In Japan, Rethinking What It Means to Care for the Dead
It’s August in Tokyo—hot and muggy, as usual. So I’ve scheduled my daily walk to be early and close to where I’m staying with a friend in the western part of the city. I walk to Tama-Reien, Tokyo’s largest municipal cemetery. Headstone and funerary shops line the street near the entrance. Once inside, I sense the order of a well-run place: a map laying out the grid, toilets and water taps well-marked, and row upon row of family headstones.
Yet, just as mosquitoes break the stillness of the air, a degree of neglect punctuates the place. While many plots are well-tended—gravestones washed, greenery neatly clipped, remnants of flowers and incense—others are overgrown, a jumble of weeds, with headstones broken or missing altogether. These are “abandoned graves” (akihaka) that no one cares for due to the family dying out or moving away.
Walking through Tama Reien, I also discover another category of dead: those who enter the ground abandoned already. When someone dies kinless and unclaimed, the municipality assumes responsibility and buries them in the zone for the “disconnected dead” (muenbo). A single marker designates the collective, anonymous remains gathered here. Devoid of the tenderness of flowers and care, the plot feels lonely. While saddened, I’m nonetheless drawn to it.
Later I ask my friend Yoshiko Kuga about it. [1] [1] Japanese names are written last name first in Japanese but inverted when writing in English (as here). She tells me that more and more Japanese are worried about meeting this undesirable fate.
Sociality, or the relations humans have with other humans, has long interested me. As an anthropologist, I’ve researched social hierarchies, gender, and capitalism in urban Japan for several decades. Yoshiko, who I became fast friends with during an earlier fieldwork project, is the one who first pointed me in the direction of my recent research on how the practices surrounding care for the dead, once dependent on family relations, have radically changed due to demographic and socioeconomic shifts in the population.
To be untended at death provokes the disturbing specter of hungry ghosts who wander the Earth, deprived as they are of a final resting place.
As anthropologist Satsuki Kawano has described, until around the middle of the 20th century, most people could count on their remains going to an ancestral plot in the ground attached to a Buddhist temple when they died. These plots were passed down for generations and tended to fastidiously by kin for at least 33 years, the designated time for the deceased to transition into the status of ancestors or gods.
But alongside legal changes to patrilineal kinship and vast urban migration from the countryside in post–World War II Japan, the family-based mortuary system became unsettled. This trend has accelerated in recent years for wide-ranging and multiple reasons: smaller households and busy lifestyles, an aging population with low birth rates, decreasing rates of marriage and cohabitation, a weakening of ties to Buddhist institutions, and economic decline since the 1990s.
Under these changing circumstances, relying on family members to bury the dead and tend to them for years after is no longer realistic for many Japanese. But to be untended at death provokes the disturbing specter of hungry ghosts who wander the Earth, deprived as they are of a final resting place.
In recent years, stories abound in Japan of abandoned graves; in the countryside, these account for as much as 40 percent of the edifices in some rural cemeteries. In the cities, too, increasing numbers of dwellers’ remains go unclaimed after dying without kin or prearranged plans—a phenomenon called “lonely death” (kodokushi). This problem seems likely to intensify in Japan—a country where one-third of the population now lives alone, and the national population is decreasing as more people die than are born every year.
Later that summer, Yoshiko and I visited her family’s grave in a different public cemetery where her parents and assorted ancestors are buried. Caring for the dead entails regular visits to the grave on holidays and set anniversaries where one performs acts such as washing the gravestone, lighting incense, and offering prayers and fresh flowers. But even for those who have family graves like Yoshiko (and many do not or can’t enter those of their families for a number of reasons), they run the risk of it becoming abandoned and “messy” once the family line moves away or dies out. That’s what will happen when Yoshiko and her sister, both single women with no successors, are gone.
With no one else to pay annual fees or maintain the plots, family graves go into arrears, and cemeteries eventually reclaim the plots, reburying what are now untended dead in their collective plots for the disconnected. Faced with this unsavory prospect, Yoshiko is now thinking of moving the entire contents of the ancestral grave into an urban, indoor facility called a columbarium, where she could also go upon death. By paying a one-time fee, these facilities—open to anyone who can afford it—perform the work a family once did, thereby ensuring that none become disconnected souls.
This is one of many such creative innovations that have sprouted up over the last 25 years to cater to the new mortuary needs in what some scholars call the era of “family-less dead” in Japan. Based on seven years of research, my recent book, Being Dead Otherwise, explores the explosion of initiatives, businesses, and services generically referred to as “ending activity” (shūkatsu).
The photos included in the slideshow below provide glimpses into this rapidly changing deathscape in Japan, where traditional mortuary services coexist with high-tech solutions such as robot priests and automated columbarium. By offering an array of options to supplement or replace those of the family-based mortuary system, shūkatsu moves the management of death in a sociologically, perhaps existentially, new direction: one where everything from rocket send-offs to green burials can now be arranged—for a price. But all of this requires resources—money, of course, but also time, energy, and intention.
Not everyone can take on the responsibilities of this decision-making—but many still want to find ways to preserve something ritualistic in honoring the dead. The photos and stories I collected during fieldwork speak to these ambiguities and tensions in 21st-century Japan: In an era of family-less dead, who or what replaces the family?
Editors’ note: This essay was adapted from the author’s book Being Dead Otherwise.
SNAPSHOTS FROM THE FIELD
All photos in the series by Anne Allison
Tending to the grave. At a typical family grave, urns with cremated remains of family members are buried below a main headstone. Traditionally, Japanese mortuary systems follow patrilineal kinship, which means only eldest sons enter the family plot, and married women are usually buried in their husbands’ family plots. When still alive, eldest sons take responsibility for maintaining the plot, including paying annual fees and making regular visits to the grave (hakamairi) at designated anniversaries and set holidays. Visitors usually pour water over the plot, tidy any debris or weeds, add fresh flowers, light incense or candles, and offer thanks and share updates with the ancestors. These visits often end by pouring water over the headstone and putting hands together in prayer.
A nighttime wake. A wake takes place the evening before a funeral, usually held around 5 p.m. The one pictured here was for a well-connected, wealthy man in his late 60s who ran his own company, which he had recently passed on to his older son. The event, held in a large tent, was elaborately staged, with big blocks of decorative ice, artistic photos of the deceased, and an entire wall of gifted chrysanthemums decorating the space. About 300 attendees lined up to give gifts of bereavement money to the family (which would later be reciprocated by counter-gifts from the bereaved family worth half the original contribution). After a short ceremony, all were invited upstairs for tea, snacks, and words of thanks from the “chief mourner” (the man’s successor, his first son).
At the crematorium. By law, all corpses must be cremated, with the exception of the Emperor or someone who opposes cremation for religious reasons. Due to a disproportionately aging population, urban crematoria are exceedingly busy. Some mourners face a wait time of two weeks, requiring supplemental storage units, sometimes called “corpse hotels.” Some families accompany the body to the crematorium when it’s their time. After saying a final farewell and waiting for about an hour for the cremation to be completed, close intimates will gather around the bone fragments. Then, lining up in pairs and holding a special set of bamboo chopsticks, they will move a fragment from one tray to another: a practice called kotsuage (raising the bones). This photo shows a worker demonstrating this funerary practice during a tour of the facilities.
Observing Obon. This season of welcoming dead spirits back to Earth for three days is held in either mid-July or mid-August, depending on the region of Japan. An amalgamation of Buddhism and ancestor worship, these annual traditions include festivals (matsuri) with dancing, music, and eating. Obon participants traditionally honor ancestral spirits by visiting and cleaning up family graves, then inviting the spirits back to their homes, where a special shrine has been set up. At the end, the spirits are gently invited to leave. At Myōkōji, a temple in Niigata prefecture (pictured here), they are sent back on lanterns placed in a river whose waters meander through the temple.
Muenbo (grave for the unconnected). When family moves away or finds maintenance too onerous or the line dies out, ancestral graves become abandoned. The Japanese word for this is “empty graves” (akihaka), and their rate is increasing across the country. Many cemeteries have a rule that after a certain designated time (as little as one year) of nonpayment of annual fees, the contents will be emptied out and reinterred within the collective plot for the unconnected, such as this one in Tama-Reien in Tokyo. Many cemeteries now post notices warning visitors of this possibility.
A collective grave—by choice. Traditionally, to be buried at a Buddhist temple, one has to be a parishioner of the temple—a tie usually passed down from generation to generation—and have a kin/successor in order to be buried there. Today some temples have relaxed these rules. In 1989, Myōkōji became the first Buddhist temple to offer burial to anyone. This photo shows a mound at Myōkōji where the deceased are buried in a collective grave. The engraving on the side reads “arigatō” (thank you) instead of personal names.
Cherry blossom burial. In recent years, many Buddhist temples have struggled financially as the numbers of parishioners have decreased. As a result, more have started to open up their services, cemeteries, and columbaria to non-parishioners. Typically, this package includes a one-time fee (versus annual maintenance fees) and provides the service of “eternal memorial” (eitaikuyō) or the performance of memorial sutras (kuyō) by a Buddhist priest on staff. This option appeals to those who may not have close-knit kin and want to avoid the fate of becoming an unconnected soul in the future. This poster, advertising eitaikuyō and burial in a columbarium under cherry blossoms, sits outside a small Buddhist temple in Tokyo.
Morticians in training. The ENDEX JAPAN convention, held in Tokyo annually, brings together businesses from around the world to showcase the latest trends in the mortuary industry. In addition to learning about products and services, attendees can participate in activities and contests. In this image, morticians compete in performing the service of undressing a corpse and redressing it in funerary grab: what would be done in front of gathered family preceding a funeral. The contest is put on by Okuribito Academy, a training academy for morticians.
Cleaning after death. The burgeoning death market (shūkatsu) in Japan includes new opportunities for entrepreneurship. One such company, called Keepers (pictured here on a job), was started in the early 2000s by Taichi Yoshida. He saw a market niche in providing cleanup services for residences of the deceased. Companies in this expanding industry also offer “special cleanup”: removing the debris and devastation of a household where a decomposing body has been discovered sometimes weeks or months after death. At Keepers, this constitutes about one-fifth of all their cases (300 out of 1,500 annually) and often requires hazmat suits and ozone generators to kill bacteria and other organisms. When there are no kin to accept financial responsibility, the municipality pays the bill.
Miniature scenes of lonely dead. Miyu Kojima was spurred to become a cleanup worker after her father died a lonely death. Shortly after joining the To-Do Company in 2014, she started crafting miniature dioramas of some of the death scenes she was commissioned to clean up. Using a photo taken at the beginning of a job, she spends about a month reproducing each detail of life/death she encountered. Her aim is to bring the public into these lonely spaces and to humanize them—exposing scenes few have ever seen. A diorama does this better than a photograph would, she told me in an interview. Kojima first displayed a set of her “miniatures” at ENDEX in 2016. She has now written a book on the subject and garnered considerable media attention.
Anne Allison is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her work on contemporary issues in Japan has ranged from nightlife and pornography to lunch boxes, Pokémon, and precarity. Allison’s books include Nightwork, Precarious Japan, and Being Dead Otherwise, on the condition of managing death without familial others.
