Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (review)

Bonds of the Dead at once makes a valuable contribution and signals an important new trend in the field of literature on the socioreligious phenomenon that has generally been referred to as “funerary Buddhism” (sōshiki Bukkyō), at least since the time of the seminal 1963 study, Sōshiki Bukkyō, by Tamamuro Taijō. Unlike many analysts of the issue, Mark Rowe is able to demonstrate through a series of fieldwork studies conducted with priests and parishioners in various parts of Japan that, far from representing a kind of desperate and degenerate form of religious practice that can easily be dismissed by skeptics, the focus on commemorating the dead in Japanese Buddhism is a vibrant and continually renewing dimension of spirituality. Newer, innovative approaches are richly deserving of attention for representing the ways that funeral rites have been changing dramatically in recent years in the face of the challenges of a rapidly changing society. Despite manifold alterations, Japanese society remains one in which a prevalent concern is the longstanding desire to avoid a sense of undergoing an “absence of bonds” (muen) along with the feeling of neglect and abandonment at the time of death (muenshi), or of there being uncared for or castaway graves (muenbo) for oneself or one’s family members.

Societal changes include urbanization and distance from ancestral graveyards, decreasing population and fewer family members to attend to the rites, economic hard times and scarcer resources to support the accoutrements that accompany memorials, and more high-paced lifestyles that are not conducive to lingering over the deceased. Rowe cites Ogawa Eiji to point out, “growing emphasis on the individual, nuclearization of families, declining birth rates, and increases in population shifts, singles, divorce, and depopulation mean that the form of the grave itself must change” (p. 69). Those kinds of adjustments suggest that people are fighting for their lives in terms of maintaining and creating connections through death, despite feeling enhanced independence that to some extent is attained by choice but is more often than not a condition thrust upon individuals.

Rowe describes the aim of Tamamuro’s work in 1963 to trace “the historical circumstances by which Japanese Buddhism came to be associated with the physical and spiritual care of the dead” (p. 5) and thereby to expose the roots of Japan’s “mortuary problem” (sōsai mondai). This problem linked Buddhist institutions to what seemed like an inferior and decadent form of religiosity that focused on rites for the deceased and memorials for ancestors primarily for commercial reasons stripped of an authentic sense of transcendence. Over the past half a century, the “mortuary problem” became “a catchall term for a broad range of doctrinal, historical, social, institutional, and economic issues confronting the traditional sects of Japanese Buddhism” (pp. 6–7). Itami Jūzō’s film O-Sōshiki (The funeral, 1984), for example, was an international sensation in the 1980s because of how, during the heights of the economic bubble, it lampooned the seemingly boundless greed of a Buddhist priest wearing gold-laced robes and being chauffeured in a luxury limousine to accept a generous donation from a bereaved family. The members of the family were disconnected from the meaning of the traditions that social custom compelled them to try to follow, yet they rather shamelessly went through the mere motions of ceremony as guided by an instructional video while adultery and other scandals were taking place only partially behind the scenes.

Rowe seeks to reverse what has become a commonplace notion that the performance of funerals has been the cause of a weakness in the Japanese Buddhist institution. He shows instead that these rites can and often do function as creative and continually redefined responses to the existential problem of death and dying that all people face. Because of their special historical and cultural status, Buddhist temples...