More Japanese Choose Non-Traditional Burial
Comments: 4
Funerals in Japan cost, on average, $17,000 US making them among the world’s most expensive. Apparently, attitudes are changing:
More Japanese Choose Non-Traditional Burial
Yufiko Oikawa, voanews.comJunko Hasunuma, 63, began to think about her funeral a few years ago. But when her husband died last year, she decided to take an unusual step.
She said three years ago, she and her husband decided not to build a tomb and be buried under it because that would damage the environment. It is her belief that we do not belong to this world. Our souls go back to nature after our bodies are dead. So, she says, when her husband died last year, she arranged to scatter his cremated remains over the ocean.
Some years ago I attended my wife’s grandfather’s funeral, which was an amazing and moving experience. The family gathered at the house where he was lying in an open coffin in the front room. An altar had been set up before which the priest chanted and said prayers. When this stage was finished, everyone filled the coffin with flowers, covering grandfather from toe to head. The last two flowers were huge orchid-like things which my wife’s father placed over grandfather’s eyes. The coffin was closed and lifted through the window to the hearse outside. Neighbours, all wearing black, had gathered along the street to pay their respects.
The family followed the hearse to the crematorium in a rented mini-bus where we met up with other relatives who had come from Niigata. The immediate family accompanied the body to the door of actual chamber in which cremation takes place. The rest of us waited upstairs where they would join us once the cremation was underway.
About an hour and a half later, an astonishing thing happened. Everyone proceeded downstairs to another waiting room. Then the immediate family plus husbands of the grand-daughters (me and my 2 brothers-in-law) went into a stark white chamber. From a door at the far end two attendants wheeled in a kind of gurney on which were grandfather’s remains. At the head of the gurney was a white procelain urn in which they would be placed.
In pairs, family members used large chopsticks to pick up the bone fragments and place them in the urn, two people picking up a single fragment at a time. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening at this point and was overcome by how sensible this all was. What great way to say goodbye to someone — you know they’re really gone when you place their bones in an urn. No lingering doubts like when you bury them in a hole in the ground.
I recognised a piece of his right scapula, and the left corner of his jaw. There was a fragment of skull that I thought might have been the upper part of the occipital plate because of the zig-zaggy lines on it.
And here’s the amazing thing — while we were doing this one of the attendants stood a little way back from the gurney and, in a sweet quiet voice that you didn’t have to listen to if you didn’t want to, identified each fragment of bone as well as she could as it was carefully placed into the urn!
When all of the fragments had been placed in the urn, the other attendant very carefully swept up the remaining bone dust with a little broom and pan and tipped the last of grandfather in. The lid was put in place and the whole thing then wrapped in a special cloth. The eldest daughter carried it out to the mini-bus.
From the crematorium we went to a very good restaurant which was ours and ours alone for the rest of the day. A place had been set for grandfather at the head of the table. Above the urn we placed a framed photograph of him. We filled his cup once and our own many, many times.
Upon returning home the urn was placed in the butsudan — a shrine for the home — rather than being interred in a tomb somewhere. Grandfather’s final resting place is the house where he lived.
It was an excellent way to bid someone farewell.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2003.10.01 (Wed) • 11:19
Comments
Posted by Nathan Wainwright 2003.10.01, 13:44
very interesting out look for both burials.
and souns like a good experience on your behalf.
Posted by Chas Porter 2003.10.01, 15:46
Thank you for that.
When my mother died in August 2002, we placed her remains in a porcelain urn my brother-in-law, the potter, had given to her as a gift years before, and then placed the urn in a large, unfired earthenware bowl set in a wreath of grapevine, laurel and candles. My brothers-in-law and I paddled out onto the lake on my parents property and gently set her on calm water near a point high with pines planted by her father fifty years ago. The grandkids, my sisters, and my father released ballons from the shore, each with a personal note tied to its string. Then Greg and Matt and I sat and talked. We watched fish rise and the sun set. We lit the candles nestled in the grapevine and, eventually, we paddled back home. After dinner I walked down to the dock and saw candles still burning offshore, knowing that by morning the unfired bowl would give way and that my mother would be at rest in the heart of the land she loved.
The next day we threw her a party. She liked a good party.
Posted by Brad 2003.10.03, 05:48
Interesting observations. I myself attended two burials in Japan, my wife’s grandfather and one of her uncles. Both seemed more like exercises in endurance than anything else. Her grandfather’s burial was more involving, as we lived in the house with him and her parents.
The day before the ceremony, the priest came with the simple wooden box and clothing he was to wear. We dressed him in the white robes, glove-like things, etc. and placed him in the box. This was intensely interesting. You had to wipe down the body with alcohol wipes in the areas that you were to touch him. That mostly involved the hands while placing the white paper glove things on. My father-in-law did this. My sister- and brother-in-law didn’t was to touch the body. It was too much for them.
The next day, we went to the temple near the house for the ceremony. It was August, so it was extremely hot and wearing the cheap, black suit I bought for the funeral was torture. I was sweating like a New York waiter. Plus the bare tatami in the temple was not the most comfortable thing in the world.
The rest of the ceremony was as you described. We took the body to the crematorium and then we transferred the bones to the urn. We took the urn back to the house and placed it in the butsudan while we went to eat kaiseki. (Actually, since my mother-in-law knew none of the kids wanted to eat it, she gave us 5000yen to order pizza.)
One month (?) later, the priest came to the house for a small ceremony and then we took the urn to the graveyard where the family tombstone was. We inserted the urn into the back of the headstone and covered it with a slab of marble. We had a short ceremony there and that was it.
Posted by Wadim 2005.12.30, 03:36
This very good site. And all Happy New Year!!!
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