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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in regional temple communities, I examine temple-run ossuaries as sites where ritual care for the dead generates pollution. Focusing on food offerings, I show how decay, risk, and regulation emerge from care itself, revealing the politics of food waste and governance.

Paper long abstract

What happens when practices of caring for the dead generate materials that linger, decay, and become sources of contamination? Across many Buddhist temples in rural Japan, food offerings such as bowls of rice, fruit, sweets, canned drinks, and their packaging remain on altars in temple-run ossuaries (nōkotsudō), domestic altars (butsudan), and graveyards as nourishment for the dead. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Buddhist temple communities in Miyazaki, Shimane, Hiroshima, Nara, and Kyoto, and centring on a detailed case from rural Miyazaki, this paper examines food waste as a form of stubborn material excess produced through ritual care. It approaches ossuaries as sites where acts of ritual care generate unintended forms of pollution, examining pollution not as external to ritual practice but as emerging from within care itself.

At Shōnenji, a local Buddhist temple in Miyazaki, food offerings placed before individual ossuary altars frequently persist beyond ritual moments. Accumulating within enclosed halls, they require continuous curatorial labour to manage rot, smell, pests, and material degradation. As they endure, these offerings reshape ritual ecologies and extend into local waste systems and more-than-human relations involving the dead, microbes, insects, and other material actors. Attending to the layered temporalities through which this excess unfolds, the paper traces how cyclical ritual time oriented towards sustaining relations with the dead collides with material temporalities of perishability, expiration dates, food safety regimes, and longer horizons of environmental governance shaped by waste regulation, sustainability discourse, and disaster preparedness. In response to anticipated decay, contamination, and regulatory scrutiny, temples and families increasingly substitute perishable offerings with long-life emergency foods, wax or plastic replicas, crocheted fruit, and heavily packaged alternatives. While these substitutions stabilise ritual spaces and mitigate organic decay, they introduce durable materials that persist across longer temporal scales, shifting the form rather than the presence of excess. By tracing how concerns over pollution and risk reorganise practices of ritual care, this paper argues that temple-run ossuaries offer a critical lens for understanding the politics of food waste in contemporary Japan, revealing how environmental governance reshapes moral relations with the dead.