Shigo Jimu Inin: Japan's After-Death Affairs Contract, Explained

Who Actually Handles the Details After You Die

A will names who inherits; it does not name who cremates a body, cancels a phone contract, or clears a rented room, and in Japan those tasks fall to whoever is physically present and willing.

A will in Japan does one job well: it says who gets what. It says nothing about who shows up at the crematorium, who tells the pension office and the ward office, who pays the last month of rent and utilities, or who clears out a rented apartment before the landlord starts charging for the empty months. Under ordinary circumstances a spouse or adult child living nearby handles this without a contract, simply because they are there. The problem shows up for two specific groups: a foreign resident retiree living alone in Japan with no family in the country, and an overseas family whose parent has died in Japan while they are still arranging flights and time off work.

In both cases, the practical question is not "who inherits" but "who is legally allowed to act, right now, before probate is settled." Funeral homes, hospitals, and utility companies will not simply take instructions from someone with no documented authority, and an heir living abroad may not be able to reach Japan for days. A shigo jimu inin (死後事務委任) contract, literally an after-death affairs delegation contract, exists to answer exactly that question in advance: it names a person or firm, in a notarized document, with authority to act the moment death is confirmed. For the fuller planning picture around wills, repatriation, and cross-border inheritance deadlines, see our companion guide to end-of-life planning for foreign retirees in Japan; this article goes one layer deeper into the single tool that answers "who executes."

The distinction matters because the two documents solve different problems and most people only plan for one of them. A will and an inheritance plan answer what happens to money and property, generally over weeks or months, through the family court and the heirs. A shigo jimu inin contract answers what happens to the body and the immediate logistics, generally within the first 48 to 96 hours, before any of that inheritance process has even started. Families who plan only the first and skip the second are the ones who end up with a body waiting at a hospital morgue while relatives overseas try to work out, by phone, who is authorized to sign for cremation.

Who This Is Actually For

The contract matters most for single foreign retirees with no relative in Japan and for families whose only Japan-based relative has just died, leaving no one local to act.

The people who most need this contract fall into a small number of situations. A foreign retiree who has naturalized, taken permanent residence, or simply settled in Japan long-term, with no spouse, no children in the country, and no sibling nearby, has literally no one who would otherwise show up. A married couple where one spouse is significantly older or in poorer health may want the contract for whichever one is left alone. An adult child living overseas, supporting an aging parent in Japan from a distance, is protecting themselves as much as the parent: the contract means a stranger's death does not become a logistics crisis conducted entirely over international phone calls at 3 a.m.

It is worth being direct about who does not need one. If a spouse, adult child, or sibling lives in the same city and is willing and able to act, that person can usually handle notifications, cremation arrangements, and the apartment clearance without a formal contract, because Japanese practice already defers to a present, willing relative. The contract earns its cost specifically in the gap where no such person exists or where that person is thousands of kilometers away and cannot get there in time.

Will, Guardianship, or After-Death Contract: Comparing the Three

A will, a voluntary guardianship contract, and a shigo jimu inin contract cover three different windows of time, and most people need at most two of the three, not all three at once.

Three separate legal tools get confused with each other because they all involve planning ahead for a time when someone else has to act on your behalf. A will (yuigonsho) takes effect only after death and only governs the distribution of the estate; it has no power over anything that happens before probate concludes. A voluntary guardianship contract (nin'i koken keiyaku), notarized in advance and activated by a family court once cognitive capacity declines, authorizes a chosen guardian to manage finances and welfare decisions while the person is alive, but that authority ends the moment the person dies. A shigo jimu inin contract is the only one of the three built to operate during the narrow window that starts at death and ends once the estate and inheritance process take over.

The gap this creates is easy to miss: a voluntary guardian, however trusted, generally cannot use that authority to arrange a funeral or clear a rented room, because their appointment legally ends at death. A narrow exception exists only for court-appointed statutory guardians (seinen koken, not the voluntary kind): under Civil Code Article 873-2, added in an October 2016 amendment, a statutory guardian may preserve estate assets, pay debts that have already come due, and arrange cremation or burial, but only if the heirs are not yet in a position to manage the estate themselves, only if doing so does not clearly conflict with the heirs' wishes, and, for the cremation and burial step specifically, only with family court permission. That authority does not extend to voluntary guardians, and it does not cover the wider list of tasks a family typically needs handled: notifying pension and insurance offices, cancelling subscriptions and utilities, settling the final rent, or clearing personal belongings.

This is exactly the space a shigo jimu inin contract fills, and why the three tools are usually paired rather than treated as substitutes for one another: a will for the estate, a voluntary guardianship contract for while you are alive but unable to manage your own affairs, and a shigo jimu inin contract for the specific list of tasks that fall between death and the completion of probate.

What Tasks a Shigo Jimu Inin Contract Can Actually Delegate

The contract can cover a defined list of administrative and logistical tasks, and Japan's notaries publish a standard scope so families know what is and is not included.

According to guidance published by the Japan Federation of Notaries Public on how these agreements are notarized, a shigo jimu inin contract can delegate a specific, enumerable set of tasks rather than an open-ended "handle everything" mandate. That list typically includes paying outstanding medical bills, paying and settling rent, management fees, or a facility's move-in deposit and usage charges, arranging the wake, funeral, cremation, and interment of ashes, selecting a temple and, where relevant, arranging perpetual memorial services, applying for the court appointment of an estate administrator when needed, handing back a rented apartment in the agreed condition, and filing the various notifications required at government offices. Because this list is set out in the contract itself, both the person signing and the person who will act can see in advance exactly where the mandate starts and stops.

What it does not do is equally important. It does not distribute the estate to heirs, it does not resolve disputes between heirs, and, for a statutory (court-appointed) guardian rather than someone acting purely under this contract, wider decisions such as accepting or renouncing an inheritance sit with the heirs and the family court, not with the person named in the contract. For a foreign resident whose heirs live overseas, or an overseas family managing a parent's estate from abroad, the contract is best understood as buying time and continuity in Japan, not as replacing the inheritance process described in our guide to what happens after a parent dies in Japan, which covers the deadlines that follow once the immediate tasks are handled.

What the Contract Actually Costs, Including the Predeposit

Budgeting for a shigo jimu inin contract means separating three distinct charges: drafting the notarized contract, the professional's execution fee, and a predeposit that covers actual expenses like cremation.

Cost estimates published by administrative scriveners (gyosei shoshi) and judicial scriveners (shiho shoshi) who draft these contracts in Japan generally break the total into three parts. Drafting the notarized contract itself runs roughly ¥100,000 to ¥300,000 depending on complexity and whether a trust account is arranged alongside it. Notarization at a public notary office (koshonin yakuba) adds a modest fixed fee, calculated under the notary fee schedule as half the standard rate that would apply to an equivalent-value contract, commonly landing around ¥11,000 to ¥14,000 once copies are included. The larger number is the predeposit: because the person who signs will not be present to pay bills as they arrive, providers commonly ask for roughly ¥1,000,000 to ¥2,000,000 held in advance to cover cremation, room clearance, and settlement of final bills, generally managed in a separate account rather than mixed with the provider's operating funds. Actual funeral and cremation costs alone are commonly cited in industry surveys in the range of roughly ¥250,000 to ¥1,500,000 depending on the type of send-off chosen, which is the main reason the predeposit sits where it does.

These are typical ranges reported by practitioners rather than a fixed national price list, and the figure varies with what is delegated, the region, and whether a trust structure is used for the deposit. Anyone comparing quotes should ask each provider for an itemized breakdown of the three charges separately rather than a single bundled number, since bundling makes it hard to see what happens to any unused portion of the predeposit if the actual costs come in lower than expected.

Choosing a Provider Safely, Using the 2024 National Guideline

A June 2024 national guideline for so-called lifelong-support providers sets out how predeposits should be managed and what a contract should disclose before signing.

Reports of providers mismanaging predeposits, and of some pressuring clients into leaving them a bequest, led Japan's Cabinet Secretariat, Cabinet Office, Financial Services Agency, Consumer Affairs Agency, and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to jointly issue the Guidelines for Lifelong-Support Business Operators for the Elderly in June 2024, aimed at the businesses that combine guarantor services, life support, and shigo jimu inin contracts under one roof. The guideline is not a law with penalties attached, but it sets out the practices a reputable provider should follow, and a family evaluating a provider can use it as a checklist. Its central requirement is that predeposits be kept in an account clearly separated from the provider's own operating funds, ideally under a trust arrangement, specifically so that a provider's business failure does not leave a client's prepaid funeral money entangled in a bankruptcy proceeding.

The guideline also expects providers to explain the full scope and cost of the contract in plain terms before signing, to give a clear method for a client to cancel and be refunded for undelivered services, and to avoid combining the contract with pressure to name the provider as a beneficiary in a will. For an overseas family vetting a provider from abroad, or a resident retiree comparing quotes, asking directly whether the predeposit is held in a segregated trust account, and asking for the cancellation and refund terms in writing, both align with what the guideline recommends and are reasonable questions any properly run provider should answer without hesitation. This is also the kind of due-diligence step where care navigation support can help an overseas family vet a Japan-based provider's paperwork rather than doing so unassisted from a different time zone.

Deciding Between Doing Nothing, a Simple Letter, and a Full Contract

The right level of planning scales with how alone a person actually is, and a full notarized contract is not the only option below "doing nothing."

For a retiree with an engaged local relative, spouse, or close friend willing to act, informal written instructions, shared in advance with that person and a copy of key account details, may be enough, since Japanese institutions generally still accept a willing, present relative acting without a formal contract. For someone with no one local but with heirs or a guardian relationship already active overseas, a lighter option is worth exploring first: naming a Japan-based professional solely for the narrow, urgent tasks (cremation authorization and initial notifications) while leaving broader estate matters to the will and the heirs, which reduces both the drafting fee and the predeposit compared with a full-scope contract.

The full notarized shigo jimu inin contract earns its cost specifically for the person with no one local at all, or for an overseas family who wants certainty that a stranger's death in Japan does not turn into an unmanageable cross-border logistics problem conducted entirely by phone. In that situation, the sequence to follow is straightforward: draft the contract with a gyosei shoshi or shiho shoshi, list the specific tasks rather than an open mandate, notarize it at a public notary office, confirm in writing how the predeposit is held, and share a copy of the contract and the named contact with whichever family member or financial manager overseas is coordinating the rest of the estate, so that no one is discovering the contract's existence for the first time after the death it was written for.

A Practical Checklist Before Signing

Four questions, asked before signing, catch most of the problems families report after the fact.

• Does the contract list specific tasks (cremation, notifications, room clearance, bill settlement) rather than an open-ended mandate, so both sides know exactly what is and is not included?
• Is the predeposit held in an account segregated from the provider's own operating funds, ideally under a trust arrangement, per the 2024 national guideline?
• Does the provider give a clear cancellation and refund process in writing, in case circumstances change before death?
• Has a copy of the signed contract and the named contact's details been shared with whichever relative, guardian, or overseas family member will otherwise be the first to learn of the death?