When death comes to families, there is often a need to clean out homes quickly. This can be challenging for families in mourning, so they may hire professionals to do the job. In Japan, there's a growing industry of people who respectfully and efficiently pack up a deceased person's possessions for storage, sale, or disposal. It's called ihinseiri.
Anne Allison, a professor of anthropology at Duke University, has studied the cultures of death in Japan for many years. She describes the ihinseiri industry at LitHub.
Animism is foundational in Japanese culture. There is, as a result, attachment to and attribution of meaning to physical objects owned by deceased people. Ihinseiri workers are not simply laborers who work as movers, but professional mourners who sort and arrange possessions in emotionally and spiritually sensitive ways.
Ihinseiri firms can move quickly after someone has died, but it's also possible to hire them before someone has passed on. As a client is preparing for the final journey, s/he can hire these companies to do much of the preliminary decluttering and packing before death. Dr. Allison was able to shadow some of these workers on the job. She described the activity "as if a gentle dust buster had been programmed to silently, automatically empty the house."
-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Death Sweeper by Shou Kitagawa, a manga about people who clean up after death