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by Mary Jordan TOKYO—For the 95 years of his life, he was known as Toichiro Yamanaka. But since his death last month, and for all eternity, he will be called “Mr. To, Man of Purity and Trust, Whose Amazing Longevity Brought Eternal Happiness and Righteousness.” The Yamanaka family paid $5,000 for that posthumous name, which was bestowed by a Buddhist monk. Most of the nearly 1 million Japanese people who died last year were similarly given a new name, a symbol of one’s passage from a worldly stage of life to an enlightened one. Tradition doesn’t come cheap. Including Yamanaka’s posthumous name, his family spent more than $50,000 on his passing. The chief problems with dying in Japan are the same as those with living here: It’s too expensive, and too crowded—so crowded that people are even being buried, with headstones, on the rooftop of a Tokyo office building. In recent years, the acute lack of space for graveyards has led to “skyscraper” mausoleums where urns are stacked in what looks like a wall of coin lockers. In 1993, the Tokyo city government built a huge domed auditorium that can accommodate 21,000 urns, and it is already 80 percent full. “People are very much worried about how they will find a place to be buried,” said Susumu Shimazono, a religious studies professor at Tokyo University. “It’s a big, big problem.” Tokyo officials held a lottery recently for 20 outdoor graveyard spaces in a public cemetery; 4,000 people applied. The alternative to urban burial can be hours of train travel outside cities; some out-of-the-way mountainside cemeteries can be reached only by cable car. Choosing city burial can mean paying $25,000 for a tiny plot that the Myosenji Temple offers on the fifth floor of an office building in downtown Tokyo. There are granite headstones for 130 people in that neat rooftop cemetery. Relatives pay their respects on the many days set aside to honor one’s ancestors by taking an elevator past the grocery store on the first floor and the shipping company on the second. “There is not the space there once was,” said Eiko Kusunoki, whose husband’s family has been in the temple business for 370 years but opened their first temple-and-cemetery in an office building only a couple of years ago. The Yamanakas bought an outdoor family plot in the Tokyo neighborhood of Meguro long ago, so their big worry was not burial but getting an appointment at a crematorium. Nearly 1 million people die each year in Japan, and 99 percent of them are cremated, so the nation’s crematoriums are usually booked solid. “They said they were so backed up that they could not deal with my father until next Sunday,” six days later, said Yujiro Yamanaka, who finally managed to reserve the crematorium for Friday. In the meantime, the Yamanakas observed tradition and kept their father’s body packed in dry ice on a futon in his home for two days. Friends and relatives came to the house to view the body during this period. Afterward, the body was placed in a simple coffin, made of the highest quality cedar, and taken to a funeral home for a wake and funeral. Following those ceremonies, the body was transferred to the crematorium, where 30 family members participated in the cremation rites. In an auditorium-like room adorned with chrysanthemums, a robed monk offered final prayers over the body. The family drank tea as they waited upstairs for about an hour for their father’s body to be cremated. Immediately afterward, they gathered over the remains and used chopsticks to place them into an urn. Even though this part of the ceremony is emotionally difficult for some people, particularly children, and many Westerners might find it somewhat distasteful, Japanese consider it a significant part of the ritual of death. Yujiro Yamanaka calls it “an important stage of saying good-bye.” “It touches on the whole social meaning of the funeral,” he said. “From the dead person’s viewpoint, this is the ceremony where they are taken care of, held by their family and close friends. And for the living, we really know he has turned to ashes and bones. If you do this with your chopsticks, it really forces you to feel what has happened to your beloved.” The association with death is the reason Japanese never pass food to each other directly from one set of chopsticks to another. Many of these customs are changing as Japan changes, but many still remain. For instance, families often still put money in the coffin before cremation, symbolizing a cash tip for the boatman who is to row the dead person’s soul across a river into the next world. That custom, as well as the ornate names families procure for their dead, are a window into modern Japan’s adherence to ritual and belief in the afterlife. National surveys consistently show that at least half of all Japanese believe in some kind of life after death, even though an overwhelming percentage of people consider themselves “nonreligious”. “I think the vague concept of an afterlife is shared by most people,” said Nobutaka Inoue, an expert on religious studies. Inoue surveyed 4,000 students and found that 70 percent said they believe in an afterlife. Yamanaka’s son, Yujiro, is not sure where his father is now, but the family paid handsomely for his new name in the next world. And cost is a key reason why some rituals are changing. Four years ago, recognizing the shortage of burial spaces and their high cost, the government gave in to public pressure and began allowing ashes to be spread at sea, or in “appropriate” places on land. There has even been criticism of Buddhist temples, which can take in thousands of dollars for holding funeral services and providing posthumous names. The most ornate names, very long and formal ones, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “The Funeral,” a movie directed by Juzo Itami, spoofed Japanese funerals and saved its most biting satire for Buddhist monks. In the film, a greedy monk arrives at a funeral in a white Rolls-Royce, then repeatedly points out to the dead man’s family how much he admires their expensive French tile work, until the family feels compelled to give him some. “The amount people pay (for a posthumous name) is very diverse,” said Shimazono, the religious studies professor. “Rich people feel if they don’t pay a lot of money, it will hurt the dead person and their relatives. This kind of ritual is becoming a bit empty, too formal and more commercial.” Inoue said the Buddhist name has come to “function as social status; the name affects the status of those alive.” Generally, monks do not set a specific price for posthumous names; they allow the family to pay what they feel is appropriate. Yamanaka said his family had no idea how much to pay, so they called friends for advice. They called the monk, too, but he told them to pay “according to their wishes.” “If you pay too much, it’s stupid,” Yamanaka said. “But if you pay too little, that reputation (for cheapness) will remain.” In the end, Yamanaka believes the $5,000 his family paid was about right. It was a respectable amount without being wasteful, and it brought a posthumous name of exactly the same length and formality that his father’s father was given. “For me, it has no special meaning,” Yamanaka said. “But after all, it’s tradition.” |
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