“Gothic Lolita x Coffin” – Experience “entering the coffin” in a pop art coffin and think about life from the viewpoint of the corpse.

As we walked up the escalator at Yokohama Bibule, a shopping building in Yokohama, we suddenly saw a row of coffins lined up in a row in front of us.

However, these coffins were quite unusual. Some were red checkered, some pale green ones were dotted, and the black ones were completely gothic lolita with fluttering frills. They blend in so well with the pop and fashionable atmosphere of the floor that it is said, “If you are looking for Gothic Lolita fashion, Biblé is the place to go.”

“GRAVE TOKYO,” a pop-up store open until July 23, is a general goods brand launched by designer Mikako Fuse in 2003. GRAVE TOKYO manufactures and sells coffins and urns with a high design quality that “makes you want to be in it. The coffins on display here cost 275,000 yen each.

I have lost friends and acquaintances who were designers, and I have attended their funerals many times. After all, families who have just lost a loved one probably don’t have time to think about funerals. In many cases, it was a very ordinary funeral.

As someone who knew the deceased, I sometimes wondered if this was the style of funeral that the person who had been particular about the design of his life wanted to have. I thought that if it were me, I would not like it, so in ’15 I started designing bone jars,” said Fuse.

Some parents who have lost a child consult with us, saying that they wanted to send their child off with a character they loved. However, he said that no character-designed funeral goods have yet been produced.

“However, In this era when Gucci is collaborating with Doraemon, realization is not far off in the future,” says Fuse. With the current wave of graveside services as people can no longer attend their parents’ graves in rural areas, and with more and more women saying that they do not want to be buried with their husbands, the shape of funerals may be changing.

At this pop-up store, Fuse is also holding a “hands-on coffin-making workshop,” which he usually holds at his atelier in Koto-ku, Tokyo. What does it mean to experience a coffin?

Fuse says, “People live their lives toward the goal of death, but they usually don’t think about that goal. If we could have more dreams and hopes about the goal of life, our present life would be more fulfilling. When we actually enter the coffin, we reexamine death and life once again to see if we would have any regrets if we were to be burnt to death.”