Anime--Covering the faces of corpses with 'handkerchief'?

Cafe Society
1

This might belong better in GQ, bit I’m not sure…

Anyway, there’s something I’ve noticed, lately, while watching a couple of separate Anime movies…in each of these movies, there was a scene of a recently deceased person laying in a hospital bed. This wasn’t in and of itself unusual, but the part that caught my attention was; in each of these scenes, the face of the deceased seemed to be covered by a small piece of cloth, about the size and shape of a handkerchief. And the cloth didn’t cover the entire head—only the face and the forehead. From a couple of camera angles, the hair on the top of the deceased’s head was visible. The rest of the body was covered by the bedsheets, but only up to the neck.

Now, in the ‘West’—in the movies, at least—when a corpse is ‘covered up’ in a bed, it’s usually shown as being covered by a single sheet, covering the entire body. Is the “face cloth” thing in Anime some Japanese tradition or cultural element that I’m not aware of, or just something that the animators made up themselves?
Well, thanks for your patience,
Ranchoth

2

Someone who’s seen more anime than I may have a better idea of what you’re describing, but in Japan they do traditionally tie a white piece of cloth around the heads of corpses. Ghosts are also depicted as wearing this white cloth.

According to one of my Japanese friends, Western ghosts aren’t scary to her because the lack of this white headband thing means they don’t look like proper ghosts. Also because they speak English, and for some reason she doesn’t find English-speaking ghosts threatening.