A fascinating book by Hannah Gould offers an opportunity to reflect on the status of religion in the country.
by Massimo Introvigne
I should confess that these days I tend to read books about religion in Japan through the lenses of the post-Abe-assassination religious liberty crisis in the country. There is an international community of religious liberty advocates, including those who work for the United Nations or the U.S. Department of State. Being a part of this community (and a former OSCE Representative for combating religious discrimination), I keep finding American and European veterans of religious liberty advocacy who tell me how hard it is to believe that a democratic country such as Japan may really have produced the current excesses targeting the Unification Church (now called Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This disconcert is apparent in the recent United Nations document criticizing Japan for the guidelines on the so-called religious abuse of children. United Nations rapporteurs on human rights, who have a solid academic and legal curriculum, simply do not understand.
But what about trying to understand by looking at Japanese society in general rather than focusing on the issue of new religions? I was at a conference in Japan this month and a colleague suggested I had a look at a book called “When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan,” by Australian scholar Hannah Gould (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2023). Gould is a specialist in death studies, not exactly my field, although many years ago I read all the works of French historian Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) on the changing Western attitudes toward death and found there is a lot a sociologist can learn from them.
I do not regret having bought and read Gould’s book. To start with, it makes for a fascinating and entertaining reading, as Gould (who speaks Japanese and has a Japanese husband) tells us of her adventures as an intern in companies selling butsudan, the Japanese ancestor altars, and even serving as “demonstration corpse” as a national convention of funeral industry professionals. By the end of the book, I knew more than I ever wanted to know about butsudan. I learned how they are made, how they are sold, what is the attitude toward them of those who have them in their homes—and how to dispose of them when there is nobody left to take care of these objects, avoiding a lack of respect that may cause bad luck. The latter turns out to be a matter of considerable importance and extends to headstones, as evidenced by Gould’s extraordinary visit to a “grave of the graves” where death-related artifacts are discarded. The companies where she performed her participant observation make good money not only by professionally installing but also by properly removing the butsudan.
This is not a flourishing industry, though. As the title of her book implies, Gould’s is an investigation into the crisis of butsudan (and graves). They are not about to disappear, and some companies are still very much active, but the number of households having a butsudan in their homes is rapidly declining. Those who do favor simple models that are far away from the old ornate masterpieces. The same is true for the graves, sometimes replaced by modern inventions such as automatic conveyance columbaria where, by pressing a button, a belt system recovers and brings to you the urn with the cremains of the deceased you want to honor.
There are several reasons for this decline, demography being one (many Japanese have no children who would take care of their graves) and economic crisis another, since funerals, graves, and even good butsudan are famously expensive. So are Buddhist priests who traditionally govern the domain of death, and here Gould’s research start interacting with the studies of those who have explored the antipathy towards religion prevailing in Japan.
There is only a single reference to new religions in the book. Gould explains that they have their own practices about the dead and a luxury butsudan company prefers not to accommodate them as dealing with new religions may hurt its reputation. This is already a red flag, as nothing similar would happen, say, in an American funeral home, but even more significant are the references to a prevailing Japanese feeling considering religion and priests a problem rather than a resource.
When I started studying Japanese religion, a mandatory reading was “The Rush Hour of the Gods” by the late historian H. Neill McFarland (1923–2017), telling us that after World War II Japan experienced a religious revival and an extraordinary success of new religions. This was welcome news for those, including myself, who were critical of the then prevailing idea that secularization was a universal phenomenon. But them came Ian Reader, a secularization theory aficionado and an excellent specialist of Japanese religion, who countered in a 2012 article that in Japan, if anything, there was “a rush hour away from the Gods,” and all forms of religion and spirituality were in fact declining, both old and new, institutional and non-institutional. I remain unpersuaded by the universal secularization theory, but about the specific case of Japan Gould’s book somewhat supports Reader’s thesis.
Japan is not France (I was tempted to mention Estonia, but then I just encountered in a conference a paper by folklorist Reet Hiiemäe persuasively debunking the claim that Estonia is the most atheistic country in the world). As indicated by the attitude toward butsudan, the Japanese approach to the sacred is complicated. Some informants told Gould they do not believe in God or religion, yet they would recite Buddhist sutras before a butsudan and fear misfortune or retaliation if they do not take care of their deceased relatives.
However, the feeling remains that there is not much sympathy towards religion in contemporary Japan. Local priests and traditions that have been around for centuries are more tolerated than loved. One starts understanding what happens when new religious traditions imported from abroad are presented by their resolute opponents and the media as threatening and sinister.
