Inhaltliche Zusammenfassung: | "In a remote area of Awaji Island, "the grave of the graves" (ohaka-no-haka) houses the material artifacts of Japan's discarded death rights. In the past, the Japanese dead would be transformed into ancestors through years of ritual offerings in the home at Buddhist altars called butsudan. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing due to falling birthrates, secularization, and economic downturn. And so, down the mountainside, wooden Buddhist statues and altars burn on carefully tended bonfires, displaced from their domestic sites of honor. Though once present in nearly every Japanese home, butsudan are increasingly spurned by younger generations. Through the lens of this domestic altar, Gould asks: What happens when religious technology becomes obsolete? In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral showrooms, the messy houses of widowers, and the cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Gould traces the butsudan alongside the Buddhist lifecycle, exploring how they are made, circulate within religious and funerary economies, come to mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, fall into disuse, and, maybe, are remade. Gould suggests how this form might be reborn for the modern world: 3D-printed altars inspired by sleek Scandinavian design and new materials that embrace impermanence and decay, such as in "green" burial. Read against a long tradition of intergenerational memorialization, Japan's contemporary deathscape offers a case study in a new kind of necrosociality, based in transitory experiences that seek to disentangle the world of the living from that of the dead"--
Through an ethnographic study inside Japan s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials. Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, the grave of the graves (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones-the material remains of Japan s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, Buddhist altars installed inside the home. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing. In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral-goods showrooms, neglected cemeteries, and cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Hannah Gould analyzes the lifecycle of butsudan, illuminating how they are made, circulate through religious and funerary economies, mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, and-as the population ages, families disperse, and fewer homes have space for large lacquer cabinets-eventually fall into disuse. What happens, she asks, when a funerary technology becomes obsolete? And what will take its place? Gould examines new products better suited to urban apartments: miniature urns and sleek altars inspired by Scandinavian design, even reliquary jewelry. She visits an automated columbarium and considers new ritual practices that embrace impermanence. At an industry expo, she takes on the role of demonstration corpse. Throughout, Gould invites us to rethink memorialization and describes a distinct form of Japanese necrosociality, one based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living |
