Shinto Funerals in the Edo Period

Abstract

DURING THE LATE EDO and early Meiji periods, politicians and ideologues reshaped Japan into a country both ancient and modern; the “ancient” part was “Shinto.” In a paradox well explored by KETELAAR (1990), the project of incorporating ancient Shinto into the modern state actually entailed inventing new old ways of Shinto, including funeral rituals. The few Western-language studies of Shinto funerals have analyzed them largely in terms of their political and ideological role during the Meiji Restoration (HARDACRE 1989; KETELAAR 1990; BERNSTEIN 1999). In this article, I mostly ignore politics and instead consider the funerals as rituals that were meaningful to the participants as symbolic celebrations of death. In particular, the Shinto funerals of the Edo period present variations on two enduring themes of Japanese mortuary rites: a concern for the fate of the corpse, and a well-crafted continuing bond between the living and the dead. This article is structured around three “scenes” of Shinto funerals in the Edo period. The ³rst two scenes are the funerals of Shinto