Expanding care across borders

What led you to establish Funeral Support Services (FSS), and what gaps or challenges in the market were you hoping to address when you started the business?

I came to Japan 33 years ago to work for a Japanese funeral company as an embalmer. At that time in Japan, embalming was in its infancy. I started Funeral Support Services to provide embalming to local Japanese funeral companies that did not have embalming facilities or expertise.

In those early years, only the large Japanese funeral companies offered embalming to their clientele. This opened up an opportunity to support the smaller companies. As one of the only foreign embalmers in Japan, people also turned to me to take care of their non-Japanese clientele. When I worked at a funeral home in Canada over 30 years ago, one of my responsibilities was repatriation cases. Trained as a funeral director and embalmer, I had the experience to handle these types of cases where Japanese funeral companies were struggling.

Most Japanese funeral companies do not have native English speakers on staff, which often leads to communication problems and frustration. Many small, important and very sensitive details were getting lost in translation.

Your company began as an embalming service primarily for local Japanese families. How has the business evolved over the years to support both the Japanese population and the international community living in Japan?

We continue to provide embalming to local funeral companies. We now have two embalming facilities in the Tokyo area, staffed with seven experienced embalmers, both Japanese and foreigners.

The repatriation side of the business has been steadily growing since the Covid-19 pandemic. FSS now has multilingual staff providing service in English, Italian, Spanish, French and Mandarin Chinese. We’ve also been working hard to stay active in Japan’s foreign community and to attend as many ITIC events overseas as possible. ITIC has been a valuable tool for gaining visibility around the world.

Working in funeral services requires both cultural understanding and compassion. What have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned from supporting families from different backgrounds and cultures?

I have been working in the funeral industry for 40 years and taken care of families from many backgrounds over that time. It is important to stay open-minded and provide as much care as possible. Every family we serve are treated as if they were our own, and that gives us a great deal of satisfaction. Some of the families we work with come from countries struggling with conflict and war, but our focus is always on the family, not the political dynamics of where they come from. There is no room for prejudice in this profession.

Looking ahead, do you have any ambitions or plans to develop FSS further, and how do you see the needs of clients changing in the years to come?

We have been expanding aggressively. FSS handles cases across all of Japan, not just the Tokyo area. We are actively looking for property around the country to build new facilities in order to remain easily accessible.

The weaker Japanese yen has led to an increase in tourism. With the influx of foreign visitors, our team has been expanding with the addition of new staff to keep up with the growing workload. It is important to have experienced staff ready whenever a call comes in.

I am also proud to say that companies outside the Asian region now turn to us not just for cases in Japan, but also in neighbouring countries. We are well connected throughout the region, which allows us to pick up the phone and provide quick, efficient service anywhere it is needed due to our strong network and global partnerships.