Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how changes to the ontological status of the dead in contemporary Japan - from Buddhas and ancestors, to beloved antecedents and angels - are manifest in material exchanges with the living. It examines evolving designs and practices for domestic Buddhist altars (butsudan).

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes how contemporary shifts in the identity of the Japanese dead are not only reflected in, but crafted through, new artefacts of memorialisation and multi-sensory exchanges with the living.

Early symbolic-structuralist analyses of Japanese death rites (cf. Ooms, 1967) describe how the living 'socialize' the dead through successive ritual actions. The dead are transformed from unruly spirits, to Buddhas (hotoke) and then ancestors (senzo), who guard the household lineage (i'e). Since the 1980s, Japanese scholars have described the impact of demographic shifts - notably, the amelioration of the household as the socio-legal kinship unit and the rise of the nuclear family - on this formation, and the transformation of the dead from "ancestors" to "beloved antecedents" (Suzuki, 1998).

However, studies have primarily focused on symbolic and social structures, and neglected the material artefacts through which the dead become sensible and knowable, and through which the living can contact, and indeed affect, the dead. Domestic Buddhist altars (butsudan) have been the primary technology for conducting such exchanges in Japanese homes since at least the 7th century, and more recently, have undergone significant changes in design and use. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with butsudan producers and consumers, my paper explores how evolving material memorial assemblages manifest new identities for the dead in the world of the living. Contemporary butsudan practice reveals that people often exist in multiple states and locations of 'dead' at once, which are accessed by the living through activating different sensory channels between life and death.