Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with butsudan workers, I detail the affective labours performed in the disposal of altars. In commercializing the Buddhist rite of kuyō, this industry, maligned for profiteering and materialism, cares for "dead" objects and people's complicated emotional attachments to them.

Paper long abstract:

In modern Japan, Buddhist altars (butsudan) have served as near ubiquitous signifiers of religious affiliation, and as key sites for ancestor veneration and Buddhist rites in the home. Lavish, handcrafted altars costing upwards of 80,000 pounds and 'cheap but cheerful' acrylic models anchor two ends of this approximately 5.2 million pounds per annum religious industry. However, as an industry it is regularly condemned by scholars and popular commentators alike as exemplary of the degeneracy of Japanese Buddhist traditions, which are accused of being almost exclusively funerary, materialistic, and above all, mercantile in the face of personal grief.

Today, the butsudan industry faces a state of crisis (Reader 2011). Not only have sales declined dramatically as families adopt non-religious rituals, but old altars are increasingly encountered as surplus goods by those who lack the space, ritual expertise, or inclination to care for them. Like other forms of sacred waste (including dead bodies) disposal is complicated for practical and moral reasons. Often, it requires the performance of special rites of veneration (kuyō). This paper details how workers in the Japanese butsudan industry manage the "problematic feelings" (kimochi-no-mondai) generated by the disposal of altars for themselves and customers. I contextualise these actions within a growing literature on "affective labor" in Japan (Plourde 2014), as the commercialisation of calm in an era of increased pecarity. In commodifying the rite of kuyō, Buddhist industries manage the risks of sacred waste disposal and help resolve heavy ties between living and dead, people and objects.