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Paper short abstract:

In the wake of downsizing sociality, single living and dying is rising in Japan. As more and more Japanese face the precarity of "nowhere to go" and "no one to depend upon" at death, new mortuary provisions are arising that offer a social prosthetics to caregive the remains of the deceased.

Paper long abstract:

Once dependent on family to bury and memorialize the dead, caregiving the deceased has become increasingly precarious in the wake of a low birthrate/high aging population, a trend towards single households, and downsizing of social relationality including the long-standing ties to temples and priests that handled mortuary rituals in the past. In the new "ending" marketplace emerging today to help Japanese manage how, and by whom, their remains will be handled post-death, one new initiative are high-rise columbaria that offer customers a burial spot in a convenient urban setting where ashes, interred in a deposit box, get automatically transferred to a grave upon visitation. Aesthetically upscale and housed in temples though run by corporations, these new-style graveparks advertise their services as easing the stress of having "no where to go" upon death. Once interred here, one is in a place where the graves are well-maintained and all those interred given Buddhist memorials (kuyō) by the facility itself. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the essay examines the just-in-time delivery system at work in automated graves, arguing that the mechanism serves as a social prosthesis, propping up the allure of caregiving the dead for even those whose ashes are never visited by intimates. As a new-style burial ground, automated graves—starting in 1996 and now numbering over 30 in Japan—are a sign of changing relationality between the living and dead in the state of becoming otherwise.