Shukatsu, before you actually need it

The Japanese practice of end-of-life preparation. Ending note, will, digital assets, advance directive. What each is for, in what order, and why the hardest part isn’t the paperwork.

The Japanese term is shūkatsu — the katakana of it looks like an ordinary word, but it’s a specific compound that means, roughly, “end-of-life preparation activity.” It came into common use about fifteen years ago, and by now it’s a whole small industry of workbooks and seminars and specialty attorneys. The mainstream branding presents it as something you do in your seventies, cheerfully, over tea.

It sounds morbid the first time you hear it. It shouldn’t. The point of shukatsu is not to prepare for dying. It is to make what happens after you die tolerable for the people you love. Which is a very different project, and one worth taking on while you’re perfectly fine.

What follows is what to actually do, in what order.

Why the absence of preparation causes real damage

The family doesn’t know where anything is

Bank accounts. Insurance policies. The safety deposit box. The rental unit you were renting to somebody in 1998 that the family didn’t know still exists. The person who dies is often the only person who knew where the paperwork lived. What follows for the surviving family is weeks of forensic archaeology through drawers.

Your actual wishes get overridden by default

Nobody’s said out loud whether you wanted a small funeral. Nobody knows if you wanted to be cremated at all. Nobody knows whether the specific pin should go to your niece rather than your daughter. In the absence of instructions, the family makes guesses, and those guesses often produce lasting family friction.

Medical decisions have to be improvised at three in the morning

If you can no longer speak for yourself and haven’t left any indication of what kind of end-of-life care you want, the family has to guess. Sometimes they guess conservatively (keep going with everything, indefinitely), which produces the intensive care unit death nobody actually wants. Sometimes they guess aggressively (stop everything), which produces the opposite regret. Written instructions solve this.

Three concrete steps, in order

Step 1: An ending note

The Japanese ending note is a bound notebook you fill in with your own information over months or years. It’s not a legal document — it has no binding force. That’s actually its virtue. You can update it freely, and you don’t need a lawyer to touch it.

What to fill in, at your own pace:

• Personal history and important memories.
• All financial accounts: banks, insurance policies, pension providers, investment accounts.
• Medical preferences: whether you want life-sustaining treatment, what to do if you can’t speak for yourself, who should make decisions on your behalf.
• Funeral preferences: scale, religious or secular, burial or cremation, who to invite.
• Messages to specific family members and friends.
• Instructions for pets, if you have them.

Ending note templates are available at any Japanese bookstore, and even at 100-yen shops. You don’t have to fill it out in one sitting. “Today the banking section.” “Today the medical wishes.” Steady progress over a few months is easier than a marathon session.

Step 2: A proper will, for the parts that matter legally

The ending note has no legal force. For asset distribution — who inherits what — you need an actual will. Japanese law recognizes three forms.

• Handwritten will (jihitsu shōsho yuigon). Free to create, but the formatting rules are strict. Since 2020, you can deposit it with the Legal Affairs Bureau for safekeeping, which prevents loss and forgery.
• Notarized will (kōsei shōsho yuigon). Drafted at a notary’s office with the help of a notary public. Costs a few tens of thousands of yen depending on the size of the estate. Nearly bulletproof legally.
• Secret will. Rare and mostly unused in practice.

For anyone whose estate is more than trivial, the notarized will is the recommendation. A judicial scrivener (shihō shoshi) or an attorney (bengoshi) can help draft it. Talk to one before you’re eighty, ideally.

Step 3: Digital assets

This is the one nobody thought about a decade ago and everyone deals with now.

What to list:

• Smartphone and computer passcodes.
• Online banking IDs and passwords.
• Subscription services (streaming, apps, storage). If nobody cancels these, the estate keeps paying for years.
• Social media accounts. Facebook, LINE, Instagram, X. Each has its own memorialization process.
• Where photos and videos are stored — on the phone, on cloud services, on a specific external hard drive.
• Cryptocurrency wallets, if you have them. These are particularly easy to lose forever without the private key.

Store this in a separate password notebook, kept somewhere the executor of your estate can access. Don’t put digital passwords into the same document as everything else — different security requirements.

The medical part deserves its own paragraph

Advance Care Planning — the topic of another article on this site — is the ongoing conversation with your family and doctor about what kind of care you want as you approach the end. This isn’t a form you sign once. It’s a conversation you have several times over the years, updated as your health changes.

The specific document is called an advance directive (jizen shiji-sho in Japan), and it’s non-binding but persuasive. It should cover: whether you want to be resuscitated, whether you want mechanical ventilation, whether you want artificial feeding if you cannot swallow, and where you want to spend your last days if possible — home, hospital, or hospice.

Give copies to your family, your primary doctor, and, if you have one, the care manager coordinating your services.

The hardest part isn’t the paperwork

The hardest part is talking about it with family. Most Japanese families don’t. There’s a superstition about tempting fate by discussing death out loud. The result is a lot of paperwork that gets filled in but never read by the people it’s meant for.

The way to break this is with a specific moment. New Year’s is one — some Japanese families use the family gathering to walk through the ending note together. Around a milestone birthday — sixtieth, seventieth, eightieth — is another. A friend’s death sometimes triggers it too.

Once you’ve done the conversation once, follow-ups are much easier. The first conversation is the hard one.

The point is the living years

Shukatsu done well doesn’t sit as a weight on the years ahead. It lifts one. You’ve handled the thing you were quietly worrying about. Your family knows what you want. The paperwork exists. The banking is organized. Whatever comes next, comes next — but the anxious version of it isn’t running underneath your daily life anymore.

That is worth doing while you feel fine.