FOCUS: Ex-Nurse Passes On JAL Crash Practice of Caring for Deceased

Tokyo, Aug. 16 (Jiji Press)–Fumiko Yamamoto still vividly remembers the moment she entered a gymnasium-turned-morgue as a nurse in the aftermath of the 1985 Japan Airlines jumbo jet crash. As she passed through the blackout curtain, “something heavy pressed down on my shoulders,” recalled Yamamoto, now 82. “(That feeling) still remains in my heart. I felt it might have been the souls of the deceased.” With 520 passengers and crew members killed, the crash remains the world’s deadliest single-aircraft accident. Its enormous impact and subsequent fires left many victims’ bodies badly damaged, with some missing body parts or burned beyond recognition. Yamamoto and other nurses dispatched to the gymnasium helped arrange the remains using cardboard and cotton, seeking to restore the victims’ bodies to a form closer to how they had appeared in life. Forty-one years after the crash, the practice known as “seitai,” or arrangement of the deceased’s body, is being passed on to a new generation, along with the respect for the deceased that guided the nurses who began it. About two weeks after the accident of Aug. 12, 1985, Yamamoto, then working at the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center in Tokyo, was dispatched for two days to a gymnasium in Fujioka, Gunma Prefecture. Bodies recovered from the mountain crash site in the same eastern prefecture had been brought there. In front of the gymnasium stage, coffins were lined up in orderly rows. Bodies that had been identified were handed over to their families. In some cases, however, only part of a victim’s body, such as a hand, could be returned to relatives. At the suggestion of the late Kazuko Kaneda, then head nurse at the medical center, Yamamoto and her colleagues used cardboard and cotton to shape the remains before handing them over. When parents asked that their deceased daughter be dressed in a kimono, the nurses arranged the body in the same way. Kaneda gave the practice the name seitai. “It was meaningful because it preserved the dignity of the deceased and their families,” Yamamoto said. After returning to her job in Tokyo, Yamamoto kept the experience locked away in her heart. Her colleagues also remained silent. “The heaviness never left my heart, no matter what,” she said. “That shows how cruel the accident was. I never want (such a crash) to happen again.” At the same time, Kaneda’s final request stayed with her. Before her death, Kaneda had asked Yamamoto and other nurses to help ensure that seitai would be practiced more widely. Yamamoto began to feel that “we must carry on her wishes and preserve (seitai).” To New Generation In 2021, at the invitation of Miho Naiki, a professor of disaster nursing at the Japanese Red Cross College of Nursing in Tokyo, Yamamoto started sharing her experience of the aircraft crash and teaching seitai in classes once or twice a year. When instructing students, Yamamoto tells them to handle the mannequin used in training with care and respect, as though it were a person. She strictly cautions them if their hands pass in front of the mannequin’s face. Naiki emphasized, “What matters most in seitai is not the act of arranging the body itself, but the attitude of nursing.” A nurse’s everyday mindset toward patients becomes clearly visible at disaster sites, she believes. “The end of life is not the end of nursing,” Naiki said. “If you regard the person as still present there and respond with utmost sincerity, nursing begins again.” Yamamoto said she hopes to pass on one message to her students: “Heart is essential to relief work. Acquire knowledge and skills–but also sensitivity.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]