Jeongja Han dumps a drawer of pens and lighters into a plastic garbage bag while her client, a recently widowed woman in her mid-50s who asked not to be named, sits on a stool, watching. The woman’s husband died in a car accident a few weeks ago, leaving her to clean out the spacious two-bedroom apartment they occupied for 30 years in Tokyo’s trendy Ebisu neighborhood. They had no children to lay claim to heirlooms or nostalgia, so her directions to Han were simple: “Get rid of everything.”
Han is director of Tail Project, a six-year-old company based near Tokyo that specializes in cleaning out and disposing of the property accumulated by the deceased, a service that’s increasingly in demand as Japan’s population ages and shrinks. For Han, today’s job is relatively simple. She and her crew of three started at 9 a.m., and the small truck waiting on the street below will be full and gone by 1 p.m. Time permitting, Han plans to accompany it to a trading company that buys spent belongings, packs them in overseas shipping containers, and exports them to buyers in the Philippines.