Negotiating the afterlife: emplacement as ongoing concern in contemporary Japan

Abstract

This article analyzes how Japanese handle problematic situations involving the care of the dead. Drawing upon narratives of hauntings, dream visitations, and split-grave internments, and other ethnographic data collected in northern Japan, we show the central importance of ongoing ritual attention and attentiveness to the needs of the dead as a means of maintaining proper emplacement of ancestral spirits. We argue that ongoing concerns about maintaining connections between the dead and their proper loci is a manifestation of concerns about constructing and maintaining social relationships among the living and between the living and the dead, providing a way to physically represent and work through social problems displaying interdependencies. In their emphasis on emplacement as an ongoing process, our informants' narratives reveal a different way of thinking about the divide between the living and the dead, and the possibility of its transcendence through the actions of the living.

Keywords::

• death
• emplacement
• ancestors
• ritual
• Japan

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging [grant number R03 AG016111-01], which funded the primary research in which both authors were involved; Connor was also supported by a US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship.

Notes

^1. These ideas have a long tradition in Japan. Ashikaga (1950, 217n1), citing an earlier source, describes how families during bon put out three types of shelves or stands for spirits, including one for the ancestors, one for all the recently departed, and a muen-dana, “altar for the spirits of the dead which have no surviving relatives and supposedly follow the ancestral spirits.”

^2. I. Suzuki (2013) discusses the changing ways in which photographs of the deceased are conceptualized and used in Buddhist ancestor memorialization practices.

^3. Although cremation is the almost universal practice at present, full-body internment was also common, even after cremation began to be promoted as modern and hygienic (Bernstein 2006; Kawano 2010; Rowe 2011).

^4. Ambros (2010, 45–46) points to a possible Chinese origin for a view of the dead as both present in a transcendent spiritual world and tied to the world of the living at the physical remains. Watson (1982) provides a close analysis of the significance of bones in the related context of Taiwan.

^5. By contrast, the Matsigenka feel the dead are most closely attached to the place of their birth; where the dead's body ends up is of little concern – it might be left for carrion or put where a river could wash it away from the settlement (Shepard 2002).

^6. This association is widespread; cf. Kawano (2010, 57): “Hearing about the scattering of ashes, many outsiders ask, ‘Where does one go to venerate the deceased if there is no grave?’”

^7. On this common reading of the term, which relies on a contrast between the “eight parts (hachibu)” and the notion of “ten parts” as complete, cf. Ooms (1996, 216).

^8. The idea that proper burial is required so that the dead may have a successful transition to their new state and not trouble the living is not uncommon (cf. Langford 2009; Lee 2011; Stewart and Strathern 2005, 43; Warner 2000; Watson 1982), though not universal (Shepard 2002).

^9. This idea that Japanese have one perfect “way” to do things is toyed with in Itami's The Funeral, where a “modern” family is challenged by the desire to successfully perform a “traditional” ritual alien to them; see also the Rahmens' series “The Japanese Tradition (日本の形),” e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = yfMqN2vu2Hg

^10. Even as some Japanese are abandoning “traditional” practices of memorializing and treatment of remains, others are spreading them into new domains, such as that of pets: Ambros (2010) argues this indexes a new level and type of emotional closeness and bond between pet and owner.

^11. This can be seen most vividly in status plays involving assertions of control over the legitimate means of respecting the ancestors. E.g., one of Traphagan's informants related how a member of a branch house (分家) bolstered its claims to being the main house (本家) by going to the main house and carrying off (abducting?) the ihai, bringing them back to the branch house. A similar case is discussed by Hamabata (1990, 112–116). See Brown (1966) for a detailed discussion of stem and branch families in Japan.

^12. Contrast the apparently amicable arrangement regarding Reiko's father with the case of Nakaya Fumiko's husband, discussed by Field (1991, 131–132): After his death, she, a Christian convert, fled her in-laws' home with his death portrait and some of his bones to remember him by, only later to be accused in court of theft by her non-Christian father-in-law. Famously, Nakaya would go on to legally challenge the state's right to enshrine her husband, a past member of the Self-Defense Forces, at Yasukuni Shrine against her will – and lose. Note that “enshrinement [or apotheosis] in Shinto never involves the remains, but only the names of the dead” (Field 1991, 141): a non-corporeal form of ritual emplacement. Nevertheless, this struggle over the dead's emplacement(s) displays clearly how the needs and desires of a collective can trump the needs and desires of an individual (cf. Field 1991, 107–174; Forfar 1996; Mullins 2010; Reid 1991, 52–54; The Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1988).

^13. Plural and singular forms are not usually distinguished in Japanese, which makes the identification of this as a single or multiple muenbotoke difficult. Any hotoke or senzo can become unattached; the transformation to a muenbotoke state may represent an individualization of a particular collective spirit that is not being cared for in a proper ritual way or may represent the emergence of the entire collectivity into a problematic state when no-one is caring for the collective's grave site. We will use “they” in our discussion, but this is merely a convenience.

^14. I. Suzuki (2013, 155) argues that displayed photographs of the deceased represent one way in which Japanese connect to the deceased and also view them as deities, although in our research we have not found informants expressing a sense in which they deify the dead.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Blaine P. Connor

Blaine P. Connor PhD is Director of Academic Programs, College of General Studies, and Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.

John W. Traphagan

John W. Traphagan PhD is Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology and Centennial Commission in the Liberal Arts Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.