Ending Note: The Japanese Guide to Writing One That Arrives

Tomoaki Sunada spent more than forty years selling for one Japanese company. His catchphrase was 段取り命, dandori inochi: planning is everything. He retired at 67. A check-up soon after found stomach cancer, already at stage four. The first thing he reached for was not a lawyer but a notebook, and in Japan that notebook has a name: an ending note, written エンディングノート, endingu nōto. His daughter Mami filmed him filling it in, and the footage became a 2011 documentary released abroad as Death of a Japanese Salesman.

His ending note worked, and not only because it was well written. It worked because his family was in the room and a camera was running. Everyone knew what was in it and where it lived. Almost no ending note has a witness.

This guide covers what goes in one. It also covers the part nobody has solved yet, which is whether the book you filled in ever reaches the person you filled it in for.

What an Ending Note Is

An ending note is one book holding your information, your wishes and your last words, in a form someone else can pick up and read. No required format, no legal force. A Japanese will, a 遺言書 or yuigonsho, has strict formal requirements; the notebook has none. You can write it in pencil and rub it out tomorrow. That freedom is its weakness and the reason it gets written.

The practice sits inside a broader idea called 終活, shūkatsu, preparation for the end of your life. It puns on 就活, also shūkatsu, the ordinary word for job hunting. The magazine Shūkan Asahi and its deputy editor Hiroto Sasaki are credited with coining it in a series that ran from August to December 2009. Why it caught on is not mysterious. Japan recorded 1,605,378 deaths in 2024, a record, and the fourth annual rise in a row, against 686,173 births.

The Gap Between Writing and Showing

The most useful numbers come from a whitepaper by Nichiryoku, a Japanese funeral and cemetery company, which surveyed 500 people aged 65 and over already practising shūkatsu, between 28 August and 1 September 2024. Not the general public. The committed. Every figure below is a share of all 500.

• Written an ending note: 42 percent.
• Shown it to anyone, or talked it over: 21 percent.
• Made a will: 20 percent.
• Told family where the will is: 17 percent.
• Put end-of-life medical wishes in writing: 30 percent.
• Discussed those wishes with family out loud: 55 percent.

Read the first two together. Both count everyone asked, so of the 42 percent who wrote a notebook, roughly half have never shown it to a living soul. The medical rows leak the same way, with more people talking about their wishes than ever writing them down. Talking outruns writing, writing outruns showing, and every step loses people.

One row behaves differently: 74 percent have told their family where the important documents are kept. Three quarters will say where the insurance certificate is filed; one in five will mention the notebook holding their funeral wishes, their cat and their last words. Saying where a policy lives is admin. Showing someone your ending note opens a conversation about the day you are not here.

What Goes in an Ending Note

Commercial notebooks and the free ones from Japanese city offices converge on the same ground; the eleven headings below harmonise the lists the main ones use. No obligation to work through them in order, and blanks are normal.

• 1. Who you are. Name and its reading, birth date, address, who to call.
• 2. Medical basics. Blood type, allergies, medication, conditions, your doctor's number.
• 3. Money, by location. Banks, broker, insurer, property, pensions, debts. Where, not how much.
• 4. Care and treatment. Life-prolonging treatment, where you want to be cared for, whether to be told a diagnosis.
• 5. Funeral and burial. Scale, guests, the photograph, the grave. It has its own guide: writing down your funeral wishes.
• 6. Whether a will exists. Yes or no, where, and who helped.
• 7. Paperwork and cancellations. Subscriptions, cards, utilities. The English cousin is the when I die file.
• 8. The pets. Who takes them, the vet, the food, the history.
• 9. Messages to family and friends. The pages read more than once. If the first line is the hard part, start with how to write a goodbye letter.
• 10. Digital estate. Passcodes, live accounts, what to delete, what to keep. Only 38 percent of the same survey had made a list of theirs. Method: digital legacy planning.
• 11. Your life, and the unfinished list. A short autobiography, places you still meant to see.

The Notebook Is Not a Will

An ending note carries no legal weight, and naming who gets what inside one guarantees nothing. The notebooks print that warning on their first page. What none of them print is the reverse, which is the dangerous half.

Article 968 of the Japanese Civil Code sets out the handwritten will: the testator writes the whole text, the date and their name by hand, and affixes a seal. A tidy person who handwrites the assets page of their notebook, dates it, signs it and stamps it may have made a valid will inside a book never meant to be one.

The near miss is worse. No seal. A date written as an auspicious day rather than a real one. Handwriting filled in around a printed heading, so the text is not entirely in the testator's hand. That page becomes something a grieving family has to classify. Keep them on separate paper.

Japan built a middle option too. Since 10 July 2020 the Legal Affairs Bureau will store a handwritten will for 3,900 yen. The state holds the original, and the family court probate step is waived. For anything binding, use that or a notary.

The Storage Paradox

Here is a question with no answer in it. Your ending note is worthless unless your daughter finds it within hours of your death, and dangerous unless nobody finds it for the thirty years before that, because it names your accounts and points at your PINs. Which room in your house is both?

The standard advice contradicts itself cleanly. The living room drawer. No, a safe. No, never a bank deposit box. Only the last comes with a reason: after a death, a deposit box in Japan generally needs every heir to agree and attend, so one unreachable relative keeps it shut for months.

The rest of it reduces to somewhere secure your family can access. Secure means nobody outside the family gets in. Access means it is not locked.

Passwords are the same shape. The usual advice is to write down your services and passwords, then concede that a notebook is not a safe and whoever opens it has everything. The compromises on offer, a hint or a family code, assume it will still be readable on the day. Do not write the PIN or the password. Write where the record of it is kept.

How to Make It Arrive

A government did once take this problem seriously, and built its answer for the will only. The same Legal Affairs Bureau scheme carries two notifications. The first fires sideways: once any heir asks to view a stored will, the others are told. The second fires on its own: the testator names people in advance, and when the bureau confirms the death through the family registry, they are told a will exists. Since 2 October 2023 they need not be heirs, and up to three can be named.

So the state built a postman for a document that would otherwise sit unread, and nothing for the ending note, which is the book actually holding the funeral wishes, the cat and the last thing you wanted to say.

Two moves close most of that gap. Pick one person by name and say it out loud.

My notebook is in the top drawer of the bedroom chest. If anything happens, you open it first.

That sentence is the difference between the half who have shown it and the half who never will. Then write on page one who should read it.

If there is no family to tell, ask about a post-death administration contract, Japan's way of handing a funeral and its paperwork to a third party. Ask a lawyer what yours is called.

What a Notebook Cannot Carry

Families do not wear out the handwriting. They wear out the voicemail nobody got round to deleting.

Delivery is not something only one company does: Wagaya Note, a free app from Mitsubishi UFJ Trust, does audio too, and chooses per item who sees it and when. What no form copies across is the sound of one particular person: the two notes your mother puts into hello when she answers, the half second your father leaves before a grandchild's name because he is still enjoying it. Paper holds none of that; thirty seconds of recording holds all of it.

Where to sit down, how long to talk, what to say, and what to do if you cannot stand the sound of your own voice: that is all in recording your voice for your family.

The Version That Is Never in the Drawer

The storage paradox does not resolve on paper. A place that can be found is a place that can be found. It stops being a contradiction only if the thing is not an object in your house until the day it is wanted.

That is where Goodbye App starts: you write to the people you love, and can record it in your own voice. Its sections mirror the notebook's contents page: contacts, pets, funeral arrangements, end-of-life wishes, assets, where important documents are kept, device passwords, and an audio recording. You choose who receives it and when, on a date up to thirty years out, or after you are gone, and you can set it to release if you stop signing in for a period you choose. Until then it stays private, impossible to find in a drawer and impossible to lose in a move.

The limits, plainly. It is not a will and carries no legal force. It does not hold your documents; it records where they are. There is a device passwords section, and our advice matches the advice above: write where your password record is kept, not the passwords. It is free, on the web and on Android, in 13 languages.

Where to Get an Ending Note

In Japan you rarely need to buy one. Many municipalities print their own and give them away: Komae, in Tokyo, made one with a local nonprofit and gives it to residents of about 65 and over. Many towns do the same, and one call to the local community care centre beats any shop. As stationery the default is Kokuyo's Moshimo no Toki ni Yakudatsu Nōto, the notebook for just in case, code LES-E101. As an app, Wagaya Note or Goose.

Outside Japan the same book sells as an end of life planner or a when I am gone workbook, one product at a time rather than a national format with a name. Any of them works, and so does a ruled notebook with the eleven headings above.

One caution the product pages leave out. Apps get discontinued and take your contents with them, while paper outlives the company and is worth nothing if nobody finds it. Both fail in their own way, so whichever you pick, write a single sheet saying where the book itself is and who should read it, and leave that sheet where your family will see it. It is the cheapest insurance on offer.

When to Start, and How to Ask a Parent

The lowest-scoring question in the Nichiryoku quiz was about timing: when should you start organising your assets? The model answer was 50, while still working. Two percent chose it. The other 98 percent picked 60, around retirement, and these are people already doing this. It is hard to argue that today is too early.

The reason people stall is not laziness. Line one asks you to think about being dead, and there are ten sections after it. The fix is to abandon the order: fill in whatever you can answer in five minutes, leave the blanks, use pencil, and close the book. Being endlessly revisable is this document's one advantage over a will. The people who set out to complete it are the ones who stop halfway.

If it is a parent you want writing one, asking directly rarely works: what they hear is a request that assumes their death. Events open the door: the drive home from a relative's funeral, the week either side of a hospital stay. The reliable move is to go first. Write yours, leave it half finished, show them, and ask the question that turns a request into a shared job.

This is as far as I got. What would yours say?

Common Questions

Does an ending note have any legal force? No. Naming who inherits what inside one guarantees nothing. The exception runs the other way: in Japan, a passage that is entirely handwritten, dated, signed and sealed can meet the requirements of a handwritten will, which is why an ambiguous page is worse than no page. Put anything binding in a real will, and since formalities differ everywhere, check the rules where you live and ask a lawyer.

Where should I keep it? Nowhere is perfect: anywhere your family can reach in an hour a stranger can reach too. The compromise is a drawer your family knows about, no PINs or passwords in it, only a note of where those are recorded. Avoid a bank deposit box: in Japan, opening one after a death generally takes all the heirs, and other countries seal them too, so check yours.

What age should I start? Most answers say your fifties, but the occasion matters more than the number. A hospital stay, a house move, a parent needing care, a child leaving home, a posting to another city. Write it once at one of those and a look through it every year is enough after that. Your forties is not too early; the assets get sorted while you still have the health and the judgement to sort them.

Can I write my passwords and PINs in it? Better not. A notebook is not a safe, and whoever opens it has everything. Write three other things instead: the services you hold, where the record of the passwords is kept, and what goes wrong if nobody can unlock your phone, which is usually the photographs, the contacts and the subscriptions nobody can cancel.

If I have a will, do I still need an ending note? Yes. A will moves property and has almost no room for anything else. Who to telephone, what kind of funeral, who takes the cat, what to do about ventilators: the first things a family needs and the last things a will contains.

How do I tell my family what I have written? You do not have to read it to them. Three facts are enough: that it exists, where it is, and who should open it first. It takes a minute at the kitchen table, and nearly half the people who have written one have not spent it.

An ending note earns its keep at the moment it is opened, not the moment it is finished. Filling in the boxes is the part Japan has spent fifteen years getting good at. Getting the book into the right hands on the right day is the part nobody has got good at yet. Today you can write one line, and tell one person where it is.