Japan's corpse hotels offer cheaper, simpler funerals

Osaka

THE minimalist rooms at the Hotel Relation here in Japan's third-largest city are furnished with plain twin beds. Flat-screen televisions adorn the walls. Plastic-wrapped cups and toothbrushes are provided in the bathrooms. And just across the hall are the rooms where the corpses rest.

Checkout time, for the living and the dead, is usually no later than 3pm.