Rows of coffins line a university classroom in the South Korean port city of Busan, ready to be used in training the funeral directors of the future in a rapidly aging country.
An increasing number of people are finding work in the death business as South Korea undergoes a massive demographic shift, with birth rates among the lowest in the world and nearly half the population being 50 years old or older.
Students from the Busan Institute of Science and Technology carefully covered a mannequin with traditional Korean funeral cloth, smoothing the cloth as if it were on real skin, before gently lowering it into a coffin.
“As our society ages, I thought the demand for this kind of work would only grow,” said Jang Jin-yeong, 27, a funeral management student.
Another student, Im Sae-jin, 23, decided to enter the field after his grandmother died.
“At her funeral I saw how well the directors had prepared her for the final farewell,” he said.
“I felt deeply grateful.”
‘Like portraits’
More and more South Koreans also live (and die) alone.
Single-person households now account for about 42 percent of all households in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
A new profession has emerged that reflects that statistic: cleaners who are called in to tidy up homes after their occupants, most of whom lived alone, have died.
Former classical musician Cho Eun-seok has cleaned many houses where people were found dead, sometimes months after their deaths.
Their houses are “like their portraits,” said Cho, 47. AFP.
He described heartbreaking trails: hundreds of carefully corked bottles of soju and dusty boxes of gifts that were never opened.
South Korea has the highest suicide rate among developed nations, and these “lonely deaths” include those who died alone by their own hand.
Recently, Cho began receiving calls from used car leasing companies to clean vehicles that were later discovered to be the places where customers ended their lives.
He is also developing a device to detect signs of unattended deaths, which he said can harm the environment, lead to pest infestations and force entire households to dispose of belongings.
In summer, the smell spreads quickly: “in three days it seeps into everything (the refrigerator, the television) and nothing can be saved.”
The house of a woman who had recently died in her eighties was still filled with vestiges of her life when AFP We visited: an old air conditioner, cosmetic jars and a portable toilet, while several canes stood by the door.
“Everything needs to be cleaned”
The job sometimes requires more than just cleaning.
Once, Kim Seok-jung cleaned the house of a deceased lyricist and found a set of songs that he had not shared with his relatives. He turned them into a song for the grieving family.
And Cho recalled a high school girl who lived alone in a gosiwon (a narrow room that is usually less than five square meters) after escaping domestic violence.
I visited once a month to clean. The teenager, who suffered from depression, had not been able to organize herself.
Piles of belongings and rotting food covered the bed and the air was thick with flies.
But he carefully guarded a small box, insisting that Cho never throw it away.
He took his life in that small room a year later.
When Cho returned to clean, she discovered that a hamster had been living in the box the entire time.
Next to him was his guitar: he had dreamed of being a musician.
“The moment I saw the hamster, all I could think was that I had to save it and keep it alive,” Cho said.
Kim Doo-nyeon, a veteran in the funeral business, said he has a growing number of recruits in their 20s.
“When people live together, they share things… even if one person dies, those things remain,” he said.
“But when someone dies alone, you have to clean everything up.”
Back in class in Busan, I admit that I have some trepidation about the career path he chose.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“No matter how much you prepare, facing a deceased person is scary.”
