Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death

Abstract

The social and cultural construction of death and rituals that surround it have long engaged anthropologists. Far from immutably set in stone, mortuary practices are subject to ongoing negotiation and adjustment, providing valuable insights into the conditions and needs of a society at a particular moment in time. Within Japanese Studies, mortuary practices remain an especially vibrant and popular field of inquiry as the volume of recent monographs, articles, and books chapters surrounding this topic attests. (Mori 2000; Suzuki 2000; Tsuji 2002; Inoue 2003; Rowe 2003, 2011; Kawano 2010). Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death by Sébastien Boret is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature. Boret’s ethnographic monograph focuses on new notions of social belonging and memorialization that are emerging through the practice of jumokusō (burial beneath a tree). Jumokusō is an alternative system for disposing of cremated human remains. Instead of interring ashes in a family cemetery plot marked with a gravestone, an individual’s ashes are placed into the ground and a tree or shrub is selected and planted to indicate the site of the burial. Underlying Boret’s study are questions related to the conditions—both social and individual—that motivate people to eschew these conventional family mortuary practices and whether jumokusō constitutes a direct rejection of ancestor worship and filial continuity.