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Paper short abstract

This paper examines disruptive demographics in rural Japan as slow-moving disasters and a modality of everyday violence. Focusing on Buddhist temples, I show how care obligations intensify amid institutional inertia, and ask how decline is endured and reworked through uneven practices of care.

Paper long abstract

Everyday life in rural Japan is increasingly organized around what has been lost: departed kin, empty houses, interrupted ritual calendars, institutions kept going with fewer hands. This paper examines disruptive demographics as a slow-moving disaster and a modality of everyday violence. Rooted in ethnography in Buddhist temple communities, I explore how population loss, ageing, and outmigration are lived as conditions that erode social ties, ritual rhythms, and care infrastructures. I argue that this attritional devastation differs from the immediacy of earthquakes or tsunamis not in its effects but in its tempo: here, devastation unfolds through closures, absences, and the thinning of everyday life. Depopulation and ageing are experienced as slow processes of disappearance, abandonment, and futures rendered uninhabitable, yet the quiet violence of decline remains largely unnamed, folded into ordinary maintenance and moral obligation.

Focusing on temples as sites of care, I trace how religious professionals and lay practitioners sustain institutions built for absent populations. Demographic decline redistributes care unevenly, intensifying responsibility for those who remain, while normalizing abandonment. This violence is also institutionally mediated: temples and denominational headquarters, slow to adjust organizational structures, financial models, and ritual expectations, stabilize obligations that outpace shrinking communities. Tending graves, maintaining buildings, and performing memorial rites mitigate and reproduce this violence, binding people through duties that are increasingly difficult to sustain. By framing demographic decline as the everyday violence of slow disasters, I ask what it means to inhabit decline as moral and affective conditions in which care is both endured and reworked.