Nature's Embrace: Japan's Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites (review)

Japan's social changes—including an aging population, declining birth rates, fewer marriages, economic constraints, and increasing urbanization—are, as Satsuki Kawano shows in Nature's Embrace: Japan's Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites, challenging traditional cultural constructions of death in Japan. These constructions have centered on notions of ancestorhood with the deceased continuing to have a role in this world and a "generational contract" (p. 25) existing between past, present, and future age cohorts in which each generation looks after the previous one. Such after-death care and memorialization requires a grave (where the ashes of the deceased are interred) and familial successors (married offspring who will also have children to continue the lineage) to tend to that grave. This system is increasingly at risk as people die older and have fewer (or no) children. Challenges to the traditional order have led to the emergence of new ways of dealing with death, including ash scattering, in which the deceased are cremated and their remains ritually scattered in natural settings.

Kawano's study is based on fieldwork done from 2002 to 2004 in one small organization, the Grave-Free Promotion Society (GFPS). Founded in 1991 and run by Yasuda Mutsuhiko, a former journalist, the GFPS is a nonprofit organization managed by a small staff plus volunteers. It initially campaigned, successfully, to get ash scattering declared legal in Japan (although some municipalities still do not permit it, claiming it is environmentally polluting) and has subsequently promoted the practice as a natural means of ending the individual's life journey. The GFPS portrays this as a return to nature that symbolizes continuity and the natural flow of life. This emphasis is important in a cultural context in which the "natural" process has been assumed to be death, cremation, and the interment of the ashes in a family grave to be cared for by future generations, and it serves to counter any claims that the deceased are simply being abandoned or cast aside.

One has to be a member of GFPS to have one's ashes scattered under its auspices. Whether the GFPS has a monopoly here or whether there are alternative ash-scattering agencies is unclear; Kawano does not discuss the matter. While the GFPS has yet to attract many members, it can be seen, according to Kawano, as one response by a particular generational cohort (she writes that many of her GFPS informants were born between 1927 and 1942) to combat their lack of successors and graves. As she notes, in the traditional stem-family system, the family grave is inherited by the first son—leaving other offspring to acquire their own. This is an expensive process in urban areas and one that many resent, especially when it means paying large fees to the Buddhist temples that have long held sway in dealing with death. And, indeed, ash scattering is far cheaper than having a grave built. It is evident that antipathy to religious specialists is a factor of some importance; Kawano cites a seventy-five-year-old informant who says he does not want to buy a grave because he does not want to make a Buddhist priest richer (p. 86). Unfortunately, Kawano does not examine whether this is a prominent consideration for many who opt to be "returned to nature" via GFPS rituals.

Besides finances, primary motivations for those who choose ash scattering are to determine one's own fate, to decide, while alive, how one is to be treated after death, and to avoid becoming a burden on future generations. Indeed, for those without descendants to care for them, ash scattering removes the worry of an untended grave; given that neglect in death has often been associated with an unhappy afterlife, this fear can be very real. "Returning to nature," aside from being a potentially viable strategy for dealing with all of these concerns, is also evidence of a continued shift away from community...