“I was so moved by how beautiful they were,” she said. Recently, she called him to express her appreciation for the beads. Jeon Gyeong-suk is one of Bae’s happy customers.
“The color and density of the beads vary from person to person,” Bae said, adding that the finished colors range from coral and topaz to gray and black. The ashes are ground inside a special machine into a finer powder, which is reheated and shaped into beads.
“This is an important process, because I am announcing that I will take good care of the deceased and handle it with utmost care,” he said. He often leads the rites with family members present. In a corner of a massive room in an industrial area an hour outside Seoul, Bae keeps an altar to hold rites for the dead. The ashes-to-beads process takes about two hours. In fact, there’s a holiness and warmth to them.” “You don’t feel that these beads are creepy or scary. “They’re very beautiful to look at,” said Bae, running a few samples through his fingers. At first he couldn’t attract customers, but slowly the idea caught on. I wanted to challenge myself and make a bead-making machine.”Īfter years of trial and error, he developed a mechanism to make the death beads. “My father ran a machine construction company, so I had knowledge of the basics of machines. “They had the idea but didn’t have capital for R&D,” he said.īae quickly got involved.
As he considered establishing a crematorium, he met some people interested in exploring the burial bead business. The former real estate and construction businessman was looking for a use for a patch of rural land he owned outside Seoul. A few competitors also cropped up.īae got into the ashes-to-beads business by accident. Whereas some South Koreans bury the ashes, most store them in mausoleums.ĭeath beads, Bae says, were just the next step, with the unique process receiving government approval in 2000. Nearly 70% of those who died in 2010 were cremated, nearly twice the percentage only a decade before, according to government statistics. But by the late 1990s, when the nation acknowledged its shortage of buildable land, cremation slowly became more popular. In Confucian South Korea, paying regular respects at the grave site of elders was for generations the preferred practice.
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