Practicing the Afterlife: Perspectives from Japan (review)

This substantial new volume, which brings together articles by scholars from Europe, America, and Japan, intends to reveal the complex diversity of beliefs and practices about the afterlife (raise) through Japanese history, and to do so from a number of differing disciplinary standpoints. In this dual endeavor, it succeeds admirably. The essays collected here will be of great use, both in the classroom and in research, to students of Japanese religious culture. The 21 scholars represented in this volume gathered in Vienna in the spring of 1999 for a conference entitled "Popular Japanese Views of the Afterlife," organized by Susanne Formanek under the auspices of the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. While the provocative introduction exposes the problematic nature of the category of "the popular" and notes the decision to strike this term from the title of the conference volume, the individual authors almost invariably, perhaps inevitably, invoke this rubric, or its twin sister—"the folk." I will have more to say about this conundrum below.

The primary question posed by the editors in their introduction, and by the contributing authors, could be most succinctly paraphrased as follows: "How have Japanese beliefs about the next life over the ages been reflected in ritual, artistic, philosophical, and literary practice?" As one might expect in a work that spans some three millennia of Japanese history from Tohoku to the Ryūkyūs, there is no simple, concrete, or unitary answer offered. And this is as it should be. The subject matter and the methodological approach of the articles vary considerably, and the contrast is at times jarring. This interdisciplinary mix is intentional, however; as the editors tell us, "It was part of our plan that these studies might bridge some of the disciplinary and conceptual dichotomies that had become built into the way we were studying the afterlife. We hoped to explore the interface between how it appeared to the historian of religious ideas and how it looked to the sociologist" (p. 11). The potpourri approach intimated here is simultaneously a great strength and a considerable weakness of the volume viewed as a whole.

The reviewer who attempted to discuss each of the numerous contributions in turn would be doomed before even beginning, so I will eschew this line of attack and instead discuss the editors' introduction at some length, then take up a number of individual articles grouped thematically. A brief summary of each occupies 15 entire pages of the introduction, to which I refer the interested reader (pp. 30–45). While the organization of the volume is largely chronological, in this review I will cut across historical lines in an effort to illuminate some of the enduring motifs engaged by the contributors, bringing together quite disparate examples of scholarly genres—the phenomenological, the textual-historical, the anthropological, and what might be termed the geographical. As the editors warn in the introduction, the reader should not expect systematic or comprehensive coverage of this vast and complex topic, really a range of topics. This volume, however, is the best work so far to appear in English to aid anyone seeking an overview, across time, of Japanese orientations to life after death.

The introduction frames this collective investigation into Japanese ideas about and practices around the otherworld in terms of modernity and the reign of the scientific or the empirical. As our world, or specifically Japan in this case, becomes increasingly secular and "disenchanted" (to use Weberian terminology), what happens to the idea of an afterlife? What use does the modern person have for such notions, often dismissed as conjectural fantasies and psychological projections? The topic of the world-to-come has, in the last century or two, the editors suggest, receded as an appropriate target of scholarly inquiry, pushed increasingly toward the hermeneutic vanishing point. Part of the reason for this, Formanek and LaFleur point out, is the messiness and lack of coherence inherent...