Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan

2. Masking Commodification and Sacralizing Consumption: The Emergence of Animal Memorial Rites

two Masking Commodification and Sacralizing Consumption the emergence of animal memorial rites M r.WatanabemanagesJindaijiDōbutsuReienSekaiDōbutsuTomo no Kai, the pet cemetery of the World Association of Animal Lovers on the grounds of Jindaiji (Tendai temple, Chōfu, Tokyo). He is also the owner of Suijin’en, a stylish Japanese gourmet restaurant at the foot of the temple. Every year in the obon season, Mr. Watanabe and his restaurant employees hold a memorial rite for fish, birds, and mammals (gyochōjū kuyō). The setting for the event is a picture of Japanese tradition: a Buddhist cleric from Jindaiji officiates at the ritual in front of a stone stupa next to the pond in the Japanese garden of the restaurant. The rite is dedicated to the animals that the restaurant serves daily and involves food and incense offerings as well as the release of fish in its pond, another nod to tradition. In a balancing act between positive public relations and privacy to allow for employee bonding, the rite is widely advertised on the pet cemetery’s website as one of Jindaiji’s yearly ceremonies,1 but only Suijin’en’s employees may attend. In the modern era, rituals for nonpet animals usually occur in a business setting. Even more so than in the early modern period, animals are treated as commodities—a fact that is mitigated by the performance of animal memorial rituals that acknowledge their status as sentient beings but turn them into willing martyrs for the sake of the nation’s progress and prosperity.2 As Nakamaki Hirochika points out, these memorial rites and monuments more likely function as a validation of the killing of animals rather than an admonition against it. He argues that they may in fact “encourage the overexploitation of nature” rather than stemming excessive 52 | bones of contention consumption, and that they mute opposition by pushing people into the roles of passive observers.3 Nakamura Ikuo has made a similar observation . He argues that such memorial rituals function as psychological and cultural devices that protect the interests of capitalist enterprises and are really meant to benefit the person who commissions them rather than the object of the ritual.4 In analyzing Siberian hunting rituals, Jonathan Z. Smith observes that there “appears to be a gap, an incongruity between the hunters’ ideological statement of how they ought to hunt and their actual behavior while hunting.”5 This gap, however, does not entirely invalidate the ideal, which is often expressed in ritual acts. Smith argues that ritual is “a human labor, struggling with matters of incongruity” and serves “as a meansof performingthewaythingsoughttobeinconscioustensiontothe way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled course of things.”6 In this chapter, I show that this rationale applies to modern Japanese animal memorial rituals for military animals, animals in the food and fishery industries, laboratory animals, and zoo animals. After their initial emergence during the early modern era, animal memorial rites became prevalent in the modern era: from the fascist 1930s and 1940s, when such rituals served to bolster Japanese patriotism; through the memorial-rite boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan underwent a period of economic prowess that strengthened ideas of Japanese uniqueness and superiority; to the contemporary period, when demographic and economic changes have brought about a reevaluation of Japan’s national identity. Even though animal memorial rites have often been nostalgically linked to Japanese tradition and been given as proof of the inherently harmonious relationship of the Japanese with nature, I argue that they flourished as a response to modernity and the commodification of animals. They constitute ritualized perfection in the face of the mechanized and often bloody realities of modernity. Premodern Precursors for Animal Memorial Rites Japanese folklorists have often linked animal memorial rites to a variety of premodern animal rituals in hunting, fishing, and agricultural communities . For example, in his Minzokugaku jiten, Yanagita Kunio defined dōbutsu kuyō (animal memorial rites) as follows: “Memorial rites for animals killed during hunts in the mountains and at sea involve the erec- Masking Commodification and Sacralizing Consumption | 53 tion of a memorial stupa [tōba] or a memorial tablet [ihai].” According to Yanagita, despite the Buddhist symbolism and terminology, such rites are “based on ancient ideas independent of Buddhism . . . , which are meant to avert misfortune incurred through the act of killing.” He cites examples such as hunting...