Ep. 367 Increasing Death Awareness in Japan with Masatoshi Shoji
09/05/22 • 58 min
Learn how this man’s experience with grief led him to start a Death Café in Japan and become a death doula and Willow EOL educator.
My guest Masatoshi Shoji is a licensed acupuncturist, health communicator and medical translator in Sendai Japan. He started Death Café Sendai in his hometown in 2015 and since then has trained as a certified grief counselor, death doula and Willow EOL Educator. He shares why he first became interested in working with grief and death and his experiences with Death Café in Japan.
This episode includes:
- Masatoshi’s experience with grief as a young widower in Japan
- What inspired him to create Death Café Sendai
- How he organized and promoted his first Death Café
- Resources that Masatoshi is using to further his own death education
- The gradual growth in popularity of Death Café in Japan
- The obstacles to talking about death in his community, including the use of implicit language
- How Masatoshi felt socially marginalized as a young widower in his community
- His goal to bring acupuncture to hospice and end-of-life care
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Death & Dying Class Instructor Training
- Widowed and Young (WAY) group in UK
- Movie: Departures
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation Education Series
- DeathCafe.com
- Leave me a message by email: [email protected], Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Support your local bookstore by buying my books on Bookshop and Indiebound:7 Lessons for Living from the Dying and The Journey from Ego to Soul
- Subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher Radio
- Check out the Series I’ve recorded in the past here
- Join the team at Patreon.com/eolu and receive free gifts like the “Mind if we talk about death?” mini-poster or Love Your Life sticker or coffee mug. PLUS get our regular bonuses: the monthly EOL News Update, occasional movie reviews from 2 Doctors and a Movie, and automatic access to A Year of Reading Dangerously!
If you enjoy this content please share it with others and consider leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks again to all supporters on my page at Patreon.com/eolu, especially my newest patron Merlin Murdock, and to those who have bought me a coffee and made a donation through Paypal! Your contributions make all the difference.
Learn how this man’s experience with grief led him to start a Death Café in Japan and become a death doula and Willow EOL educator.
My guest Masatoshi Shoji is a licensed acupuncturist, health communicator and medical translator in Sendai Japan. He started Death Café Sendai in his hometown in 2015 and since then has trained as a certified grief counselor, death doula and Willow EOL Educator. He shares why he first became interested in working with grief and death and his experiences with Death Café in Japan.
This episode includes:
- Masatoshi’s experience with grief as a young widower in Japan
- What inspired him to create Death Café Sendai
- How he organized and promoted his first Death Café
- Resources that Masatoshi is using to further his own death education
- The gradual growth in popularity of Death Café in Japan
- The obstacles to talking about death in his community, including the use of implicit language
- How Masatoshi felt socially marginalized as a young widower in his community
- His goal to bring acupuncture to hospice and end-of-life care
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Death & Dying Class Instructor Training
- Widowed and Young (WAY) group in UK
- Movie: Departures
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation Education Series
- DeathCafe.com
- Leave me a message by email: [email protected], Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Support your local bookstore by buying my books on Bookshop and Indiebound:7 Lessons for Living from the Dying and The Journey from Ego to Soul
- Subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher Radio
- Check out the Series I’ve recorded in the past here
- Join the team at Patreon.com/eolu and receive free gifts like the “Mind if we talk about death?” mini-poster or Love Your Life sticker or coffee mug. PLUS get our regular bonuses: the monthly EOL News Update, occasional movie reviews from 2 Doctors and a Movie, and automatic access to A Year of Reading Dangerously!
If you enjoy this content please share it with others and consider leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks again to all supporters on my page at Patreon.com/eolu, especially my newest patron Merlin Murdock, and to those who have bought me a coffee and made a donation through Paypal! Your contributions make all the difference.
Previous Episode
Ep. 366 The Death Conversation Game and Talking About Death with Angela Fama
Learn about a creative game to help foster conversations about death.
My guest Angela Fama is an artist and photographer who lives in Vancouver Canada and is also a recently trained death doula. She created the Death Conversation Game and facilitates online seasonal Let’s Talk About Death conversations. She will share how she became interested in exploring death as a subject and why she created the game. We will also play a few rounds of the game so you can see how it works! Learn more at her websites:
This episode includes:
- Angela’s What is Love project
- How focusing on love led her eventually to learn about death
- Why Angela needed to talk about death after a serious accident
- What inspired the Death Conversation Game
- How playing a game helps facilitate conversations about death
- Why it’s important for people to talk about death
- How to create a safe, trauma-informed space to discuss death
- We play the game to demonstrate how it works
- Who might benefit from using the game in their work
- How Angela’s time in Zimbabwe influenced her decision to become a death doula
- Angela’s request for a collaborator to extend the reach of the game
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?“
The Flaming Lips from Do You RealizeLinks mentioned in this episode:
- Song: Do You Realize by The Flaming Lips
- Get in touch with Angela: [email protected]
- Leave me a message by email: [email protected], Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Support your local bookstore by buying my books on Bookshop and Indiebound:7 Lessons for Living from the Dying and The Journey from Ego to Soul
- Subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher Radio
- Check out the Series I’ve recorded in the past here
- Join the team at Patreon.com/eolu and receive free gifts like the “Mind if we talk about death?” mini-poster or Love Your Life sticker or coffee mug. PLUS get our regular bonuses: the monthly EOL News Update, occasional movie reviews from 2 Doctors and a Movie, and automatic access to A Year of Reading Dangerously!
If you enjoy this content please share it with others and consider leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks again to all supporters on my page at Patreon.com/eolu, especially my newest patron Martha Lundgren, and to those who have bought me a coffee and made a donation through Paypal! Your contributions make all the difference.
Next Episode
Ep. 368 Why Death Education is Important with Karen Wyatt
Learn some ideas for how you might teach others in your community about death and dying and why you should.
In today’s solo episode I’ll share with you my thoughts on why death education is so essential in our society today. No matter what type of work you do in the end-of-life field (estate attorney, hospice staff, death doula, home funeral guide, green burial practitioner, bereavement counselor) you need to help educate your community about death, dying and grief if you want people to utilize your services. Right now we ALL need to become death educators in our own special way and I’ll talk about why that’s true and how you might get involved.
Watch on YouTube to see the slides
This episode includes:
- We are living longer and developing complex diseases (like Alzheimer’s) with increasing incidence.
- Medical tech continues to advance rapidly allowing us to prolong life (even when patient’s don’t want that).
- Our society is divided over ethical and moral dilemmas around end-of-life issues like medical aid in dying and removal of life support.
- Being unprepared for death has a high financial cost (too much medical care and wasteful after-death care)
- There is also and emotional and spiritual cost to ignoring death.
- Where we need to be teaching about death, dying and grief:
- The home – showing parents how to talk to their children about death
- Schools – teaching high school and college students about death through classes, book clubs, discussion groups
- Churches – clergy members need to know about EOL issues in order to better serve their congregations
- Workplaces – employers and staff need to know how to deal with death and grief at work
- Medical facilities – of course all medical personnel need much more education about death, grief, and how to deal with EOL decisions
- Assisted living and nursing homes – staff also need to know how to handle grief, help residents with ACP, create sacred space for dying residents
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Death and Dying Class Instructor Training
- Step-by-Step Roadmap for End-of-Life Planning
- Episode 127: The Consequences of Ignoring Death
- Map of Memory Lane by Francesca Arnoldy
- Leave me a message by email: [email protected], Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Support your local bookstore by buying my books on Bookshop and Indiebound:7 Lessons for Living from the Dying and The Journey from Ego to Soul
- Subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher Radio
- Check out the Series I’ve recorded in the past here
- Join the team at Patreon.com/eolu and receive free gifts like the “Mind if we talk about death?” mini-poster or Love Your Life sticker or coffee mug. PLUS get our regular bonuses: the monthly EOL News Update, occasional movie reviews from 2 Doctors and a Movie, and automatic access to A Year of Reading Dangerously!
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