Metro Tokyo, bring in your dead
In another sign that the Japanese economy might finally be off life support, the number of graves in central Tokyo is on the rise. Last week Aoyama Cemetary, the Park Lane of Tokyo necropoli, took its first new applications for plots in 43 years, offering 50 at the rate of ten million yen a tsubo (3.65 square metres). Reckoned in US dollars, that's about $24,000 per square metre.
The power of Aoyama as a brand and the cachet of taking eternal rest alongside the architects of the Meiji Restoration, former prime ministers, celebrated authors, and other historical personages means that space will always come at a premium--the prices are more than ten times those of other cemetaries, and the 50 plots are expected to be "several tens of times" oversubscribed. Elsewhere, though, it's a less snobbish and localised factor that's drawing more and more to purchase their square of earth in the metropolis: the final signs that land prices have hit bottom after the interminable post-bubble freefall into blackness.
Cemetaries have quietly been acquiring land and growing, and they are offering plots at prices half those of the bubble years. The cost is now low enough to justify a family shelling out the extra versus the suburbs for the ease of having their loved ones interred within commuting distance. There's still a considerable gap between metro and bedtown--the average price per square metre rises from JPY320,000 in Hachioji (depressingly far), to JPY620,000 in Machida (somewhat less so), to JPY1.72 mn within the 23 wards of Tokyo--but the absolute sums involved are no longer prohibitive, especially given that most city centre purchasers opt to make do, as is the case with their dwellings, with less space. Plots in metropolitan Tokyo average under one square metre, whereas one and a half to three is the norm in the suburbs.
The available options range widely. One could choose on the one hand to pay perhaps JPY1 mn for a 0.36 sqare metre plot at Daizouji Hijiri-en, in the embassy-dotted landscape of Mita, Minato-ku; or go for the budget option of Hongo Ryouen, run by Bunkyo-ku's Kouanji, next to the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium, which has turned its 550-plot graveyard into a five-storey building with 6200 spaces. A "space" involves a 30-cm-square name plaque and a box for the ashes, which are delivered to the building's chapel for mourners to pay their respects. The delivery system is an eye-opener: One inserts a card into a slot in the chapel and the remains are automatically whisked there from the depths of the building. A space is JPY700,000, and they're going at the rate of a hundred a month. Some are even moving their relatives in from the suburbs.
There is of course some opposition to the boom--"near but not next door" is what residents want--but it looks set to continue for the moment. As with property in general, there's a growing recognition that if you want to get a foothold in the centre of town, better hurry.
Some of the material for the above comes from an Asahi Shimbun website article which I read on my cellphone and do not immediately have a link for, TV news reports, website digging, and a piece from TBS news.