Older Women as Caregivers and Ancestral Protection in Rural Japan

Abstract

Ancestral appearance in the dreams of older women is closely related to Japanese tendencies to center responsibilities for taking care of family health and well-being on women. Two points related to women and ancestor veneration are: 1) when confronted with the question of how people know they are protected by the ancestors, many informants turned to discussions of specific dream experiences in which ancestors appeared; and 2) although men report seeing ancestors in dreams and ancestral-dream experiences can happen at any age, the appearance of ancestors in dreams has gendered and age-dependent features. Particularly as they enter into middle and old age, women often become caretakers of the collective well-being of the family and the appearance of ancestors in dreams becomes a signal that something is amiss in the world of the living. Regular participation in ancestor-related rituals and reporting of ancestral dreams is one way in which elderly women, in particular, can exercise their caregiving role by mediating the worlds of the living and dead and conveying the concern of the ancestors to their descendants. (Dreams, ancestors, Japan, gender, elderly women, ritual) ********** Ritual behavior associated with shrine visitation and ancestor veneration in Japan is often organized around what can be understood as a total life-care system that is used to enact worldly benefits and well-being for oneself and one's family (Reader and Tanabe 1998). This life-care system involves reciprocal relationships between spiritual entities and humans that are enacted through ritual to ensure and maintain personal and collective well-being. Rituals associated with ancestor veneration are particularly important in this reciprocal and interdependent life-care system. In terms of reciprocity, the dead and living are linked through social interactions enacted in the context of ritual practice. Just as the living keep the ancestors socially involved in their world through ritual performance and provide for the ancestors through food offerings, often of rice and water, the ancestors are seen as watching over and protecting the people whom they have left behind. As one Buddhist priest from Akita Prefecture put it, There is a feeling of give and take between the living and the dead. The ancestors protect the living in return for offerings of rice. However, this relationship is not simply one of exchange nor is it necessarily symmetrical. Without ritual attention, there is a risk that the ancestors will become muenbotoke (lit., unattached or wandering spirits), not cared for properly by the living. In much the same way as one's children and other family members need love and attention, ancestors, too, need emotional support, which is expressed largely through ritual practice. Ancestor-veneration rituals serve to keep the dead attached to people in the world of the living through a combination of affectively and materially maintained bonds. The ritual obligations associated with care are the basis for an interdependent and complementary relationship between living and dead. Both roles, the living and the ancestors, are structured around ideas of supplication and nurturance that shape many interdependent Japanese relationships, such as the mother-child bond. Ancestors and living not only reciprocate, but also depend upon each other for care (Lebra 1976:240). These characteristics of supplication and nurturance exist simultaneously in both roles. The living and the ancestors depend upon each other for their continued well-being and for their existence: the living would not exist without the ancestors, and the ancestors depend upon the living to keep them involved, as memories, in the world of the living and to provide the love and attention that all humans require. In short, living and dead are mutually involved in enacting and maintaining each other's well-being. Well-being within this framework is often conceptualized as extending beyond the individual to include the prosperity and health of one's stem family (Smith 1974), although there is a rising tendency to celebrate the dead apart from the context of the stem family, emphasizing more the memory of specific deceased rather than the collective ancestors (Suzuki 1998:185). …