End-of-Life Planning (Shukatsu) for Foreign Retirees in Japan: Wills, Repatriation, and a Cross-Border Family

Why shukatsu guides don't fit a foreign retiree

Shukatsu (the Japanese term for end-of-life preparation, literally the activities for the end) became a household word in Japan after about 2009, and there are shelves of guides on how to do it. Almost all of them assume one thing: that the person, their money, their family, and their grave are all in Japan.

A foreign retiree's plan has a second country in it, and that one fact changes nearly every step. Your bank may be in two places. Your will may already exist somewhere else. Your children may have no Japanese resident record and no seal. Your body, if you do nothing, defaults to cremation in Japan, while your family back home may expect burial. The standard ending-note template has no box for any of this, which is why a competent shukatsu plan written for a Japanese neighbor can leave a foreigner's affairs more tangled, not less.

This article is about the legal and administrative side of that planning, the part you can set up in advance while you are well: a written record of your wishes, the will question, who will actually settle the estate, and the funeral and repatriation logistics. It deliberately does not cover medical end-of-life decisions, advance directives, or what care looks like in your final illness; those are clinical matters that belong with your doctor, and the related care-side reading sits in our end-of-life care in Japan article. Here the subject is paperwork and planning, not treatment.

Two boundaries apply throughout. Inheritance tax, the validity of a will, and how two countries' laws interact are questions with real money and real legal consequence attached, and the right answer depends on your nationality, your assets, and how long you have lived in Japan. Treat every figure below as general orientation that a licensed tax accountant (zeirishi) or a lawyer should confirm against your own situation. And Japan Care Concierge does not draft wills, give tax advice, or settle estates; what we do is help a cross-border family see the whole sequence in plain English and route each piece to the right professional.

An ending note for a cross-border family

The single most useful thing a foreign retiree can leave is not a will. It is a plain, current document that tells whoever shows up where everything is. The Japanese call it an ending note (endingu nōto), and unlike a will it has no legal force, which is exactly why it is easy to keep and easy to update.

Surveys of what Japanese people actually put in these notes are instructive: assets and property top the list, followed by funeral and grave wishes, then information about inheritance and any will. None of that is legally binding, and that is the point. An ending note is the map a grieving family reads first, before any professional gets involved, and for a family scattered across borders it does more work than for anyone else, because the people who will need it cannot simply open a drawer in the family home.

What turns a generic template into a cross-border one is the second-country detail a Japanese form never asks for. Write down which accounts are in Japan and which are abroad, because banks in both countries freeze on death and your heirs will need to know both exist. Note where any existing will is held and in which country. List your home-country consulate and its emergency contact, since a foreigner's death in Japan always involves them. Record whether you want cremation in Japan, repatriation of your remains, or burial here, because the default if you say nothing is cremation, and that decision is hard to reverse once the clock starts. Name the one person, ideally someone reachable in Japanese, who should be called first.

Keep it on paper and tell two people where it is, in two countries if you can. A note encrypted on a laptop nobody can unlock is worse than none. Review it whenever a bank, an address, or an heir changes. This is the cheapest and most forgiving part of the whole plan, and it is the part that spares your family the worst of the early confusion.

• Accounts and assets, split clearly into Japan-based and overseas, with institution names
• Where any existing will is held, in which country, and who drafted it
• Your consulate's details and its after-hours emergency line
• Your wish on cremation in Japan, repatriation of remains, or burial here
• The single first-call contact, ideally someone who can deal with Japanese institutions
• Recurring contracts to stop: rent, utilities, subscriptions, any care service

Making a Japan will that doesn't void your home-country will

This is where foreigners most often create a problem by trying to be tidy. Many people, on settling in Japan, want a Japanese will to cover their Japanese assets, and assume it sits neatly alongside the will they already have at home. The two can collide, and a new will often revokes an older one by default.

Start with the rule that governs which law applies. Under Japan's Act on General Rules for Application of Laws, inheritance is governed by the national law of the deceased. So if you are a foreign national, the substance of your succession, who your heirs are and what shares they take, is generally decided by your home country's law, not Japan's, even though you lived and died in Japan. There are important exceptions: real property located in Japan is treated under Japanese rules in practice, and a renvoi can send the question back to Japanese law where your home country's own rules point here. The practical upshot is that a foreigner's estate is rarely a purely Japanese matter, and a single Japan-only will written as though it were can misfire.

Japan recognizes three will formats. A holographic will (jihitsu shōsho yuigon) is handwritten entirely by you, dated, and signed or sealed; the text need not be in Japanese, but a foreign-language will must be accompanied by a Japanese translation to be acted on. A notarial will (kōsei shōsho yuigon) is drawn up with a notary public, is the most secure form, and spares your heirs the court authentication step a holographic will normally requires; a testator who cannot follow Japanese can still make one with an interpreter present. The third form, a secret will, is rarely used. Since July 2020 a holographic will can also be deposited with the Legal Affairs Bureau (hōmukyoku) for a one-time fee of ¥3,900, which protects it from loss or tampering and removes the post-death court authentication, a cheap safeguard worth knowing about.

The collision risk is the part to take to a professional. A will commonly contains a clause revoking all earlier wills, and if your new Japanese will carries that language, it can wipe out the home-country will covering your overseas assets, leaving those assets to fall under default succession rules nobody intended. The clean approach most cross-border advisers favor is to write each will so it is expressly limited to the assets in its own country and explicitly does not revoke the other, or to have one will drafted with full knowledge of the other. Getting this wrong is not a paperwork annoyance; it can redirect an entire estate. A Japanese lawyer or judicial scrivener (shihōshoshi) who handles international cases should draft or review both sides, and this is squarely outside what we or any general guide can decide for you.

When heirs are overseas: who settles the estate

A foreigner's estate in Japan is usually settled by heirs who are not in Japan, and the Japanese system was built around the assumption that they would be. That mismatch is where the delays and the costs come from, and it is the part worth planning for while you are alive.

Japanese inheritance procedure leans heavily on documents that overseas heirs do not have. The standard estate steps ask for the deceased's full family register (koseki) traced back far enough to establish every heir, plus each heir's own register, proof of address, and a registered personal seal (jitsuin) with its certificate. An heir living abroad has no Japanese resident record and no seal, so they substitute a signature certificate or an affidavit from their consulate or local authority, and assembling that set across borders is routinely the slowest part of the whole process, measured in weeks, not days.

Banks add their own friction. Once a Japanese bank learns of a death, it freezes the account, and unfreezing it requires the documented agreement of all the heirs. A family spread across three time zones, gathering certified signatures one consulate at a time, can spend months on a single account, and meanwhile the rent and the utilities still need paying. This is the practical case for the ending note and the will to name accounts clearly and to name one heir who will front these filings, so the family is not negotiating who does what in the middle of a deadline.

Two newer Japanese obligations sit on top of the international steps. Renouncing an inheritance, which matters if debts may exceed assets, must reach the family court within three months of learning of the death, and that clock is unforgiving when documents have to travel between countries. And since April 2024, registering inherited real estate has been mandatory, due within three years, with a penalty for failing to register without good reason, so an inherited home in Japan can no longer simply be left in the deceased's name. The third-person, after-the-fact view of all these deadlines, written for the family receiving the news rather than the person planning ahead, is laid out in our companion article on what happens when a parent dies in Japan; this section is the planning mirror of it.

The single advance step that resolves most of this is deciding, in writing, who will act. The legal-authority groundwork, the proxies and arrangements that let a named person handle banks and offices, has to be set up while you still have capacity, and Japan's tools for it differ sharply from a common-law power of attorney. We cover that machinery in legal authority for an aging parent in Japan, and the same tools apply when the person planning is you.

Repatriation of remains and the funeral and burial admin

If you say nothing, the default for a death in Japan is a Japanese funeral home and cremation, which is near-universal here. A foreign retiree who wants their remains returned home, or who simply wants the family to know the options, should record the choice in advance, because the decision drives a chain of consular and logistical steps that start within days.

A foreign national's death in Japan always runs on two tracks at once. The Japanese side issues a death certificate (shibō shindansho) and processes the municipal death registration and cremation permit, usually with the funeral home doing the filing. The home-country side runs through the consulate, which prepares its own consular death record and, where remains are being shipped abroad, the mortuary documentation the destination country requires. The consular report typically cannot be issued until the Japanese authorities finish their paperwork, with around a week as a common interval, so families planning a repatriation should expect the timeline to be set by that sequence rather than by the airline.

Costs vary widely and should be treated as ballpark figures, not quotes, because they depend on the funeral home, the destination, and the airline. Basic Japanese funeral-home services commonly fall in the ¥400,000 to ¥600,000 range, and consular service fees are a much smaller line, often in the low tens of thousands of yen. International repatriation of remains, with embalming, a sealed casket, documentation, and air freight, is a separate and substantially larger cost handled by specialist firms, and your home government does not pay for it. This is the practical reason the choice belongs in the ending note: cremation in Japan followed by sending ashes home is far cheaper and simpler than repatriating a body, and a family that knows your wish in advance can plan for the option you actually wanted rather than the one forced by cost and time pressure.

If you have lived in Japan long enough to have built a life here, the burial side has its own quirks worth recording. Grave plots in Japan are bought as a right to use, not freehold land, and a foreign family with no plan often ends up improvising. Whether you want a Japanese grave, a columbarium niche, ashes returned home, or scattering, write it down. None of this is binding, but a clearly stated wish spares the family from guessing on a matter that is easy to get wrong and awkward to undo.

Inheritance-tax exposure: when to bring in a professional

Inheritance tax is the part of foreigner shukatsu that generates the most anxious online reading and the most bad guesses. We will not give you a number for your case, because the rules turn on details only a tax accountant can apply to your facts. What is worth knowing is the shape of the question, so you know when the exposure is real enough to pay for advice.

Many estates owe nothing. Japanese inheritance tax applies only above a basic exclusion of ¥30 million plus ¥6 million per statutory heir, so an estate passing to, say, two heirs has the first ¥42 million shielded before any tax is due, and an estate below the line carries no filing obligation. Where tax does apply, the filing and payment deadline is ten months from the death, which is tight for families dealing with cross-border documents and frozen accounts at the same time.

The part that genuinely surprises long-staying foreigners is how far the net can reach. Broadly, how long you have lived in Japan affects whether only your Japan-located assets are exposed or your worldwide assets are, with a roughly ten-year residence threshold often cited as the line beyond which global assets can come into scope. The exact test is more complex than any single sentence, involves your visa history and the timing rules, and interacts with estate-tax treaties such as the one between the United States and Japan. This is precisely the kind of question where a confident answer from a guide does real harm, so we will not give one.

Treat the following as the signposts for when to stop reading and call someone licensed. Japan Care Concierge does not assess, calculate, or file inheritance tax, and we do not draft the wills these questions hinge on; we will point you to the right professional and help your family understand, in English, what that professional tells them.

• You have lived in Japan close to or beyond ten years and hold significant assets abroad: ask a zeirishi who handles cross-border estates whether your worldwide assets are exposed. Paid.
• You own Japanese real estate: ask a zeirishi and a shihoshoshi, since the property is taxed and registered under Japanese rules regardless of your nationality. Paid.
• You are a US citizen or hold US assets: ask an adviser familiar with the US-Japan estate-tax treaty, because two systems can reach the same estate. Paid.
• You want to know whether your estate even crosses the basic exclusion: a zeirishi can answer quickly from a rough asset list, and many estates fall below it. Paid.
• You need a will that works in both countries: a lawyer or shihoshoshi handling international succession should draft or review it. Paid.

Where Japan Care Concierge fits, and where it does not

Almost every binding step above belongs to someone else, and most of the public-facing parts are handled by professionals and offices you engage directly. It is worth being plain about the division of labour.

We do not draft your will, file or calculate inheritance tax, settle your estate, or make medical end-of-life decisions. Those belong to lawyers and judicial scriveners, to licensed tax accountants, to your heirs and the professionals they hire, and to your doctor. We say so clearly because the value of a guide like this is undermined the moment it pretends to do regulated work it cannot.

What we do is the cross-border coordination that no single professional owns. We help a foreign retiree and their family abroad see the whole sequence in plain English, work out which question goes to which door, and keep the Japan side and the overseas side talking while a plan is assembled. For the wider context of planning a later life in Japan, the strands tie together in our retire in Japan as a senior hub. If you would rather walk this with someone who has helped cross-border families through it before, that is exactly the conversation our care navigation service is built for, and getting in touch costs nothing.