Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan

5. Vengeful Spirits or Loving Spiritual Companions? Changing Views of Pet Spirits

five Vengeful Spirits or Loving Spiritual Companions? changing views of pet spirits E arly in the afternoon on Sunday, July 15, 2007, the small main hall of Jikei’in, a Rinzai temple in Fuchū, western Tokyo, with one of the largest and busiest pet cemeteries in the metropolitan area, is crowded with sixty people—mostly middle-aged women and a few young women and elderly men (figure 19). Despite the heavy rains of a typhoon that morning, they have come to attend the yearly segakie ritual for pets. The patrons have received booklets so that they can chant along with the clerics as they intone the Heart Sutra, a Kannon dhāranī, and the Four Vows—which begin appropriately, “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” A censer box is passed through the rows of patrons so that they can offer incense. The service ends with a brief dedication of merit. There is no sermon, and the pets are not mentioned individually, but some patrons will commission individual services later in the afternoon. As the ritual is about to begin, Ms. M., a middle-aged, slender woman, slides into one of the last open chairs next to me. She whispers, “You know, it was my cat who woke me up this morning so that I would attend this ritual on his behalf. I nearly overslept because of the typhoon. He kept licking me with his rough tongue. I would not have made it in time without his waking me up. When I opened my eyes, though, he was gone.” Her mackerel tabby, Jun, had died only eleven days earlier at the age of twenty. She did not immediately want another cat, but her neighbor brought her a kitten that was Jun’s spitting image, except that his tail was a bit longer. The new cat took immediately to her, so she became convinced that Jun had been reborn as this kitten. When the kitten had woken her on this Vengeful Spirits or Loving Spiritual Companions? | 157 morning, it was a message from Jun that he did not want her to miss his memorial service. In my ethnographic fieldwork at over thirty pet cemeteries, it was apparent that Buddhist clerics left their views on the afterlife of pets largely unarticulated, though one would assume some explanation to be crucial for providing a rationale for pet mortuary rites. This is not to say that this discourse does not exist, but it occurs in popular publications and discussions in Internet chat rooms rather than at Buddhist temples.1 As Shimazono Susumu has pointed out, there has been a growing interest in spirits and spirituality in Japan’s highly urbanized society since the late twentieth century. Spirit belief and magico-spiritual practices occur mostly outside the framework of established religion: in the “new” new religions, the writings of spiritual intellectuals and what Shimazono terms new spirituality movements and culture (shin reisei undō bunka).2 Shimazono argues that such spiritualist practices and spirit beliefs are particularly compatible with the postmodern world because they work well in the context of disintegrating traditional family structures and weakening ties with established reliFig . 19. Segaki service at Jikei’in, Tokyo, July 15, 2007. 158 | bones of contention gious institutions. They are also appealing because they play on the notion of complexity and uncertainty, which they appear to make somewhat controllable through the manipulation of spirits.3 Shimazono has also repeatedly noted the emphasis on individuality and personal gratification in the “new” new religions and the new spirituality movements and culture. He arguesthat thesespiritualandmagicalpracticesareradicallydifferentfrom the communally oriented ancestral practices in established Buddhism and older new religions, which emphasize the protection of the family rather than the existence of personal spirit guardians.4 It is no surprise then that the discourse about the afterlife of pets—with its implied redefinition of the meaning of “the family” (kazoku) and emphasis on vengeful and protective spirits—has occurred primarily in the context of this new spirituality culture. In my survey of sermons at mortuary rituals for pets, interviews with Buddhist clerics and clients at pet cemeteries, publications by popular psychics, and Internet chat rooms, I encountered several influences that shape ideas about the afterlife of pets: (1) Buddhist ideas of transmigration, rebirth, and salvation; (2) notions about unsettled, vengeful spirits and benign , protective spirits; and Western influences including (3) popular ideas of heaven as well as (4) spiritualist...