During my fieldwork research in Japan, I was intrigued by the somewhat dismissive attitude that several people held toward final rites, the lack of confidence that their death would be ceremonially remembered by their children, and the sense of resignation to the new generation's way of living and dying. In other instances, personal realizations that the cultural meaning of conventional mortuary procedures was weakening motivated creative actions to remake rituals. In one case, I even spoke with a woman in her twenties who went so far as to take a part-time job at a funeral company in order to do “research” for her own “pre-need contract” (seizenkeiyaku) detailing how she would like her remains to be treated. While an exception within her own cohort, the idea that final rites may need to be updated to adapt to the social and demographic reality of twenty-first-century Japan was of much more immediate concern to older adults, whose sense of purpose (ikigai) is often linked to the value placed on interdependent ties of obligation and responsibility between generations and beyond death.
Anthropologist Satsuki Kawano's Nature's Embrace: Japan's Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites is the latest work to address questions of aging and death rituals in Japan by persuasively linking the macro-phenomenon of historical and generational cohort shifts to the ways in which individual older adults make decisions about their postdeath care. In doing so, she deftly avoids contributing to overgeneralizations about unfilial youngsters and disintegrating modern families, choosing instead to tell a story of older adults’ agency and the reproduction of cultural values in new forms. Kawano argues that older adults “who adopt new mortuary strategies reconfigure memorial rights and obligations and reformulate generational contracts by addressing the upset balance of ‘symbolic equity’” (see Akiko Hashimono, The Gift of Generations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]) between generations from the perspective of aging persons” (p. 13).
Appropriately, the first chapter in Nature's Embrace is titled “The Actors,” challenging the idea that older Japanese adults are mere passive recipients of care in late life or death. This chapter, together with chapter 2, “Historical Perspectives,” situates Kawano's study through a literature review of the social history of Japanese elder care policies and their relationship to the generational succession of mortuary responsibilities. Kawano adopts Susan O. Long's strategy (see Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005]; adapted from Clive Seale, Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]) of briefly profiling different cultural “mortuary scripts”: community scripts, modern scripts, religious scripts, scripts of resistance (pp. 77–87). Again following Long, Kawano clarifies that multiple scripts may be deployed by individuals as they make their decisions about postdeath arrangements, and that these decisions occur in a cultural context in which self-sufficiency does not exclude the influence of others, such as family members.
Chapters 3 and 4 contain the ethnographic focus of Kawano's book. These chapters describe the activities of the Grave Free Promotional Society (GFPS), a social movement founded in 1991 to promote the scattering of ashes as an alternative to conventional mortuary practices such as the erection of permanent family graves (p. 90). From the perspective of Japanese family ideology, scattering ashes may appear radical, but as Kawano describes the activities of the GFPS both in the office and in ceremonial contexts, we are shown how considerable efforts are made to fit ash scattering within existing cultural frames. Ash scattering does not, for example, eliminate practices of periodic memorial (p. 133), nor does it violate Japanese aesthetic sensibility of death as a “journey” or “return” (pp. 137–38).
Perhaps Kawano's strongest contribution is made in chapter 5, in which she departs from her description of encounters in the field to take a more sociological cohort analysis approach. Here, Kawano takes on the argument that new death rites are simply the result of recently emergent trends toward “individualization” and “nuclearization” of the household, as put forth by supporters of the “historical-transition thesis” (p. 144). Rather, Kawano argues that both household structures and the succession ideology that supports and links them to ancestor memorial remain relatively stable, and that the increase in new death rites more likely indicates the increase in mortuary options and consumer power of the elderly. In support of her claims, Kawano uses profile data she gathered on GFPS ash scatterers, itself a promising new source of data worthy of greater investigation.
Kawano's book is propelled mainly by two engaging topics: ash scattering and aging. However, aside from three long excerpted passages from field notes taken during scattering ceremonies, Kawano's ethnographic evidence often appears only as a few choice one-liners and anecdotes scattered throughout. Similarly, it would have been nice to examine how attitudes toward aging, family relationships, or decisions about death are influenced by an individual's developmental life course or by the particular details of their experience. Although Kawano interviewed a total of ninety members of the GFPS, we do not get to know any of them in depth; it remains unclear throughout the book how the interviews were conducted, as we are not shown portions of transcripts. The lack of ethnographic depth ultimately hurts Kawano's possibly valid claims about elder agency and the generational contract, since, in the end, we still do not really know who these older adults are nor do we see any interaction between generations of living actors.
My second, related criticism of the book is the lack of any tabulated data. Given the brevity of the ethnographic content, a few tables illustrating the results of her survey relating it to historical trends in aging, household composition or patterns of grave purchasing would have gone a long way to strengthen its presentation and readability for those without a specialist background. Similarly, while not a substitute for narrative, photographs may have been helpful, but unfortunately the three included do not depict anything specific to the GFPS, ash scattering, or aging urbanites.
The topics that Kawano writes about in Nature's Embrace are still evolving, and will no doubt continue to be debated and discussed for many years to come. This book is therefore both timely and contributes to further the discussion in the right direction.
