there is some statement in his will or documentary evidence in his estate, his funeral expected this week may be the last time to test whether this rumour has any basis in fact.
The Jacksons are Jehovah’s Witnesses and could be expected to bury Michael in the tradition of that faith. When he announced the death, his brother Jermaine — a Muslim — ended with the words: “May Allah be with you, Michael, always.” Jermaine said in 2007 he was trying to convince Michael to convert.
The post-mortem period hasn’t looked very Muslim so far. Traditions vary, but in Islamic funeral practices in general, autopsies and cremation are out and the body should be buried quickly, usually in a day or two. Jackson is reported to have asked for cremation in his will and his family has asked for a second autopsy after the first one failed to pinpoint the cause of death without long toxicology tests.
Jehovah’s Witnesses prefer short and simple funerals, usually with a Scripture reading, and warn adherents against funerals with emotional outbursts ranging “from frantic wailing and shouting in the presence of the corpse to joyous festivities after the burial. Unrestrained feasting, drunkenness, and dancing to loud music often characterize such funeral celebrations.”
The focal point of an Islamic funeral is the funeral prayer called the salat al-janazah. An imam facing Mecca leads the faithful in saying the prayer, punctuated by declarations of Allahu Akbar. The corpse of the deceased is placed perpendicular to the qibla, the direction of Mecca in which all worshippers are standing, rather than in the same direction as the faithful as usual in a Christian funeral.
The funeral service could be in the Jehovah’s Witness style, it could be Islamic or it could be a mix of the two (maybe even with borrowings from other traditions as well). If Michael Jackson’s artistic career is anything to go by, the third option wouldn’t be a surprise at all.
FYI the delay was due to the holidays. Comment moderators take some time off too 
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from UK News:
Scots favour traditional funeral hymns
While the English and Welsh are asking for more pop songs to be played at funerals, the Scots are bucking the trend and opting for more religious music.
Fifty-six percent of Scots chose hymns during the past 12 months, a rise of 2 percent on 2005, according to a survey carried out by Co-operative Funeralcare.
In the rest of the UK, only 35 percent selected religious music, a fall of 6 percent on the same period - reflecting an increasingly secular society.
The most popular hymns remained "The Lord is My Shepherd", "Abide with Me" and "All Things Bright and Beautiful", while the top songs were Frank Sinatra's "My Way" and Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings".
The Co-op, which gathered the information from 242 of its funeral homes, put the contrast down to a different attitude to change.
"I do not think we are so different from our cousins in the south," said John Williamson, operations manager for the Co-op in Scotland.
"The Scots are not more prone to be church members, but they have a more traditional approach to funeral services in general. We are slower to change, but change is coming".
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