When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

Through an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials.

Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones—the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, ...