— My parent died. I had no idea what to do first.
My parent died. And I did not know where to start.
If you are in that place right now — lost, not sure what comes first — let me tell you the order I went through. I am in my 60s. I worked in a factory in Japan for over forty years. I am not an expert. I just did it, one thing at a time.
Here is the short version, the one thing I want you to take away: go to the town office and say, please teach me everything. And they will.
I read a book first. My head still would not work.
When my parent started to get weaker, I began to think, quietly, about what would happen. I did not want to do a sloppy job and then get stuck later.
So I bought one book. Something like a guide to what to do after a parent dies. I was anxious, so I wanted the knowledge in my head ahead of time. The death notice, the pension, changing names on things, the property registration — I knew, more or less, that these were the jobs waiting for me.
But when the day actually came, my head would not work. I had the knowledge, but I could not take it in as a real thing happening in front of me. I could not decide what to touch first. Reading a book and standing there afterward are two different things.
The day I said: please teach me everything
In the end, I stood at the counter of the town office and said this:
“My parent has died. I do not know what to do or in what order. Please teach me everything.”
I did not feel ashamed. This is not something a person does over and over. Not knowing is normal. So I asked.
The person at the counter said, in a kind way, that almost everyone doing this is doing it for the first time. That I should take it slow, and they would explain it in order, and it would be fine. That is the feeling I got from them.
Then they set the priorities for me. First this. Next that. This one can wait, that is fine. One at a time, in plain order. My only job was to do as I was told and take notes as fast as I could.
There were more steps than I expected
The number of procedures the office walked me through was far more than I had imagined.
The death notice. Stopping the pension. Returning the health insurance card. The nursing insurance paperwork. Freezing and then closing the bank accounts. Claiming the life insurance. Changing the name on the property. The property tax paperwork.
One would finish, and the next document was already waiting. And each one was at a different counter — the town office, the pension office, the legal affairs bureau, the bank. Each in a different place, and each one I had to visit on a weekday.
If I am honest, I had no time to grieve. That is the truth of it. There was no room for crying. Papers with deadlines kept coming, one after another. I set my feelings aside and just moved through the office work, one step at a time.
(A note for readers outside Japan: the death notice, or shibo-todoke, is the form you file with the local town office to formally register a death. Much of what follows starts from there.)
The order I actually went through
When I lay it out in order, this is roughly the flow I followed. Nearly all of it came straight from what the office counter told me — I did not build this list myself.
| Order | What to do | Deadline | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | File the death notice | Within 7 days | Town office |
| 2 | Return the health insurance card | Within 14 days | Town office |
| 3 | Stop the pension | Within 10 to 14 days | Pension office |
| 4 | Nursing insurance paperwork | Within 14 days | Town office |
| 5 | Bank account procedures | Soon | Each bank |
| 6 | Claim the life insurance | Within 3 years | Each insurer |
| 7 | Change the name on the property | Within 3 years | Legal affairs bureau or a judicial scrivener |
Almost everything I did was in the order the office counter gave me. That is why I can say it plainly: if you stand at the counter and say please teach me everything, they will tell you the order and the deadlines, all of it.
The property registration cost me 68,970 yen
For the real work of changing the name on the property, I asked a judicial scrivener — the same one who had helped me back when I built my house. (A judicial scrivener, or shiho-shoshi, is a licensed specialist who handles property registration in Japan.)
He was, so to speak, a familiar face from years back, so I could hand it to him and feel at ease.
Here is the part that surprised me. In my memory, I had it fixed that this cost something like 200,000 or 300,000 yen. The number stuck in my head, and I dreaded it. So when I dug out the paperwork, I found the receipt too.
The real figure was 68,970 yen.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Scrivener fee | 54,000 yen |
| Consumption tax (8%) | 4,320 yen |
| Registration and license tax | 10,650 yen |
| Total | 68,970 yen |
Back then it felt expensive to me, and somewhere along the way my memory blew it up to three or four times the real size.
The reason it stayed low: I did not hand the whole job over from start to finish. I gathered the documents myself, and asked the scrivener only for the registration part. That is why it came out to what it did.
Looking back, what I really wanted at the start
When I look back now, the thing I wanted most was not exact knowledge.
What I wanted was someone to lay out the whole picture, tell me the order, tell me what mattered in my particular case, and point me to where I could go to ask. Something to show me all of that at the very start.
The office will explain the rules. A scrivener or a lawyer will do the job well if you ask them. But the step before that — someone to help you sort out where you even stand — is harder to find than you would think. For me, saying please teach me everything at the counter was the closest thing to it.
If you are standing where I stood
To the person who just lost a parent and does not know where to start, here is my order, once more, made simple.
1. Go to the town office counter first. Say, please teach me everything.
2. Work through the order they give you, one step at a time.
3. For the parts you cannot do yourself, ask a judicial scrivener. It costs money, but it is fair.
That is all.
The grieving can come later, after the paperwork settles. That is what I did. Not because I did not care — because there was no time. And that, I think, is fine.
— Me-me
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