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"In a remote area of Awaji Island, "the grave of the graves" (ohaka-no-haka) houses the material artifacts of Japan's discarded death rights. In the past, the Japanese dead would be transformed into ancestors through years of ritual offerings in the home at Buddhist altars called butsudan. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing due to falling birthrates, secularization, and economic downturn. And so, down the mountainside, wooden Buddhist statues and altars burn on carefully tended bonfires, displaced from their domestic sites of honor. Though once present in nearly every Japanese home, butsudan are increasingly spurned by younger generations. Through the lens of this domestic altar, Gould asks: What happens when religious technology becomes obsolete? In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral showrooms, the messy houses of widowers, and the cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Gould traces the butsudan alongside the Buddhist lifecycle, exploring how they are made, circulate within religious and funerary economies, come to mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, fall into disuse, and, maybe, are remade. Gould suggests how this form might be reborn for the modern world: 3D-printed altars inspired by sleek Scandinavian design and new materials that embrace impermanence and decay, such as in "green" burial. Read against a long tradition of intergenerational memorialization, Japan's contemporary deathscape offers a case study in a new kind of necrosociality, based in transitory experiences that seek to disentangle the world of the living from that of the dead"--
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Hannah Gould is a Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the School of Social and Political Sciences and a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. She is president of the Australian Death Studies Society, coeditor of
Aromas of Asia, and coauthor of
Death and Funerary Practices in Japan.
