Japan Foundation Toronto

Date: Monday, February 13, 6:30 pm
Location: The Japan Foundation, Toronto
Address: 131 Bloor St. W., 2nd Floor of the Colonnade Building
Admission: Free
RSVP required: www.jftor.org/whatson/rsvp.php or (416) 966-1600 x102

“I plan to have my cremated remains scattered on a mountain,” a seventy-four-year-old man living in Tokyo told Dr. Kawano during her field research. He described the site of ash scattering almost cheerfully; it would preferably have a view of Mt. Fuji and perhaps some delicate bellflowers. Yet, what would his son, relatives, or neighbors think?

For metropolitan residents in Japan, establishing a family grave to have their remains interred signals middle-class success and pride in family ties and continuity. What does it mean to forgo a family grave, a place that is highly valued and regularly visited across Japan to venerate the deceased loved ones? In this lecture, Dr. Kawano will explore ash scattering ceremonies conducted by the Grave-Free Promotion Society of Japan (Sôsô No Jiyû O Susumeru Kai) established in 1991. Contrary to the common assumptions that childless people usually elect ash scattering, a number of the Society’s members have adult children. By “returning to nature” and joining a benevolent force larger than their small family, such older urbanites seek self-sufficiency in their postmortem world. They choose ash scattering in part to lighten the survivors’ burden as a grave obligates their descendants to maintain it. Ash scattering reveals people’s attempts to remake their ties with their family, and serves as a window onto new patterns of generational relations in urban Japan.

About the speaker:

Satsuki Kawano is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Guelph. After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (U.S.), she held positions at Harvard University

(Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions) and the University of Notre Dame (Assistant Professor) before joining the University of Guelph in 2004. Her research interests include ritual, death and dying, demographic shifts, aging, family, and kinship. As a Japan Foundation Fellow, Kawano conducted fieldwork for her project on Japan’s low fertility in 2009. She is the author of Ritual Practice in Modern Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2005) and Nature’s Embrace: Japan’s Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010).