From a ‘good death’ to a ‘calm heart’: Buddhist retailing meets self-care in contemporary Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how vendors of Buddhist goods, which are traditionally associated with death and funerary rites in Japan, have responded to religious decline by venturing into alternative spirituality, wellness, and home décor markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within Buddhist goods stores, I examine how retailers and artisans have begun re-orientating their business models and product lines from caring for the dead at acute moments of spiritual transition to caring for the living in their everyday conditions of loneliness and stress. By pushing products that generate affects of healing (iyashi) and a calm heart (kokoro), these actors forge a new corporate–spiritual philosophy and religious consumer subjectivity and, in so doing, seek to defend their market share and social relevance in an age of secularism, disconnection, and precarity. However, for commercial actors, the space between religion and spirituality can be surprisingly treacherous and this transition challenges their skills of ‘affective retailing’.