Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan

3. Pets, Death, and Taxes: The Legal Boundaries of Religion

three Pets, Death, and Taxes the legal boundaries of religion O n June 17, 2007, I visited Jimyōin, a Tendai temple in Kasugai City in the hilly suburbs north of Nagoya, to attend the monthly memorial service for pets. After the service, the taxi driver who took me back to the nearest train station criticized pet memorial services at temples such as Jimyōin: such rituals served as moneymaking schemes (kane mōke) for temples. He said, “People are used to having Buddhist clerics memorialize family members. Since the pet mama and pet papa want to do more for their ‘children,’ they are willing to pay anything, and temples take advantage of that.” The taxi driver is hardly alone in his assessment. Many Japanese, including Buddhist clerics and scholars of religion, have voiced similar criticisms. It is also the topic of much discussion in webbased chat rooms dealing with pet memorial rites. On a message board on Spinavi, a chat-room site dedicated to spiritual issues, the majority (most of whom had apparently never owned a pet) stated that spending money on pet memorial rites was wasteful, unnatural, too commercialized to be personal, inconsiderate of the animal, for the self-satisfaction of the owner alone, and simply over the top.1 Criticism of this sort is not limited to the rumblings from the general public: in the past few years, such critiques have taken the shape of legal proceedings. Between 2004 to 2008, there were two prominent legal disputes that illustrate the social and cultural rifts surrounding pet mortuary rites. Cases involving the above-mentioned Jimyōin (Kasugai City, Aichi Prefecture) as well as Ekōin in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward challenged the tax privileges of Buddhist temples conducting pet mortuary rites. The two cases advanced all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, but they came to Pets, Death, and Taxes | 91 radically different, paradoxical conclusions: the Jimyōin case resulted in the assessment of corporate income tax on a Buddhist temple conducting pet funerals, whereas the Ekōin case upheld the temple’s privilege of being exempt from property taxes on buildings and land used for pet mortuary rites. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of the taxation of religious corporations and then discuss the two legal cases in detail. The cases illustrate the discontent felt by many Japanese about the perceived tax privileges of religious institutions. They also help us grasp how pet memorial rites are perceived as fundamentally different from memorial rites for inanimate objects and nonpet animals: although the latter are emblems of Japaneseness and tradition, the former are widely seen as inauthentic, un-Japanese, antisocial, egocentric, and unproductive. They are emblems of consumerism and individualism gone awry. As liminal, hybrid beings that are treated simultaneously as commodifiable objects and beloved family members, pets have become the focal point of contestation that have allowed critics to transgress against the sacrosanct economic privileges of religious institutions. Religious Corporations and Tax Exemptions Theideathatreligiousinstitutionsshouldreceivetaxprivilegesisnotanew one. Even in the premodern era, temples and shrines were able to amass landholdings without paying taxes to worldly authorities—an arrangement that was frequently criticized from a Confucian perspective. With the development of Japan as a modern nation-state this situation was formalized in legal terms. Religious organizations could become religious corporations , and with incorporation religious organizations initially received blanket tax privileges. The first attempts to pass legislation codifying the incorporation and tax-exempt status of religious organizations failed in 1899, 1927, and 1929. The incorporation of religious organizations began in 1940 with the implementation of the Religious Organizations Law (Shūkyō Dantaihō), which gave religious organizations such as Buddhist schools, Shinto sects, and Christian churches the right to incorporate but also subjected them to strict state regulation. Article 22 gave registered religious corporations summary exemption from income, property, regional, and municipal taxes. In 1945, the Occupation authorities revoked the law and replaced it with the ReligiousCorporationsOrdinance (ShūkyōHōjin Rei), which maintained the right of religious organizations to incorporate 92 | bones of contention but removed much of the strict supervision by the state. Article 16 again gave registered religious corporations general exemption from income, property, regional, and municipal taxes.2 The subsequent Religious Corporations Law (Shūkyō Hōjin Hō; enacted in 1951) and the Corporate Tax Law (Hōjin Zeihō; enacted in 1965) made the tax exemption of religious corporations more complex. The postwar legislation...