Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan

Introduction

introduction Late in the rainy season, on July 12, 2007, the main hall of Kōsaiji, an Ōbaku Zen temple in eastern Tokyo, is overflowing with visitors. Temple patrons have come to attend the yearly segakie, a Buddhist ceremony commonly performed during the obon season to feed the hungry ghosts. Elderly couples, middle-aged women, and young families with children spill into the hallway and the spacious waiting room, where they can follow the ceremony on a large-screen plasma TV (figure 1). Overseas patrons halfway around the globe can watch a silent live stream of the ritual over the Internet on the temple’s website. Accompanied by a cymbal, the abbot and his assistants recite scriptures and incantations to consecrate stacks of miniature tōba, wooden tablets shaped like stupas inscribed with the names of the deceased. The crowd lines up in front of the main hall and huddles under canopies and umbrellas to seek shelter from the pouring rain. As they enter the main hall one by one, two clerics stamp the miniature tōba with a seal and read out loud the names of the deceased: “Okano Chocolate, Ozaka Pon, Kikuchi Pudding, Maruko Pyontan”—dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, hamsters, and birds. After picking up the tōba from the clerics, patrons offer incense and a short, silent prayer on behalf of their beloved pets at one of four censers in front of the altar. Then they leave the main hall to enter the columbaria in the basement and on the second floor. There some replace old cans of dog and cat food with new ones and install their tōba in small shelf units holding urns with the cremains of their pets. Others offer tangerines, water bottles, and treats and place their tōba beside a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon at a side altar. Whitish bone fragments shimmer through the glass cover at the foot of another Kannon statue on the altar that marks the collective ossuary as a camera mounted on the ceiling pans across the room and captures the activities for transmission on the Internet. As illustrated by rituals such as these, the relationships that many con- 2 | Introduction temporary Japanese have with their pets approximate those with human family members—even in death. However, the concept of the pet, particularly the idea that the pet is a family member, is largely a modern notion. Premodern Japanese textual sources do not distinguish pets from domestic animals in general. Despite the lack of a distinct term for pets, the premodern Japanese did keep animals for nonutilitarian purposes.1 From the beginnings of Japanese history through the early modern period, exotic animals such as parrots, peacocks, domesticated cats, and unusual breeds of dogs (including lapdogs and hunting dogs) were imported first from the Asian continent and later from Europe to serve as status symbols for the socioeconomic elites.2 However, pets were not nearly as common as today and were not widely regarded as family members. Instead, aesthetic concerns and collecting practices were more important factors. One of the earliest, if literary, examples of such practices is recounted in the Heianperiod (795–1185) tale Mushi mezuru himegimi (The lady who admired vermin). The tale describes an unusual young girl who collects and studies Fig. 1. Segaki service at Kōsaiji, Tokyo, transmitted on a large plasma TV in the temple’s waiting room. Introduction | 3 creatures such as caterpillars and snails, which are considered highly unattractive by everyone else. Her contemporaries are more interested in aesthetically pleasing animals, such as butterflies. The girl’s fascination with these animals is described as obsessive and shocking, yet her motivation is not all that different from that of her peers: she is an avid collector albeit seemingly of the wrong type of creatures.3 Other animals, such as birds and cats, also appear as pets of the nobility during the Heian period. The caging of small birds is well documented in Heian literature despite the fact that the practice of confining wild creatures was decried as cruel by contemporaries. For example, the Tale of Genji (early eleventh century) contains an episode about the young Murasaki, who is upset that a female servant released her sparrow from its cage and worries about its safety. Her grandmother, a Buddhist nun, chides her saying that caging living beings is an evil deed.4 Likewise, Sei Shōnagon (966–1017), an...