Being Dead Otherwise

Since 2006, deaths have exceeded births in Japan. In Being Dead Otherwise, Anne Allison demonstrates that anxieties about these demographic changes transcend life: people fear disconnection after death for themselves and their ancestors but are also forging new connections as they innovate in the face of such fears. Drawing on her previous scholarship, Allison investigates the rapidly changing “deathscape” in Japan, revealing how concern about the future of the nation includes reimagining memorialization and deathcare in the present: the realities of “being dead, otherwise,” when an increasing number of Japanese have no heirs or when nearest kin's refusal to care for the dead means leaving such care to be managed by the self while alive or by the state, private enterprise, and even robots after death.Chapter 1 traces Buddhist, Shinto, and Confucian antecedents to contemporary mortuary and funerary practices. Allison reviews corpse care, the work of moving the spirit to other realms, and anxieties about disconnected spirits, and situates them within the codification of the family and temple registry systems that required a male heir to maintain graves through cleaning and fees. She argues that the resulting deathcare practices order the messy processes of bodily decay, maintain community safety, and enact humanity—and in turn reproduce the nation-state.Chapter 2 features ethnographic research conducted at a death industry expo held next to Tokyo Bay. Allison extends her earlier conception of “techno-animism” (coined to describe the bursts of affect-driven relationality through Pokémon, electronic toys, and gaming) to “necro-animism”: the ways in which people are energized to participate in the planning of their own deathcare by businesses such as those highlighted at the expo (51). Mortician contests, demos with a robot priest, and examples of art and jewelry made from cremains there demonstrate how mortuary planning can be generative and even playful.Chapter 3 explores practices surrounding grave visits, Obon festivals, and tending to family altars at Obon alongside the business of choosing nonfamilial graves and making plans “in one's own style” (87). Neoliberal as such planning may seem, Allison asserts that necro-animism around nonfamilial gravesites is framed as a mode of healing (iyashi) or a reason to live (ikigai) for people (many of whom are women) who feel it is unnecessary to “make someone remember” them but who do want to have grave companions whom they befriended while still alive.Chapter 4 focuses on the affective currency mortuary planning generates and who benefits from such “before crisis” preparation. Based on data gleaned from workshops by NGOs and interviews with Yokosuka City officials, Allison finds that the specter of unattended death motivates planners to engage with civic, commercial, and nonprofit deathcare resources. These resources capitalize on anxieties about both inconveniencing others at death and having one's own (and ancestral) remains treated as simply matter. Meanwhile, city managers frame support for mortuary planning as a financial strategy to combat the increasing burden on municipalities to pay for cleanup and corpse care if one has no kin or kin refuse to claim the remains.In chapter 5, Allison focuses on the visceral work of cleaning up after unattended deaths, drawing on participant observation at three homes with an ihinseirigaisha, a company that specializes in cleaning services after a death. She also includes photographs of dioramas of lonely deaths created by an ihinseirigaisha worker. Allison argues that workers strike a balance between capitalizing on such deaths and assuaging them, noting that the practical business of ordering disordered personal effects rehumanizes decedents by bearing witness to their humanity, even when their deaths go unattended.The materiality and sociality of human remains are the focus of chapter 6. While cremains are imbued with the connections the person had to others in life and are thus treated as more than matter, for what the living may hope is “eternity,” Allison's research at bone crushers and crematoriums reveals that remains become matter over time. Unclaimed cremains are sent to mass graves for the “disconnected”; cremains in general may be sorted into bones destined for graves and “ash” to be sold for its metallic content. Further, cremains may be commercially pulverized to make “wearable urns” (jewelry) that facilitate the spreading of ashes without breaking Japanese law on abandoning corpses, or compress the contents of a family grave for storage at a new location. While pulverization may enhance grievability by converting cremains into a form with more individualized meaning to the bereaved, they are no longer human remains in the eyes of the law.In chapter 7, Allison explores “just in time” technologies at columbaria advertised by businesses and run by temples. She posits that the ability to shift from graveyards (where fees and maintenance protect lineages from “abandonment” and transfer to mass graves for the disconnected) to automated columbaria (paid for up-front to house individuals or lineages indefinitely) functions as a type of social prosthesis for deathwork in the face of an uncertain future (tech-necro-animism?). Such columbaria will house remains indefinitely, provided the temple-business does not go under.Allison concludes by suggesting that necro-animism responds to fears that Japan is an increasingly disconnected society (muen shakai). Yet she shows that there have always been “disconnected” people who haven't had the luxury of memorialization and deathcare: rapidly shifting demographics in Japan have made disconnection a potential fate for privileged Japanese. Further, the lines between human remains and matter are blurred more than the living might want to admit: the duration of “eternity” becomes an open question when cremains become matter and their storage is commercialized and automated. Planning for death becomes a new way of life complete with new connections, “animisms,” concepts of remains and matter, senses of time and space, and potentials.Further scholarship may address questions that remain. First, who participates in mortuary planning and who remains marginalized? Second, who is refusing to claim remains and why (are they people who came of age post-bubble, chased permanent employment, did not find it, and were chastised for not contributing to society?) Third, to what degree do Allison's findings apply to rural Japan? Fourth, given that graves were moved from fields to graveyards after the land reform, some of these remains have been pulverized and moved to urban columbaria, and pulverization converts remains to matter in legal terms, is the third move to the trash if columbaria go under? What might this mean for rural Japan, which is losing both living and dead to cities? Finally, what do Japanese people think about the deathscape businesses, the people who work in them, the financial strain on municipalities from responding to lonely deaths, the prospect of deathcare being mediated by robots, and the possibility that a stranger might someday unknowingly wear them as jewelry?This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in necro versus biopolitics, relationality and affect, and care work

History · Middle East Politics and Society