 Production of Departures took ten years , and the work was ultimately only loosely adapted from Coffinman ; later revisions of the script were worked on collaboratively by the cast and crew . Although the religious aspects of funerals were important in the source work , the film did not include them . This , together with the fact that filming was completed in Yamagata and not Aoki 's home prefecture of Toyama , led to tensions between the production staff and the author . Aoki expressed concern that the film was unable to address " the ultimate fate of the dead " . The first edition of the book was broken into three parts ; the third , " Light and Life " , was an essay @-@ like Buddhist musing on life and death , regarding the " light " seen when one perceived the integration of life and death , that is absent from the film . Aoki believed the film 's humanistic approach did away with the religious aspects that were central to the book — the emphasis on maintaining connections between the living and the dead that he felt only religion could provide — and refused to allow his name and that of his book to be used . For the new title , Koyama coined the term <unk> as a euphemism for nōkanshi , derived from the words <unk> ( " to send off " ) and hito ( " person " ) . 
