Nearly half say maintaining graves is hard work: Japan firm’s survey

TOKYO — As more people in Japan choose to close their family graves, nearly half of the respondents felt burdened by the maintenance and upkeep of such sites, according to a survey by a Nagoya-based company that operates a nationwide gravestone cleaning business.

Between Aug. 2 and 4, Assi-Stone Inc. conducted a survey of men and women aged 40-79 across the country and received responses from 500 people.

Regarding the frequency of visiting graves, the largest percentage of respondents, or 25.6%, chose “about once every six months,” and together with the 11.8% that selected “about once every two to three months” and 10.6% who picked “once every four to five months,” nearly 60% of the respondents said they visit the graves more than once every six months.

As for the management of the graves, 29.6% of the respondents answered that it was “hard,” and together with 16.2% who said it was “fairly hard,” nearly half of all respondents felt that the maintenance and management of the sites was a burden.

What exactly do they find hard? The top four reasons given were: cleaning gravestones, removing weeds, going to the grave, and the cost of maintenance. The farther the distance from their home to the grave, the more respondents felt burdened. This suggests that cleaning and visiting the graves themselves are burdensome.

On the other hand, 47.4% of the respondents wanted to maintain the graves properly and 8.6% wanted to maintain them fairly properly, which together accounted for more than half of the respondents.

A spokesperson for Assi-Stone said, “The results suggest that while there are cases in which people have no choice but to close their family graves due to the burden they feel, such as when the distance from their homes to the graveyard is too great, there are also many who want to maintain the graves somehow.”

(Japanese original by Hiroya Miyagi, Digital News Group)