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Abstract
Despite a great deal of work on death and mortuary rituals in Japan, scant attention has been paid to the importance of emotional responses to death and their social and cultural implications. In this article based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Japanese rural town, I examine the ways in which grief is experienced and perceived by the surviving family members, specifically how it is expressed and controlled and under what circumstances, by focusing on their emotional condition, grieving demeanour, mortuary practices, ritual process, gender roles and pollution. I found that the emotional response to death is closely related to social relationships between the bereaved and the non-bereaved as well as the proximity of bonds between the living and the dead. Thus, the analysis as a whole seeks to elucidate why the Japanese notion of grief and the process of mourning must be understood, first and foremost, in terms of these interpersonal relationships.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Furuie Shimpei, Dimitri Tsintjilonis, Francesca Bray and Philip Taylor for their extensive comments on this paper, and thank also the two anonymous reviewers for the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Most of all, I am deeply indebted to friends and acquaintances in Makabe who supported this research.
Funding
The research was funded through the generosity of the Japan Foundation's Japanese Study Fellowship and Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Notes
[1] Makabe, located at the western central part of the Ibaraki prefecture within the central region of the main island of Honshu, is a rural town of approximately 19,000 people and 5700 households (as of 1 June 2007). Although Makabe is about 50 miles away from Tokyo, it is quite an isolated and remote inland town surrounded by mountains; visiting the town is not convenient because there is no direct train or bus service from Tokyo to Makabe. Like many other rural Japanese towns, Makabe is composed of a town centre (machinaka) and its peripheral hamlets (buraku).
[2] All names in this article are fictitious to protect the anonymity of informants. The suffix -san is a polite honorific attached to a person's name.
[3] The boundary between this world and the other world.
[4] Nakionna were hired for the wailing which led the ceremonial lamentation.
[5] My thanks to Philip Taylor for suggesting this aspect of the interpretation.
[6] On this occasion, the deceased's family cooks sekihan (red rice) and distributes it to everyone who participates in the funeral. Sekihan is served on joyous occasions such as after childbirth, on birthdays, weddings and New Year's Day because of its red colour which symbolises life, vitality and happiness (see, for example, Ohnuki-Tierney Citation1993, 14; Rupp Citation2003, 65).
[7] The inverse relationship between pollution and vitality has often been explained by Japanese folklorists and anthropologists such as Sakurai (Citation1974, 224), Namihira (Citation1984, 133–185, Citation2003, 186) and Ohnuki-Tierney (Citation1993, 56).
[8] The word kawa means ‘river’ or ‘stream’ and segaki means ‘feeding the hungry ghosts’. The kawa segaki ritual is privately performed by the bereaved at the riverside for forty-nine days.
[9] In the past, according to Tanaka-san, the coffin did not have the casement window. The window was created quite recently and nowadays almost all kinds of coffins have the window. It is kept open while the coffin is on the altar and the bereaved can view the face of the deceased during this time.
[10] Because fire has long been considered a powerful means of casting out pollution (see Bernstein Citation2000, 319; Saitō Citation1986, 167–168; Shintani Citation1992, 63–66).