Grave matters

The winter being almost hospitable to outdoor activities, the Delightful Miss E and I recently decided to go for a wander through one of the forested hills behind or little aparto. Here we found a small cemetery overlooking a valley of rice paddies, and I took some photos of the graves. Matsue's most famous foreign resident, Lafcadio Hearne, wrote an essay about these graves, inclding a detailed description of the philosophy behind the writing and the burial procedure. In brief, burial in Japan is conducted under the Buddhist religion, not the Shinto religion (Shinto considers death unclean, and in early times had to institute a caste system to ensure the dead got buried). Because Buddhism comes from India via China and Korea, it maintains some influences from these regions. The pole of wood in the second picture with this post is called a Stupa ( a name derived from Hindi, I think) and if you look closely halfway down this Stupa you can see what looks suspiciously like some kind of Indian script (Sanskrit?) I think the Stupa contains information about how the deceased is to be viewed in the afterlife, including a translation of their post-death name. According to Lafcadio Hearne, Japanese people take a new name after their death (well, I suppose they don't take it - someone else gives it to them). This usually has complex meaning related to a philosophical ideal derived from mainland Buddhism (possibly, this is related to that Indian writing). I do not know if Japanese people today still do this, but the presence of the Stupa suggests to me that they do. These Stupas have to be maintained by living relatives, and revisiting the grave regularly forms an important part of the process of mourning (even up to years after the event). Sometimes one can see a family group wandering into a shrine, dressed to the nines (for important memorial dates the women may wear kimonos) to pay their respects and give offerings at the graves.

These cemeteries frequently appear out of nowhere - single graves standing alone at the side of a road, a little copse of stones nestled between the hillside and the railway line, or a large plot under the windows of an apartment block. I have not yet seen a large cemetery, but it seems that every forested hillside in Matsue and Tottori has its resident plot of graves - often completely disconnected from a temple, and standing alone on the hillside. I have heard from my Japanese teachers that in Tokyo there are mechanised graves, like safety deposit boxes where, once you put your money in, your relatives' ashes come to the fore by some kind of mechanical process; you can worship, give offerings, and then return them to the darkness, to nestle again in the bowels of the uncomprehending machinery of modern life. Such are the contrasts of modern Japan.