Tag: cremation

Imperial graves (Ryoan-ji)

May 9, 2020 / John D. / 0 Comments

The burial mound of Emperor Ichijo on the hill above Ryoan-ji

Kyoto’s Ryoan-ji houses the most famous rock garden in the world. Sadly the World Heritage site is closed at present, because of the Coronavirus crisis. Not many people know, however, that on the hillside behind it called Shuyama are woods containing seven imperial burial mounds.

The present emperor’s father, who stepped down last year, is considered the 150th of his lineage. There is a grave at Kashihara Jingu for the first of the imperial line, but not for other early emperors who are generally considered to be fictitious. An official listing of emperors’ graves begins with no. 26 and includes the most famous of them all – the enormous World Heritage mound at Sakai in Osaka known as the Daisen Kofun and erroneously claimed as Emperor Nintoku’s burial place.

Unsurprisingly, a great many of the emperors’ graves are located in and around Kyoto, imperial capital for over 1000 years. The city’s first and last emperors, Kammu and Meiji (born and raised in Gosho), are buried not far from each other in the south-east of the city. And at nearby Sennyu-ji nearly all the emperors who died in the Edo Period are buried in the Tsukinowa Cemetery.

Two of a row of three emperors’ graves containing Go-Reizen, Go-Sanjo and Go-Shujaku

Aristocrats in Heian times were known as ‘cloud-dwellers’, since they were thought to be so august as to live on a higher plane, far above normal humans. A consequence of this was that like divine beings they were not referred to directly by name, but were often called after the place where they lived. Hence in The Tale of Genji one of the most famous females is known as Lady Roku-jo, named after the street where she lived.

Similarly the emperors buried on the Shuyama hill above Ryoan-ji have street names familiar to anyone who resides in Kyoto – Emperor Horikawa (1079-1107), Emperor Sanjo (976-1017), and Emperor Ichijo (980-1011).

One interesting oddity of the Ryoan-ji graves is that the mounds have torii in front of them except for one – that at the top. Moreover, it is not referred to as goryo (burial mound) but as a tsuka. It seems that in contrast to a burial mound, tsuka is not an emperor’s grave but contains remains that can’t be identified or an imperial family member of lesser status. In this case a notice board indicated that the site is where cremation of an emperor took place and his remains buried elsewhere.

The *tsuka* site of a cremation, hence no torii

Over the course of centuries there have been changes in the preference for burial or cremation. Early emperors from no. 26 to no. 40 were buried, with the first to be cremated being Empress Jito (d.703).

For a long period of time practice alternated between burial and cremation, with nos. 63 to 73 being cremated and nos.108 to 124 being buried. The sole exception was no. 81, death in water, grave unknown. This was the tragic child-emperor Antoku, who was drowned aged five at the end of the Genpei War (1180-1185) between the Heike and the Genji.

In the Edo Period the custom was for emperors to be buried at the Tsukinowa Cemetery in Kyoto, and this continued up to present times. However, Emperor Akihito, who resigned last year, has declared a wish to be cremated. This is in keeping with the general postwar tendency in Japan to change from burial to cremation. As a result, it’s said that today an astonishing 99.94% of Japanese are cremated.

Return to nature – ancestral spirits in an animist setting

Water basin at the entrance to Shuyama housing the imperial mounds. Simple. natural and aesthetically pleasing – very much in the Japanese tradition.

Shinto death 1: Overview

October 18, 2015 / John D. / 1 Comment

Japanese graveyard at Obon. Uniformly Buddhist?

This series consists of adapted extracts from Elizabeth Kenney’s groundbreaking work on Shinto funerals, with her permission. Her remarkable research shows in graphic detail how the traditional Shinto arrangements differ from the more prevalent forms of Buddhist funeral and mourning. Though the research was carried out in the 1990s and some of the information is dated, the fundamentals still apply.

For the original article, see Elizabeth Kenney ‘Shinto mortuary rites in contemporary Japan.’

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Elizabeth Kenney, at a conference in Kyoto 2015

So who dies Shinto?

Certainly most Shinto priests have a Shinto funeral. Their family members, too, will usually choose Shinto rites. For a woman who has married a Shinto priest, a Shinto funeral does not necessarily represent a religious commitment to Shinto but rather is part of her fitting in with the ways of her new household. The reverse situation occurs, too: the daughter of a Shinto priest marries into a Buddhist family, “becomes” Buddhist, and has a Buddhist funeral.

I conducted interviews with three families who live near Kamigamo Shrine and consider themselves exclusively Shinto. In one case, the men of the family are Shinto priests. In each case, the wife had grown up in a Buddhist household and had converted, so to speak, to Shinto upon marriage.

According to the women, the family religious practices are “simply a matter of custom.” To move from a Buddhist to a Shinto household is not so different from joining a Zen household from a Pure Land household; “you just have to learn some different customs if you marry into a Shinto family” — and one of those customs is the Shinto funeral.

There are a host of other reasons for choosing a Shinto funeral. Some areas of Japan have been predominantly Shinto since the Edo period, when Shinto funerals were first widely encouraged. Some people choose a Shinto funeral in order to save money: “[They] think, ‘Since a kaimyôu is expensive, I’ll have a Shinto funeral'”. (The kaimyô is the posthumous Buddhist name bestowed on the deceased by a Buddhist priest and engraved on the memorial tablet. It can indeed be expensive, costing one or even two million yen for the most prestigious honorifics. The average spent on the kaimyô is about 300,000 yen.

In other cases, a falling out with the local Buddhist priest prompted some families to switch to the local Shinto shrine for their funerals. Change can go both ways. In a village in Saitama prefecture, one household, which had switched to Shinto several generations earlier, changed back to Buddhist.

Of course, it is not just the kaimyô that costs money. Some funeral expenses are unavoidable and do not vary with the religion (coffin, hearse, flowers, food, tombstone, and so forth). One survey found that the average total price for a funeral is around 2,500,000 yen (over U.S. $20,000), with a high end of 7,900,000 yen and a low end of 550,000 yen .

All sources agree that a Buddhist priest charges the most, partly because the kaimyô may be included in the temple fee. A “donation” to a temple averages 490,000 yen, while one could expect to pay 350,000 yen to a Shinto shrine and 190,000 yen to a Christian church .

In the case of a Shinto funeral, the decorations are simpler, using fewer (or no) flowers and including an important detail: sakaki #| tree branches adorned with white zigzag paper strips. Near the entrance is a bamboo vessel with a dipper, the tools of ritual purification that will be used by the mourners. Gagaku music may be heard (more likely taped than live). Atonal and eerie, this music is associated with Shinto, rather than with Buddhism, and so changes the atmosphere accordingly. The complete funeral consists of a couple of dozen distinct steps and stages.

According to 1992 statistics, 56.7% of funerals were held at home; 28.7% in a temple or church; 10.5% in a funeral hall; 3.7% in a community building; and 0.4% someplace else. With living conditions in urban Japan growing ever more crowded, it may not be long before the majority of funerals are held outside the home.

Click here for Part Two of this series on the topic of cleansing the corpse.

Man mourning his dead parents after the Tohoku disaster (photo Yomiuri Shimbun)