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Rite And Symbols Of Death In Japan
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Book Synopsis Ceremony and Ritual in Japan by : D. P. Martinez
Download or read book Ceremony and Ritual in Japan written by D. P. Martinez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is one of the most urbanised and industrialised countries in the world. Yet the Japanese continue to practise a variety of religious rituals and ceremonies despite the high-tech, highly regimented nature of Japanese society. Ceremony and Ritual in Japan focuses on the traditional and religious aspects of Japanese society from an anthropological perspective, presenting new material and making cross-cultural comparisons. The chapters in this collection cover topics as diverse as funerals and mourning, sweeping, women's roles in ritual, the division of ceremonial foods into bitter and sweet, the history of a shrine, the playing of games, the exchange of towels and the relationship between ceremony and the workplace. The book provides an overview of the meaning of tradition, and looks at the way in which new ceremonies have sprung up in changing circumstances, while old ones have been preserved, or have developed new meanings.
Book Synopsis Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism by : Jacqueline I. Stone
Download or read book Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism written by Jacqueline I. Stone and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-08-20 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in this volume, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice. The idea that death, ritually managed, can mediate an escape from deluded rebirth is treated in the first two essays. Sarah Horton traces the development in Heian Japan (794–1185) of images depicting the Buddha Amida descending to welcome devotees at the moment of death, while Jacqueline Stone analyzes the crucial role of monks who attended the dying as religious guides. Even while stressing themes of impermanence and non-attachment, Buddhist death rites worked to encourage the maintenance of emotional bonds with the deceased and, in so doing, helped structure the social world of the living. This theme is explored in the next four essays. Brian Ruppert examines the roles of relic worship in strengthening family lineage and political power; Mark Blum investigates the controversial issue of religious suicide to rejoin one’s teacher in the Pure Land; and Hank Glassman analyzes how late medieval rites for women who died in pregnancy and childbirth both reflected and helped shape changing gender norms. The rise of standardized funerals in Japan’s early modern period forms the subject of the chapter by Duncan Williams, who shows how the Soto Zen sect took the lead in establishing itself in rural communities by incorporating local religious culture into its death rites. The final three chapters deal with contemporary funerary and mortuary practices and the controversies surrounding them. Mariko Walter uncovers a "deep structure" informing Japanese Buddhist funerals across sectarian lines—a structure whose meaning, she argues, persists despite competition from a thriving secular funeral industry. Stephen Covell examines debates over the practice of conferring posthumous Buddhist names on the deceased and the threat posed to traditional Buddhist temples by changing ideas about funerals and the afterlife. Finally, George Tanabe shows how contemporary Buddhist sectarian intellectuals attempt to resolve conflicts between normative doctrine and on-the-ground funerary practice, and concludes that human affection for the deceased will always win out over the demands of orthodoxy. Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism constitutes a major step toward understanding how Buddhism in Japan has forged and retained its hold on death-related thought and practice, providing one of the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of the topic to date. Contributors: Mark L. Blum, Stephen G. Covell, Hank Glassman, Sarah Johanna Horton, Brian O. Ruppert, Jacqueline I. Stone, George J. Tanabe, Jr., Mariko Namba Walter, Duncan Ryuken Williams.
Book Synopsis Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village by : D. P. Martinez
Download or read book Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village written by D. P. Martinez and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be understood as a place all of its own. In the 1980s it was one of the few villages where female divers (ama) still collected abalone and other shellfish and where some of its inhabitants continued to make a living as fishermen. Kuzaki was also a kambe, or sacred guild, of Ise Shrine, the most important Shinto shrine in modern Japan—home to Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Kuzaki’s rituals affirmed a national identity in an era when attitudes to modernity and Japaneseness were being challenged by globalization. Martinez enhances her fascinating ethnographic description of a single diving village with a critique of the way in which the anthropology of Japan has developed. The result is a sophisticated investigation by a senior scholar of Japanese studies that, while firmly grounded in empirical data, calls on anthropological theory to construct another means of understanding Japan—both as a society in which the collective is important and as a place where individual ambitions and desires can be expressed.
Book Synopsis Death and Funeral Practices in Japan by : Hannah Gould
Download or read book Death and Funeral Practices in Japan written by Hannah Gould and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-08 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the past, present, and future direction of death rituals and deathcare systems within Japan. As Japan heads toward a precarious future shaped by its super-ageing society, secularisation, and economic stagnation, the socioreligious structures that once organised death and funeral practice are becoming increasingly unstable. In their place, new social structures, technologies, and rituals for the farewell of the dead, handling of cremains, and commemoration of the ancestors have begun to emerge. The work is informed by the authors’ extensive research within Japan’s funeral, cemetery, and memorialisation sectors and the latest Japanese data sources and academic publications, many of which are not currently available in English. Providing readily accessible and contextualising information, this book will be an essential reference for graduate students and academics, as well as international policymakers and deathcare practitioners.
Book Synopsis Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan by : Gary L. Ebersole
Download or read book Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan written by Gary L. Ebersole and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of death rituals in early Japan finds in the practice of double burial a key to understanding the Taika Era (645-710 A.D.). Drawing on narratives and poems from the earliest Japanese texts--the Kojiki, the Nihonshoki, and the Man'yoshu, an anthology of poetry--it argues that double burial was the center of a manipulation of myth and ritual for specific ideological and factional purposes. "This volume has significantly raised the standard of scholarship on early Japanese and Man'yoshu studies."--Joseph Kitagawa "So convincing is the historical and religious thought displayed here, it is impossible to imagine how anyone can ever again read these documents in the old way."--Alan L. Miller, The Journal of Religion "A central resource for historians of early Japan."--David L. Barnhill, History of Religions
Book Synopsis Japanese Tree Burial by : Sébastien Penmellen Boret
Download or read book Japanese Tree Burial written by Sébastien Penmellen Boret and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tree burial, a new form of disposal for the cremated remains of the dead, was created in 1999 by Chisaka Genpo, the head priest of a Zen Buddhist temple in northern Japan. Instead of a conventional family gravestone, perpetuating the continuity of a household and its identity, tree burial uses vast woodlands as cemeteries, with each burial spot marked by a tree and a small wooden tablet inscribed with the name of the deceased. Tree burial is gaining popularity, and is a highly-effective means of promoting the rehabilitation of Japanese forestland critically damaged by post-war government mismanagement. This book, based on extensive original research, explores the phenomenon of tree burial, tracing its development, discussing the factors which motivate Japanese people to choose tree burial, and examining the impact of tree burial on traditional views of death, memorialisation, and the afterlife. The author argues that non-traditional, non-ancestral modes of burial have become a means of negotiating new social orders and that this symbiosis of environmentalism and memorialisation corroborates the idea that graveyards are not only places for the containment of human remains and the memorialisation of the dead, but spaces where people (re)construct, challenge, and find new senses of belonging to the wider society in which they live. Throughout, the book demonstrates how the new practice fits with developing ideas of ecology, with the individual’s corporality nourishing the earth and thus re-entering the cycle of life in nature.
Book Synopsis The Wiley Blackwell companion to East and inner Asian Buddhism by : Mario Poceski
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell companion to East and inner Asian Buddhism written by Mario Poceski and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to East and Inner Asian Buddhism combines outstanding contributions covering Buddhism as it developed and is practiced in this region. These newly-commissioned essays provide fresh scholarly perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, and practices. Offers a comprehensive and balanced survey of Buddhism within East and Central Asia, from the time of the Buddha through to the present day Provides fresh perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, traditions, doctrines, practices, and institutions - on topics spanning gender roles, tantric rituals, and the spread of Zen into Europe Brings together cutting-edge research by an interdisciplinary and international contributor team, including historians, literature scholars, and historians, as well as those from religious studies Presents a panoramic view of the extraordinary richness and variety of local Buddhist expressions and practices within Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Tibetan, cultures.
Book Synopsis The Buddhist Dead by : Bryan J. Cuevas
Download or read book The Buddhist Dead written by Bryan J. Cuevas and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its teachings, practices, and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms has been—and continues to be—centrally concerned with death and the dead. Yet surprisingly "death in Buddhism" has received little sustained scholarly attention. The Buddhist Dead offers the first comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet, and Burma. Its individual essays, representing a range of methods, shed light on a rich array of traditional Buddhist practices for the dead and dying; the sophisticated but often paradoxical discourses about death and the dead in Buddhist texts; and the varied representations of the dead and the afterlife found in Buddhist funerary art and popular literature. This important collection moves beyond the largely text—and doctrine—centered approaches characterizing an earlier generation of Buddhist scholarship and expands its treatment of death to include ritual, devotional, and material culture. Contributors: James A. Benn, Raoul Birnbaum, Jason A. Carbine, Bryan J. Cuevas, Hank Glassman, John Clifford Holt, Matthew T. Kapstein, D. Max Moerman, Mark Rowe, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Gregory Schopen, Koichi Shinohara, Jacqueline I. Stone, John S. Strong.13 illus.
Book Synopsis Funeral Rites Reformation for Any African Ethnic Community Based on the Proposed New Funeral Practices for the Agikuyu by : Johnson Nganga Mbugua
Download or read book Funeral Rites Reformation for Any African Ethnic Community Based on the Proposed New Funeral Practices for the Agikuyu written by Johnson Nganga Mbugua and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has been written on the premise that the mode of coping with death of virtually all African ethnic communities has taken proportions and turns that are neither cultural, scriptural, nor necessary. Current rites are complicated, time-consuming, expensive, and are leaving most families and their neighbors impoverished. They have been extremely commercialized and a large number of Africans do not have resources to bury their dead the "modern" way. Were the Agikuyu (read: Africans) to curb numerous funeral demands which they deem necessary and "customary," when in actual fact they are not, funerals for them would become cheaper, faster, and simpler; would be decent enough for the dead; would take care of those left behind; and would be environmentally friendly. How Africans in the Diaspora, away from their ancestral homeland, should cope with death is also addressed. Also addressed is the issue of cremation. It is shown that at the resurrection, God will accord us new spiritual bodies which will have no bearing with the material substance of our earthly (mortal) bodies.
Book Synopsis Death in the Early Twenty-first Century by : Sébastien Penmellen Boret
Download or read book Death in the Early Twenty-first Century written by Sébastien Penmellen Boret and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.
Book Synopsis The Price of Death by : Hikaru Suzuki
Download or read book The Price of Death written by Hikaru Suzuki and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funerary practices have long been a classic topic of anthropological inquiry, which has tended to focus on death rituals as expressions and reinforcers of community ties and values. In this book, the author looks at funerals as an urban business, based on her fieldwork at a large Japanese funeral company. Her central theme is the progressive commercialization of what once were primarily religious rituals. The book depicts the process of contemporary Japanese funerals, the practices of those who provide commercial funeral services, and the motivations and behavior of the mourners who purchase those services. In so doing, it examines the role of funeral companies in shaping Japanese cultural practices and changing an important aspect of Japanese society. The author addresses several related questions: What cultural changes accompanied the shift from traditional community funeral rituals to commercial funeral services? How did the mass consumption of commercial funerals produce cultural homogeneity while allowing for differences in individual services? How does the marketing of professional funeral services mediate changing cultural values? How have commercial services served to objectify changing concepts of dying, death, and the deceased in contemporary Japan? The author demonstrates that the funeral industry, the purchasers of funeral services, and Japanese values surrounding death are mutually dependent and are responsible for supporting, representing, and transforming cultural practices. Throughout, the author relates vivid and often moving details and anecdotes to lend a personal element to her study of the commodification of death in Japan.
Book Synopsis Modern Passings by : Andrew Bernstein
Download or read book Modern Passings written by Andrew Bernstein and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What to do with the dead? In Imperial Japan, as elsewhere in the modernizing world, answering this perennial question meant relying on age-old solutions. Funerals, burials, and other mortuary rites had developed over the centuries with the aim of building continuity in the face of loss. As Japanese coped with the economic, political, and social changes that radically remade their lives in the decades after the Meiji Restoration (1868), they clung to local customs and Buddhist rituals such as sutra readings and incense offerings that for generations had given meaning to death. Yet death, as this highly original study shows, was not impervious to nationalism, capitalism, and the other isms that constituted and still constitute modernity. As Japan changed, so did its handling of the inevitable. Following an overview of the early development of funerary rituals in Japan,Andrew Bernstein demonstrates how diverse premodern practices from different regions and social strata were homogenized with those generated by middle-class city dwellers to create the form of funerary practice dominant today. He describes the controversy over cremation, explaining how and why it became the accepted manner of disposing of the dead. He also explores the conflict-filled process of remaking burial practices, which gave rise, in part, to the suburban "soul parks" now prevalent throughout Japan; the (largely failed) attempt by nativists to replace Buddhist death rites with Shinto ones; and the rise and fall of the funeral procession. In the process, Bernstein shows how today’s "traditional" funeral is in fact an early twentieth-century invention and traces the social and political factors that led to this development. These include a government wanting to separate itself from religion even while propagating State Shinto, the appearance of a new middle class, and new forms of transportation. As these and other developments created new contexts for old rituals, Japanese faced the problem of how to fit them all together. What to do with the dead? is thus a question tied to a still broader one that haunts all societies experiencing rapid change: What to do with the past? Modern Passings is an impressive and far-reaching exploration of Japan’s efforts to solve this puzzle, one that is at the heart of the modern experience.
Book Synopsis Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan by : Karen M. Gerhart
Download or read book Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan written by Karen M. Gerhart and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a multidisciplinary examination of rituals featuring women, in which significant attention is paid to objects produced for and utilized in these rites as a lens through which larger cultural concerns, such as gender politics, the female body, and the materiality of the ritual objects, are explored. The ten chapters encounter women, rites, and ritual objects in many new and interactive ways and constitute a pioneering attempt to combine ritual and gendered analysis with the study of objects. Contributors include: Anna Andreeva, Monica Bethe, Patricia Fister, Sherry Fowler, Karen M. Gerhart, Hank Glassman, Naoko Gunji, Elizabeth Morrissey, Chari Pradel, Barbara Ruch, Elizabeth Self.
Download or read book Japanese Death Poems written by and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 1998-04-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." --Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated into English here, the vast majority of them for the first time. Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined--from the longing poems of the early nobility and the more "masculine" verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries. Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in English translation and romanized in Japanese.
Book Synopsis Interpreting Japan by : Brian J. McVeigh
Download or read book Interpreting Japan written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an experienced teacher and scholar, this book offers university students a handy "how to" guide for interpreting Japanese society and conducting their own research. Stressing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, Brian McVeigh lays out practical and understandable research approaches in a systematic fashion to demonstrate how, with the right conceptual tools and enough bibliographical sources, Japanese society can be productively analyzed from a distance. In concise chapters, these approaches are applied to a whole range of topics: from the aesthetics of street culture; the philosophical import of sci-fi anime; how the state distributes wealth; welfare policies; the impact of official policies on gender relations; updated spiritual traditions; why manners are so important; kinship structures; corporate culture; class; schooling; self-presentation; visual culture; to the subtleties of Japanese grammar. Examples from popular culture, daily life, and historical events are used to illustrate and highlight the color, dynamism, and diversity of Japanese society. Designed for both beginning and more advanced students, this book is intended not just for Japanese studies but for cross-cultural comparison and to demonstrate how social scientists craft their scholarship.
Book Synopsis Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions by :
Download or read book Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing work by some of the leading scholars in the field, the chapters of this handbook survey the transformation and innovation of religious traditions and practices in contemporary Japan. Readers will find lively scholarly studies about changes in the traditional institutions of Buddhism and Shinto, vivid examples of social activism as well as the so-called “new religions,” examination of the relationship between religion and the state, and analysis of the religiosity of individuals encompassed by “spirituality,” pilgrimage and tourism, and the marketing of religions. This groundbreaking collection of scholarly papers helps to map out the fascinating complexity and dynamism of religion in contemporary Japanese society and culture.
Book Synopsis Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands by : Arne Røkkum
Download or read book Nature, Ritual, and Society in Japan's Ryukyu Islands written by Arne Røkkum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu Islands and their world. In particular it explores the mind of the islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression to these relationships. Based on extensive original research, including participant observation, the book allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves as well as setting the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese Studies and Pacific Island studies.
