Can Coffin-Lying Help You Overcome the Fear of Death?

Climbing into a casket is emerging as an unconventional way to improve mental health and address mortality

Would you pay to lie in a coffin? At a 120-year-old funeral home called Kajiya Honten in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, visitors can pay a fee of around $14 to do just that. Closing the lid is optional, but it’s part of the experience. The practice is intended to give visitors a “reset” or a “second start” in life.

The company president, Kiyotaka Hirano, told the South China Morning Post that exiting the coffin afterward can feel like a rebirth or a chance to begin again. This “coffin café experience” offers a quiet moment of meditation that can encourage many to rethink their lives, reconsider relationships and contemplate how they’ll leave the world behind.

Kiyotaka Hirano came up with the idea after his father died. 

“Some may want to close the coffin lid for a few minutes to contemplate how they’d like to live before their time comes,” Hirano said.

The practice has spread in popularity in Japan and is now offered by Tokyo relaxation salons and other businesses. With the country’s high youth suicide rates, those in favor of the practice point out that this is a harmless and therapeutic way to consider life and mortality.

You can even choose which coffin design to lie in.

Coffin-Lying as a Religious Ritual

Japan isn’t the only country that practices coffin-lying. In fact, Thailand uses it as a religious ritual in some of its Buddhist temples, including Wat Ta Kien near Bangkok. 

In the ritual, participants will hold flowers in a coffin while monks chant funeral rites. The monks stage death by drawing a cloth across the coffin.

Agence France-Presse, a major international news agency based in Paris, France, reports this ritual is meant to “resurrect” participants by stripping away their bad karma. While this practice is much different than the Japanese trend, they both provide a spiritual way to “start over” in one’s life, or reset one’s mental health.

“People cannot escape from being born, getting old, getting ill and dying, so this is like practising dying before you die for real — as when you die, your body has to be put in a coffin anyway,” the temple’s chief abbot, Phrakru Samusangob Kittiyano, said.

The Benefits of Coffin-Lying

Does coffin-lying actually have any benefits to your mental health? A Taiwanese study published in BMC Medical Education studied student volunteers who participated in a three-hour coffin-lying activity. 

The participants measured their fear of death before and after the experience. The data showed that the students who went through the coffin-lying exercise exhibited a lower fear of death and less avoidance of death-related topics than the control group who did not participate. These effects may be worth looking into.

For those who participate in coffin lying with the lid closed, the sensory deprivation that occurs from the experience may also help calm the brain and lower stress levels. It can also allow those to focus on confronting their fear of death without distraction.

Lying in a coffin isn’t meant to replace other effective methods of therapy, such as grief counseling. However, it may just be worth looking into as a short-duration, low-cost exercise to explore your reaction to death and make the most of your time on Earth. This activity is just one of many to prove that structured encounters with mortality can assist with coming to terms with it.

Coffin lying may not be available everywhere, but closing your eyes, limiting distractions and focusing on your reaction to death in a safe environment may help ease your anxiety about the subject. What you take away from it is up to you.

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