Reli 73h Textbook Chapter 4

Bones of Contention

Ambros, Barbara R.

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

Ambros, Barbara R.

Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan.Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012.

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four

Embodying Hybridity

the necrogeography of pet memorial spaces

Ms. N., who is middle-aged and unmarried, lives in Tokyo. In 2006, when her parents passed away in short succession, they were in-terred at a Buddhist temple. Her father’s cremains filled the last

space in the family grave. Ms. N. began to ponder her options for her own future interment. Eventually, the family would have to have the ancestral cremains removed from their urns and “returned to the soil” (tsuchi ni kaesu) to open up more space, but rather than considering a traditional burial, Ms. N. began to search for a new grave site though this would mean being separated from her mother. Ms. N. decided to be interred with her two shih tzus, to whom she had grown very attached while she cared for her aging and increasingly infirm mother. They were, she insisted, not her pets but her children (uchi no ko). Sharing a grave with her dogs would mean that she would not be separated from them after her death, and like-wise her dogs would not feel abandoned after they died.

In her search for a cemetery that would accept her with her dogs, she found Azusawa Boen, an urban cemetery in Itabashi Ward, northern Tokyo. She was attracted to the cemetery not only because it offered joint-species interment but also because of its bright, cheerful atmosphere and the relatively reasonable cost of a plot. After purchasing a plot, she had the headstone engraved with a rose pattern and an inscription that reads, “Madoi” (Intimate gathering). The base bears the names of her small family — hers on the right and the dogs’ names on the left under two small paw prints. Her human family has not been supportive of her decision. Ms. N.’s brother criticized her for being excessively attached to her shih tzus: “If you are that attached to your dogs, you will turn into a dog in your next

Embodying Hybridity | 125

life.” Ms. N. brushed this off as a country superstition caused by the influ-ence of her sister-in-law, who is from a rural area in Nagano Prefecture, where — according to Ms. N. — people still believe in the existence of fox possession and the Buddhist concept of the realm of beasts. In her quest never to be separated from her dogs, Ms. N. has been willing to contest the boundaries between the human and nonhuman animals and between blood relations and canine companions.

According to cultural geographer Chris Philo, animal geography can benefit from investigating how animals are represented in religion and cosmology in order to understand how humans have constructed animals “as one thing rather than another . . . and then subjected [them] to related socio-spatial practices of inclusion or exclusion.”1 Conversely, to rephrase Philo, we can also study sociospatial practices of inclusion and exclusion to understand how humans construct animals as one thing rather than an-other. Cemeteries powerfully illustrate practices of inclusion and exclusion. According to Michel Foucault, cemeteries are heterotopias, “real places . . . which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted uto-pia in which the real sites . . . are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”2 Cemeteries often mirror social practices and boundaries among the living, such as ethnic, racial, or economic segregation.3 Racial segregation has applied not just to the deceased but also to the clients: an early pet cemetery in Washington, DC was segregated into areas for pets of white people and those for pets of African-Americans.4 In Japan, until relatively recently some Buddhist temples made apparent their dis-criminatory practices against outcasts on tombstones and in necrologies of posthumous names.5 Spatial concepts are particularly important in the East Asian context with its ubiquitous geomantic ideas, which also infuse funeral practices: the placement of the body, cremains, accoutrements, and offerings ensure the repose of the dead and the prosperity of the liv-ing. Boundaries in the necral landscape tend to be observed even more strictly when it comes to pets, which are usually buried in spaces distinct from human mortuary spaces. This is also true in Japan. For example, in a study on how to establish a pet cemetery at a Buddhist temple, Yama-moto Kazuhiko points out that when establishing a place for pet funerals and memorial rites “the most crucial problem is in which location they should be performed. If they are performed in the same space as those for humans (which is quite common), one has to consider how these spaces

126 | bones of contention

should be divided into distinct spaces. It is easier to keep the indoor and outdoor spaces separate.”6 As the relationships between humans and pets are increasingly conceptualized in kinshiplike terms, new spatial, social, and ritual boundaries are drawn in mortuary practices to reinforce and renegotiate differences between the species.

In this chapter, I investigate how pets are included or excluded in the necral landscapes of contemporary Japan. What spatial arrangements do pet mortuary rituals produce that symbolize the paradoxical relationships between humans and pets? What spatial boundaries do pet mortuary spaces draw to contrast the species or cross to blur their differences? To investigate these questions, I examine three specific instances: the choice between burial or cremation, the memorialization of pets in the home, and the interment of pet cremains in cemeteries. This evidence demonstrates that contemporary mortuary practices place pets in a liminal position be-tween animals and humans, indicating their status as marginal, temporary family members. Many pet owners also choose to keep the pet’s cremains at home or establish a home altar for the deceased animal to memorialize it. Whether at home or at the temple, the deceased animal is represented by a photograph, a memorial tablet (ihai), or its urn with cremains, and it is offered hot water, flowers, favorite foods, and small toys — very much as one would do for deceased human family members. However, while pet owners and providers of pet funerals often insist that the postmortem rites are just like those for humans, the actual spatial practices reinforce boundar-ies that place pets in a marginal position and delineate their liminal status in human society.

Burial of Pets in Noncemetery Spaces

Before discussing interment of pet cremains in pet cemeteries, it is impor-tant to emphasize that the interment of pets in a pet cemetery, let alone in human burial spaces, is not considered normative in Japanese society as a whole — a fact already discussed from a different perspective in chap-ter 3. The debates about the proper disposal of pet carcasses shed light on the rationale behind the development of modern pet cemeteries and pet cremation — especially in urban areas. Most Japanese treat deceased pets very differently from humans: they are buried in radically different spaces and in different ways. According to the law governing the disposal of gar-bage, animal carcasses are waste. It is illegal to bury dead animals or scatter


their cremains on public property, but burial on private property is not restricted — as long as one owns the land or has the owner’s permission. The only animals excluded are large farm animals — horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats, which are industrial waste and need to be disposed of in special facilities. As long as the animals in question are not oversized or bur-ied in large quantities, which might cause an environmental hazard, there are few restrictions.7 In contrast, human interment is governed by legal re-strictions: humans cannot be cremated or buried without a legal permit.

Even today there are Japanese who believe that pets should not be cre-mated but buried intact because this is seen as more natural and appropri-ate. Preferred burial sites are either marginal spaces of the family home (e.g., the yard) or the marginal spaces on the edges of human settlements (e.g., mountains, fields, and rivers). Interestingly, the ongoing disagreement about whether pets should be cremated is remarkably reminiscent of the ideological debates over human cremation waged in late nineteenth cen-tury Japan. As Andrew Bernstein has shown, human cremation became common in the early modern period but did not become the standard until the modern period. This change was accompanied by fierce debates ques-tioning the ethical validity and hygienic benefits of both cremation and full-body burial.8

Pet cremation evokes similar questions of legal regulation, morality, and hygiene. In an early book on pet funerals, entitled Inu no sō to kuyō (Funer-als and memorial rites for dogs; 1993), Tomidokoro Gitoku — whose work I discuss more fully in chapter 5 — argues strongly for burial of the pet’s body on one’s private property:

In terms of the burial place, lay the dead body to rest on its side in a hole five times as deep as the width of the animal. After taking the animal from its coffin, bury it in the hole that you have dug in an open space like the yard of your house. That’s a ground burial. This burial method may not be legal in some regions, so before the burial, contact the sani-tation department or the city hall to make sure it is not prohibited. As long as it does not pollute the environment or bother anybody, it should also be all right to bury the animal in fields or the woods. However, this is only under the condition that you own the land. There are also people who bury animals on other people’s land without their permission, but that is considered antisocial behavior, so please refrain from that prac-


tice. Contemporary law also prohibits discarding the dead body in fields or rivers or the ocean in order to return it to nature. Therefore, please don’t do it.9

While Tomidokoro’s views are hardly representative in every respect, postings in web-based chat rooms suggest that many Japanese agree with Tomidokoro’s opinion that animals should be buried intact. A significant number of postings in a chat room on the website Spinavi state that ani-mals should not be cremated but buried, in keeping with “traditional prac-tices.” Similarly, many of those who had owned pets described burying their animal after its death.10 However, whereas Tomidokoro displays a strong commitment to upholding the law, pet owners do not always share this commitment in practice. According to a chat room on the website 2 Channeru, many pet owners have buried their animals regardless of legal considerations. The issue at stake appeared to be the place of pets in the world. Although many Japanese would like to consider their pets as family members, that is, as members of human society, others disagree and regard them as beings that are close to nature. In other words, the latter view is inspired by a strongly dualistic worldview that associates humans with culture and animals (including pets) with nature.

Yet many pet owners were also aware that urbanization has made burial difficult. Many postings pointed out the drawbacks of burying dead pets in an urban environment: people move, land is scarce, many owners live in apartments, and the urban landscape changes constantly — what is now a grassy vacant lot could soon be a parking lot or a high-rise apartment building. Overall, there appears to be a strong concern that the burial place could be desecrated or that the owner could be separated from the burial place through a change of residence. Several anonymous postings on 2 Channeru expressed such concerns:

1. To bury the animal and set up a grave marker — both are difficult to do at home in a big city. What’s more, there are a lot of houses with-out a yard. Maybe one could buy a huge flowerpot. The pet would be lonesome [if buried] on a distant mountain or [set afloat] on a river. Dogs that have never been separated from their human companion during their lifetime wouldn’t be able to bear being buried in the mountains. They’d be lonely in such an unfamiliar place.11


2. Perhaps people who own a house bury their pets in the yard, but what if they end up moving? What do you do with the buried animal? The new owner won’t know that there are animal carcasses buried in his yard. If he does gardening and digs up the yard, he’ll find animal bones — well, that’s not a laughing matter.12

3. I buried my dead cat in a vacant lot next door, but three days later it was paved over with cement and turned into a parking lot. Now my cat is buried in parking space number two.13

4. I buried [my pet] in front of the house. However, several years later, there was a construction project, and it became a small road. Now all the animals that once lived inside the house are under a layer of concrete!14

While some felt that burial in the mountains was a solution to the urban dilemma, one posting argued that this was to “merely discard the body on other people’s land.”15 Hence, in an urban environment, burial of dead animals such as cats and dogs is becoming increasingly difficult.

If burial on private property is impossible, pets can be turned over to the sanitation department for cremation. Whereas special incinerators have been established in some municipalities or ties forged with private crema-toria, in others animal carcasses are still incinerated with burnable trash.16 However, many pet owners and animal rights groups object to treating pets like trash. One posting on 2 Channeru remarked angrily: “Everyone can mourn [their pets] as they please, but those who throw them in the burnable trash are human garbage!”17 I encountered this view also among pet cemetery clients during my fieldwork. Another posting on 2 Channeru speaks to the ethical dilemma posed by this method of disposal:

The other day, my parents’ dog died. We contacted the municipal sani-tation department and were told to place the animal in a plastic bag so they could collect it for disposal. We couldn’t bury it in the yard, so in the end we had them take it. But it was somehow very sad to see it treated like an inanimate object. If there had only been a pet funeral business or temple nearby!18

In this case, pet funeral services that offer individual or joint cremation or interment are a convenient solution for those willing to spend extra money to ensure their pets’ humane treatment after death. As a matter of fact,


quite a few managers of pet cemeteries and pet cremation services indicated that they were motivated to start their own pet cremation business after being shocked to see their own family pet treated as trash after its death.

In the eyes of pet owners, pet cemeteries provide spatial stability: the owner knows where the remains of the animal will be kept. Moreover, there are definite advantages to having a pet buried in a place where other animals are memorialized. One posting in a chat room on 2 Channeru explained: “On obon [the festival of the dead] and the equinoxes, other pet owners come and visit the grave and there are always lots of flowers. I think [the pets] are not lonely. What’s more, the place won’t ever move.”19 This stability, however, may be somewhat illusory. In the early nineties, a Japanese researcher sent surveys to forty-three pet cemeteries in the Tokyo area, ten of which were returned as undeliverable because the business no longer existed at the given address. In her study of animal kuyō, Angelika Kretschmer takes this as evidence that pet cemeteries frequently go out of business.20 However, it seems likely that pet cemeteries in temple precincts provide at least a certain measure of stability even if the temple ceases to provide such services.

Increasingly, pet owners may feel that their beloved pet was a family member during its lifetime and should therefore be memorialized like a human. While many memorialize their pets privately, others hire pet fu-neral companies or Buddhist priests to carry out these rites. By turning over the funeral and memorialization of their pets to specialized businesses, the owners have to submit to ritual forms imposed by those conducting the postmortem rites and to the wishes of fellow temple parishioners and cem-etery clients, who may be resistant to having animals interred at their cem-etery. Pet owners might seek to have their beloved companions treated as human members of the family, but the pet funeral profession often draws ritual and spatial boundaries in their treatment of animal remains.

A case in point is the process of cremation. On the one hand, ritual pro-cedures during cremation may resemble those followed for humans. The act of cremation in itself treats pet remains similarly to human remains. On the other hand, whereas humans are always cremated individually, pets can be cremated jointly, which makes the procedure cheaper for the owners. Furthermore, family members usually attend human cremations, whereas pet owners have the option of simply collecting the urn with the cremains later. Still, the most expensive option of cremation, the so-called tachiai


funeral, during which owners attend the cremation, closely resembles the cremation for humans.

Even so, pets are usually cremated in a space segregated from that used for humans. There is a strong sense that pets and humans should not be cremated in the same furnace. In addition to special pet crematoria run by private companies or municipalities, there are mobile pet cremation ser-vices that use small trucks that come to homes or Buddhist temples by appointment. Temples such as Kannōji (Jōdoshū, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo) that rely only on mobile cremation trucks tend to have small-scale pet cemeteries. Since funerals occur only sporadically, it is unlikely that the neighbors would offer much resistance to the fumes and smells of the cre-mations, and the building of a costly crematorium on temple grounds is not feasible. Therefore, a cremation truck presents a convenient solution.

Most pet cemeteries, however, strongly reject the use of mobile crema-tion units. Several pet cemetery owners insinuated in interviews that the earliest cremation trucks were operated by organized crime cartels. Others had ethical objections to the truck itself. As the pet cemetery director at the Kanazawa Teramachi Dōbutsu Reien (Ishikawa) put it: “We have a cremation truck but never use it. A cremation truck resembles the truck used by a vendor of roasted sweet potatoes [yakiimo]. Would people want to have their parents cremated in a truck like that? I don’t think so. There-fore, people should have their pets cremated at a proper crematorium.” A pamphlet at Chōrakuji (Sōtōshū, Nagoya) warns strongly against the use of mobile cremation trucks, which it labels a “Pandora’s box” (Pandora no hako). The temple temporarily used a cremation truck in 1997 but later sealed it on temple grounds. Surprisingly, the temple claims it took this action for the lofty goal of protecting the peace and security of the nation. According to the temple, places handling matters of death should be static, not moving. Using a mobile truck for the cremation of animals leads to a blending of the realms of yin and yang, darkness and light, stillness and motion, bad and good, the dead and the living. This in turn leads to mis-fortune and the destruction of the social order, as can be seen in Japan’s recent political and economic woes.21 What in particular initiated this highly negative turn against cremation trucks is unclear. Yet the recurrent refrain of pet cemeteries is that cremation trucks are undesirable, though many pet owners consider them a convenience.

Buddhist temples specializing in pet funerals that have no cremation


facilities on the temple grounds tend to establish ties with a pet crema-torium, which is not necessarily located anywhere near the pet cemetery. As discussed in chapter 3, Ekōin, in Sumida Ward in southeastern Tokyo, relies on the services of a private pet cemetery called Tokyo Kachiku Hakuai’in, located in Funawatashi, Itabashi Ward, in northwestern Tokyo. The pet cemetery staff collects animal bodies for cremation daily. Other temples rely on municipal services or funerary businesses that specialize in human funerals but also have a furnace for pets. For example, pets interred at the columbarium at Kōmyōji (Jōdoshū, Kamakura) are cremated at sev-eral funerary companies in Kamakura, Zushi, and Ōfuna. These include Seikōsha in Zushi, which has four furnaces for human use and one for the use of pets. Temples with booming pet cemeteries, however, tend to have a pet crematorium on the temple grounds. Such facilities are usually rel-egated to a marginal space, such as the basement or a corner of the precinct, are often subject to fierce opposition by adjacent residents because of the potential for noxious smells and fumes, and — as demonstrated in chapter 3 — are one of the reasons why pet funerals are deemed subject to taxation even when performed by religious institutions. Once pets have been cre-mated, however, their treatment begins to converge more strongly with that of human members of the family.

Marginalization in Pet Memorial Rites in the Home

In Japan, deceased family members are memorialized primarily in two locations: at the ancestral altar at home and at the family grave in the cemetery. Increasingly, the same holds true in the case of pets. The grave serves as a memorial place on special occasions and holidays, whereas an in-home Buddhist altar with a photograph fulfills that function day to day. Instead of the cremains, a photograph — or in some cases, a memorial tablet — often serves as a secondary symbol for the deceased pet. However, the introduction of the pet into the memorial spaces of the family raises questions about the relationship between the ancestors and the pet — an issue that also arises in the memorialization of mizuko, who are also not ancestors in the full sense.

Both mizuko and pets share the status of marginal members of the fam-ily. This is spatially reenacted by the placement of memorial tablets or other referents to the deceased (photographs, small Buddhist statues). Ancestral memorial tablets are kept on the Buddhist altar in the home (figure 13). If


the altar has several shelves, the main image of worship (a Buddhist statue or a scroll) is enshrined on the top shelf and the tablets are placed beside or on the shelf below the Buddhist image. Ritualists often recommend that the memorial tablets be arranged hierarchically from oldest to youngest (from right to left, or alternating right and left from the center, or back to front). Memorial tablets or small statues of the bodhisattva Jizō repre-senting mizuko tend to be placed below the ancestral tablets or, if there is no altar in the home, on a miniature altar.22 The spatial arrangement of ancestral altars is symbolically significant. It reflects internal hierarchies among the enshrined spirits and serves as a meeting place for the descen-dants and ancestors. As Sudō Hiroto has argued, the lowest shelf, where the descendants place their offerings, is accessible to the living, whereas the upper shelves represent the world of the Buddha and the ancestors.23 Of course, these guidelines for organizing the Buddhist altar are not followed by everyone. Yet the organization of altars and the details of memorializa-tion remain a popular topic not just in the sectarian literature published by the Buddhist schools for their adherents but also in publications by new religious movements and by independent spiritualists.24

Like that for a mizuko, the pet’s memorial tablet (figure 14) can be in-

Fig. 13. Diagram of a Japanese Buddhist altar.


stalled on a separate, miniature altar. While it is possible to use the same kind of miniature altar as for mizuko and ritual accoutrements used for humans, an industry specializing in pet specific altars, memorial shelves, and accoutrements has developed, which are marketed mostly on the In-ternet. Some are clearly inspired by traditional Buddhist accoutrements, while others give evidence of Western aesthetics. In any case, the small size as well as the coloring of the accoutrements (e.g., pink or light blue) often enhance their “cuteness,” as does the general tendency of the pet funeral industry to use juvenile images of animals (rather than images of mature or aging dogs) to advertise their services and products. This heightens the childlike character of the pets. However, many Japanese consider the purchase of special pet altars or memorial shelves as too ostentatious and instead construct less-formal, makeshift altars, sometimes in the vicinity of the family’s Buddhist altar.25 A merchant of Buddhist accoutrements at a store belonging to the Hasegawa chain echoed this view by noting that she did not carry special altars for pets because people tended to use those intended for humans instead.

Fig. 14. Pet memorial tablet. The inscription on the tablet reads, “Aiken Chibi no reii, Heisei 19, gogatsu tōka” (Memorial tablet of the beloved dog Chibi, May 10, 2007).


In her 2004 study of pet funerals, Elizabeth Kenney reports that pet memorial tablets are usually not enshrined on the Buddhist altar. Ac-cording to one of her informants, a Buddhist priest at a pet cemetery, the owner’s ancestors might not welcome the pet, and the owner’s descendants might have no interest in memorializing the pet after its owner’s death.26 In other words, pets are given only temporary status as family members by and through their owners. Once the owner is no longer alive, the fam-ily will not have any further interest in acknowledging the bond. There-fore, Kenney’s informants believed, pet memorial tablets and photographs should not be placed on the Buddhist altar.

In my research conducted only a few years later, I also found that many ritual specialists still argued that pet memorial tablets or photographs did not belong on the Buddhist altar. However, I also encountered many Bud-dhist clerics — especially in urban areas such as Tokyo and Nagoya — who disagreed and argued that the pet’s memorial tablet could be enshrined there. This seems to reflect a recent shift in opinion. In most cases, there was not much consistency among clerics belonging to a particular Bud-dhist sect (with the exception of Jōdo Shinshū, which officially rejects the performance of pet memorial rites per se because it objects to any kind of merit-transfer rites).27 For example, some Sōtō clerics argued that pet memorial tablets could be enshrined with the ancestors, whereas others, es-pecially those in the countryside, were highly uncomfortable with the no-tion. The underlying reason for this discrepancy between urban and rural areas may be that urban households tend to have smaller Buddhist altars enshrining fewer generations beyond the nuclear family.28 This means that there are fewer members of the family involved in the decision process of what belongs on the Buddhist altar. There are also fewer ancestors involved who might take offense at the enshrinement or who never had a personal relationship with the pet. There was, however, a common argument found among proponents of joint enshrinement on the Buddhist altar. These rit-ualists recommended that if the pet’s memorial tablet was to be included on the family altar, it ought to be given lower status vis-à-vis the ancestors. Concretely, the pet’s tablet ought to be enshrined in the lower-left corner of the altar (figure 13). This placement indicates an even lower status than for mizuko, which are relegated merely to the lowest shelf but not necessarily a corner. Claims that the presence of pet memorial tablets might confuse the ancestors and lead to a curse were usually denied.


The following two cases are representative examples of the arguments made by ritualists in favor of including pet memorial tablets on the family altar. The website of Yūminsha, a pet cemetery in Kumamoto, declares that humans and animals are ontologically the same:

Q2. Is it all right to place the pet’s bones and the pet’s memorial tablet on the human Buddhist altar?

Answer: The Buddhist altar is the center of the family home and where the venerable main image is worshiped. This could be Amida Nyorai or Dainichi Nyorai or a sacred inscription. The Buddha extends his hand of great compassion to save all sentient beings. Before the great compassion of the Buddha, humans and animals are all the same. It should be all right to place the [pet’s] memorial tablet on the altar. How-ever, it would be good to install it on the left side of the lower shelf. The cremains should be placed on a separate, small stand next to or in front of the Buddhist altar instead of inside the altar.29

The most striking aspect of this reply is the ritualist’s claims that the Bud-dhist altar is the center of the family and focuses on the worship of the Buddha. In other words, even though many families probably conceive of the Buddhist altar as an ancestral altar, he asserts that the Buddha is the focal point of cultic attention rather than the ancestors. This means that ancestor veneration is secondary. This shift allows him to make an argument for the inclusion of pets on the altar. Still, the ritualist’s answer seeks a middle ground: even though humans and animals are technically the same in the eyes of the Buddha, a hierarchy between the two should be maintained, which is expressed through the lower placement of a pet memorial tablet in respect to the ancestral tablets.30

This inclusive yet hierarchical tendency is also touted on Pet World Ri-kugien’s website. Muyo Kūjin, a Jōdo cleric who conducts memorial rituals at a pet cemetery in Komagome, Tokyo, stresses that the space of the Bud-dhist altar is primarily about worship of the Buddhist main image:

Q3: Is it all right to place the pet’s memorial tablet on the Buddhist altar for humans?

Answer: Basically, it’s no problem. Generally, people think of the Buddhist altar as a place to put memorial tablets, but from the point of view of a Buddhist cleric, it’s different. The Buddhist altar is a place


to worship the main image. The main image is the Buddha that is at the center of the faith in the respective Buddhist school. That could be Śākyamuni, Amida, Yakushi, or a scroll with the title of the Lotus Sutra. In any case, they are all enshrined on the top shelf and are wor-shiped sincerely by placing the hands together. As for pet memorial rites, memorial tablets are placed on the Buddhist altar to guide the ances-tors to salvation through the power of the main image. But ultimately the main image of worship is most important. The compassion of the Buddha is great. Before the Buddha, there is no distinction between humans and animals. Even if there are some among ancestors who hated animals, if they have been memorialized properly for several years, their spirits should have been purified sufficiently. Therefore, they won’t be-come angry and vengeful. Perhaps they will welcome [the pet] gladly. However, the higher-ranking place is on the right side facing the altar. The highest shelf is occupied by the main image (if the Buddhist altar is small, there is no way around it all being in the same place) and no memorial tablets are placed there. The ancestral tablets are on the sec-ond shelf, lined from oldest to most recent from right to left. Therefore, etiquette dictates that the pet’s memorial tablet should be placed on the left side of the lowest shelf. Even if you are recklessly told by a decep-tive spirit medium, who threatens you to get your money, that this will bring spiritual retribution upon you or that you must not place it there because [the altar is supposed to be only for] the ancestral memorial tablets and because the pet’s spirit lineage is different, proper Buddhist clerics disagree. Memorialization is always good. If you place your palms together with sincerity, there won’t be any spiritual retribution.31

Clearly, Muyo sees the Buddhist home altar as an extension of the author-ity of the respective Buddhist sect that the family is affiliated with. The cleric thus denies alternative interpretations, which see the altar as a place for the ancestral tablets and ancestral veneration. The cleric also takes the official stance of many contemporary Buddhist schools that denies the ex-istence of vengeful spirits and spiritual retribution — popularly associated with dissatisfied ancestors and mizuko and promoted by spirit mediums and psychics — and applies this denial to the placement of pet memorial tablets. As a result, since the pet’s memorial tablet or photo can be placed on the family altar, which ideally contains only the memorial tablets of


family members related by blood lineage or marriage, the pet is treated symbolically as a member of the family, which mirrors its status in life. Still, it is placed in the most marginalized position, on the lower-left side, to indicate that it ranks far below human ancestors.

In cases of ritualists having negative personal views on the matter, some pet owners choose to disregard the disapproval of their parish priest and enshrine a pet memorial tablet or photo of the pet on their family altar anyhow. For example, two clerics at a temple with about eight hundred parishioners in Matsumoto City in Nagano reported that they occasion-ally saw a photograph of a pet on the family altar on their rounds of parish-ioner homes during the obon season in August. The first time one of the clerics encountered the practice, he asked his parishioner why they had a photograph of a dog on their family altar and was told that it was a picture of their deceased family dog. He himself disapproved of the practice but usually did not voice his disapproval to his parishioners directly. His fel-low cleric stated that the practice seems to be rare, occurring in only one household in a hundred.

Memorialization of pets at the Buddhist altar can be very subtle: some-times there are no physical markers for the pet, but the owner might use the Buddhist altar to commemorate the pet nonetheless. One elderly woman, for example, noted that she did not have her pet’s photograph or memo-rial tablet on her altar but offered a stick of incense on the animal’s behalf every day. On the surface, then, the pet’s effigy has not been enshrined on the altar, but the altar nevertheless serves as a memorial space for the pet. The strategy of creating an invisible joint human-pet mortuary space that omits any tangible referent of the pet is also used in some cases of joint interment, discussed below, as a successful way of avoiding conflict with fellow cemetery clients.

Another marker of the human-animal divide occurs in the treatment of pet cremains. Human cremains are usually not kept in the home lon-ger than forty-nine days or until the grave is ready.32 In contrast, many pet owners choose to keep their pet’s cremains at home for years, perhaps indefinitely. The above-mentioned Ms. N. planned to have her dogs’ cre-mains interred after forty-nine days but would keep a small bone fragment in a capsule that could be worn around the neck. She had encountered the accoutrement on the website of a pet cremation service and liked it because she would be able to wear it when she left her house and could make of-


ferings to it back at home. “This way,” she said, “neither I nor my dog will be lonely.” Similarly, a stonemason at Hōtokuji, a Jōdo temple in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, recounted that while people are usually eager to inter the re-mains of their human relatives by forty-nine days after the death, pet own-ers were often loath to part with their pets’ cremains. Keeping the cremains at home precludes worries about what might happen to the pet’s cremains should the family move.

It also enables pet owners to maintain physical contact with their pets in the familiar surroundings of the home, which are filled with memories of the living pet. One posting in a chat room on Spinavi reads as follows:

In my house, we have four dogs. I just started keeping them so none of them have died yet, and I haven’t looked into memorialization and how much money to spend. However, when one of my own dogs dies, I think I want to memorialize it properly. When I was little, I had a hamster. . . . because I was still a kid I didn’t think of cremation, but I went and bur-ied it in a nearby park. I think in contrast to a hamster, when we sleep, eat, and live together with a dog in the house, the dog spends each day just like a member of our family. Therefore, the dog should be memori-alized just like a human. A dog’s life is definitely shorter than a human’s. The dogs that I have right now will definitely die before me. Therefore, when they die . . . , I want to cremate them. I haven’t thought about the grave yet, but I want to keep their bones in my house. . . . I want to have a reminder so I won’t forget that I kept the dogs.33

The pet owner here explains that the family dogs, who share the human living space, have a much more intimate relationship with their owners than a hamster, which was presumably kept in a cage that created a spatial barrier between its habitat and the human habitat. Thus the owner would like to keep the dogs’ cremains at home within the domestic space that they shared as living beings. This thought did not arise in the case of the hamster.34 Unburied, the cremains serve as mementos of the animal and remain symbolically suspended in a liminal space within the family home until the final resting place is determined.

In the United States, many pet owners choose cremation precisely be-cause it allows them to keep the pet ashes at home. Similarly, at some of the pet cemeteries that I surveyed in Japan, pet owners who took the cre-mains home for at least some time constituted about 80 percent, with only


20 percent opting for immediate interment. Many freely admitted that they planned to keep or had kept their pet’s cremains at home for one to two years — which coincides approximately with the common duration of the grieving process. The most frequent reasons cited were a combina-tion of wanting to feel close to the deceased animal and wanting to avoid the hefty price tag of an individual columbarium space or grave plot at a pet cemetery. Eventually, many pet owners do move the cremains to a temple for interment, either in individual plots, locker-style columbaria, or — most commonly and least expensively — in collective ossuaries. Ms. T., a middle-aged homemaker, for example, had kept her dog’s cre-mains at home for one year. She felt that her acquaintances disapproved of the small altar in her entryway, which housed the urn and a small pile of offerings. Several times during the year she resolved to take the cremains to the pet cemetery but could not bring herself to go through with it. Eventu-ally, out of embarrassment she hid the altar in a closet. Once one year had passed, however, she picked up the urn and interred the cremains in a col-lective ossuary at a pet cemetery without any further remorse.

According to Hallam and Hockey, keeping the cremains of a deceased in the home is to frame “the dead within the spaces of everyday life.”35 In the case of pets, this impulse to frame the cremains in the spaces of everyday life is particularly strong and protracted, even more so than with human cremains. In the case of humans, such framing often occurs when the deceased is a child. As Hallam and Hockey noted in the case of a chil-dren’s cemetery in England, parents often treated the burial space as if the child were still alive and adorned their child’s plot with toys and trinkets in order to fill the void caused by the premature death.36 In Japan, memo-rial spaces for mizuko are also frequently decorated with toys, sweets, and memorial statues symbolically dressed with bibs. It is also common to offer the adult dead favorite foods or drinks and to place small objects frequently used by the deceased (e.g., eyeglasses) on family altars, though to a lesser extent.

In the case of pets, such strategies serve to extend the bond with pets be-yond death. Pet graves, columbaria, or altars are adorned with toys, treats, and small mementos. This behavior is not unique to Japan. Catherine Grier reports that recent pet graves at Hartsdale Cemetery (Westchester, New York), the oldest modern pet cemetery in the United States, are fre-quently decorated with trinkets and toys.37 However, many Japanese pet


owners go even further. During my fieldwork at pet cemeteries, I often observed that pet owners treated the urn with the cremains of their pet as if the pet were still alive: cradling their pet’s urn in their arms as well as gently petting or stroking the urn as if they were touching a live animal. At some pet cemeteries, owners removed urns from columbaria spaces for important ritual events at the site or to take them home for important memorial events (the equinoxes, the obon season, or the death anniversary). Several temple priests whom I asked about this behavior confirmed that this was unique to urns with pet cremains.38 Yokota Harumasa, the abbot of Chōfukuji, a Sōtō Zen temple in rural Niigata Prefecture, attributed the distinctive, intimate handling of pet urns to people’s being wary of human spirits lest they might offend them. Pet spirits, on the other hand, were not perceived as threatening and permitted the handling of the urns. He noted that some of his clients carried the cremains with them around the house as they went about their day: picking them up when they get up in the morn-ing and transferring them to the living room until they leave the house and then placing the urn near a window in the entryway so that it is waiting for them when they return, just as the pet would have when it was alive. The manager of the pet cemetery Bukkyō Heiwa Kai (Kawasaki, Kanagawa) had heard of a woman who took her pet’s urn with her to the office every day. The latter two cases, however, were seen as extreme and regarded as inappropriate, pathological behavior even by those who approved of keep-ing the cremains at home.

However, keeping pet cremains in the home for a lengthy period of time is not universally sanctioned in Japan either. Some people believe that holding on to the cremains is an expression of excessive, even pathological, attachment to the pet; others worry that the spirit of the deceased animal will not be able to find peace. One pet owner anticipating her pet’s fate after its death worried that she might end up suffering from pet loss syn-drome: “I think that if I keep being sad interminably and keep holding on to the beloved dog’s cremains and his memory, he won’t be able to be at rest and go to heaven.”39 I discuss these fears in greater detail in the following chapter.

Some ritualists also disapprove of pet owners’ tendency to keep their pet’s cremains in the home. For example, the Jōdo cleric Muyo Kūjin likens keeping pet cremains at home indefinitely to the case of a family who had lost their son and kept his cremains at home for more than two years. The


family kept the urn on a funerary altar and made frequent offerings to it. As a result, Muyo reported, the mother was suffocated by sadness, suffer-ing, and attachment. Because of her excessive attachment, she was unable to find peace and found herself in a living hell. Consequently, the deceased could not find salvation either and was also dragged into hell. The son should have been interred after forty-nine days so that his mother could find some distance and therefore peace. He concludes:

If we think of a pet not as a mere animal but as a family member, I think it is good to treat it the same. The pet owner’s own happiness and men-tal stability are also an important way of memorialization.40

Here it is the Buddhist cleric who wants to see the pet treated like a human — specifically like a child — whereas many pet owners regard pet cremains as different from human cremains and thus consider it permissible to keep them in the home. His answer uncomfortably skirts an issue that is usually not stressed by Buddhist clerics: the problem of restless spirits created by improper memorialization. Although he conjures up threatening images of hell, he psychologizes the mother’s reaction to her son’s death: excessive attachment and grief lead to mental instability. Excessive mourning results from a failure to distinguish between the sphere of the living and that of the dead. Incorporating the dead into the sphere of the living causes un-happiness and distress to the living and the dead. It turns the world of the living into a living hell. Calm and happiness in both realms can be main-tained only through a clear separation of the realm of the living and that of the dead. Only then can both let go and find peace. Since pets are family members, they should be treated the same as the human dead. Interring pet cremains is therefore preferable to keeping them in the home.

Peripheral Interment in Mixed Human/Animal Burial Spaces

Many Japanese pet owners value highly physical proximity of the cremains. Often pet owners want the pet’s remains to be physically or symbolically close to the family — at home or near the family grave or at least at an ac-cessible pet cemetery that they can visit periodically. Cemeteries at parish temples with pet sections often serve the function of giving pet owners convenient access to their pet’s grave. They can visit the pet on their way to the family grave and are guaranteed burial near the pet once they die. An anonymous posting on 2 Channeru explained that a pet owner wanted to


find a burial place for the cremains of her two cats so that they could find peace. She had no yard in which to bury them because she lived in an apart-ment but did not want to bury them at a nearby pet cemetery because she might move out of the neighborhood. Instead, she decided to have them in-terred in a group grave for pets at a cemetery linked to the Buddhist temple where she and her family were parishioners. She had discovered the grave during her regular visit to her family’s grave and felt a sense of reassurance: “I thought that since they are buried in the cemetery where my family grave is, I will be able to visit them, and sometime in the future I will be buried in the same cemetery as my pets. I could finally be at peace and let go of the cremains.”41 Despite the physical proximity to the family grave, which was obviously important to her, the collective ossuary was in a separate section of the cemetery in a newly claimed piece of land, but this was close enough for her: “I thought that even though it is in a separate location, people feel at ease knowing that they will be buried in the same cemetery as their pets.”42 However, while she appreciated that the group grave was near the family grave, she did not want the cats in the family grave. In fact, she noted with dismay that “in the plot of one household at our temple there is a fairly new tombstone for a dog. I was surprised and personally thought that this was indicative of too much attachment.”43

At Buddhist temples that also have cemeteries for humans, human and animal spaces of interment are usually strictly separated. The reason for this practice is not always purely doctrinal. As Mark Rowe has observed, practical concerns often outweigh doctrine or tradition in a funerary con-text.44 Temples have to make do with limited space and need to maintain agreement among cemetery clients. Some patrons might oppose the pres-ence of animal cremains, while others would like to have their pets’ cre-mains near their family grave. One posting in a web-based chat room read, “There are really a lot of people who agree with being buried with animals, but there are also those who oppose it. At our temple, there was nothing we could do, but as a compromise we built a memorial stupa and a group grave on the edge of the temple precinct.”45Another posting (possibly by a cleric) read, “We also wanted to establish a collective ossuary for pets in our cemetery, but the plan was aborted because of resistance from the cemetery patrons. Therefore, we would like to establish a small columbarium (a hall with shelf spaces provided for memorialization) in the corner of the pre-cinct, but we wonder what pet owners think about that idea.”46


The marginalization of necral spaces for pets is illustrated by the lay-out of Hōtokuji (Setagaya Ward, Tokyo) (figure 15). Upon request from its parishioners and neighborhood residents, the temple built, in 2004, a col-lective ossuary and a columbarium for pets. The ossuary for pets is located conveniently near the entrance of the temple grounds but on the margins of the cemetery space. The temple also has a large statue of Jizō that serves as a memorial for mizuko. The pet ossuary is clearly separated from the human cemetery by a wall and from the memorial for mizuko by a small shrine. Hōtokuji’s pet columbarium is located in a small underground chamber below the human cemetery and is accessible only from the street. Hōtokuji’s cemetery and memorial spaces are clearly divided into segments for humans and pets. The two do not overlap.

Yet despite objections, some pet owners opt to have their pet’s cremains buried in the same grave with them upon their death. Public opinion seems to be split on this. Many people believe that pets should have their own grave because they are not human members of the family. Some who regard animals as spiritually inferior claim that giving pets equal status with hu-mans causes them only to suffer in the afterlife.47 Others see such a practice as an expression of excessive attachment leading to suffering for the human

Fig. 15. Map of Hōtokuji, a Jōdo temple in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo.


pet owner. As mentioned above, the brother of Ms. N. tried to dissuade her from having her dogs buried with her by stating that she would be reborn as a dog because of her excessive attachment. Most important, the pres-ence of a pet in the family grave might offend the ancestors.48 Similarly, an informant of mine who worked as a chef at a dog-friendly café noted that although she had nothing against the burial of a pet with its owner as long as there was consensus in the family, she was concerned about the possibil-ity of its offending the ancestors. According to her, burial would be possible only in a new grave that did not contain the remains of family members one could no longer ask for permission for a pet’s burial.

Buddhist temples usually resist joint interment. From the perspective of one Buddhist cleric, the pet’s lack of a religious affiliation is a reason for excluding it from the family grave. Muyo Kūjin, the above-mentioned Jōdo cleric, argued that at temple cemeteries the chances of being buried with one’s pet were slim: “In the case of temple cemeteries, that would be impossible in 99 percent of the cases. Because parish representatives may strongly pressure the abbot, there are examples where it is possible to inter the cremains, but it is uncommon. At temple graves, people are buried on the condition that they are family members of parishioners who are follow-ers of a certain sect. In any case, pets do not fall under that condition. If it is a [religiously unaffiliated] secular cemetery, there are possibilities.”49 As in the case of Buddhist altars, Muyo argues that temple graves are spaces that express sectarian affiliation rather than only family relationships. The underlying assumption of Muyo’s argument is that humans are buried ac-cording to their religious affiliation. Since pets do not have religious af-filiations, they ought not to be buried in the family grave at a Buddhist temple. Muyo implies the common understanding that religious affiliation is passed on among human family members through blood and marriage ties (regardless of the beliefs of the individual family member).50 He also conveniently equates collective family membership with shared beliefs but does not extend the same kind of collective membership to pets. Their owners may consider them family members, but that does not give them a sectarian affiliation.

However, some pet owners and their descendants are determined to cir-cumvent the opposition posed by their temples. One young man posting on 2 Channeru, for example, confessed that he had smuggled the cremains of his father’s dog to the family temple when he visited the family grave


during the equinox to offer incense on the dog’s behalf and that he planned to mix the dog’s cremains secretly with those of his father during the cre-mation process in accordance with the latter’s wishes.51

Douglas Davies reports that in the United Kingdom it is the practice of pet cremation that has facilitated the spread of joint human-pet inter-ment, especially the mingling of human and pet ashes. He speculates that this is not just because cremation makes joint interment more practically feasible but also because ashes look the same regardless of their origins and because they are “removed from the original body.”52 He implies here that on a physical level this complete blurring of the boundaries between the species becomes possible because the actual material — cremated remains ground into ashes — looks the same and is neither identifiably human or identifiably nonhuman. This material similarity removes psychological and physical boundaries against the mingling of ashes.

This rationale is not entirely applicable to the Japanese case. Crema-tion has become the norm for human funerals in modern Japan.53 Un-like Britain, where the “actual act is seldom witnessed” by family members and friends,54 Japanese family members are usually directly involved in the cremation and the transfer of the freshly cremated remains into the urn. During the process of cremation, bones — human or pet — are intention-ally left relatively intact and usually not ground into ashes unless specially requested.55 During this transfer, pet cremation clients who have chosen an attended cremation, in which they personally transfer the cremated re-mains into an urn, are keenly aware of the anatomical differences. As dur-ing a human funeral, the cremains are usually studied with fascination, and the grief is forgotten for the moment. The skull, claws, and teeth of pets, though similar in color and texture to human cremains, are still clearly identifiable as distinct from human bones. When pet owners choose joint interment, they do so with the knowledge that at least some of their pet’s bones will be identifiable as a different species by posterity.

However, despite the opposition at Buddhist parish cemeteries, the option of not being buried at a parish cemetery opens up new possibili-ties. According to Japanese law, only the state or religious institutions can own cemeteries, but private companies often develop nominal relation-ships with Buddhist temples to open private cemeteries.56 Two cemeter-ies managed by Ōnoya, a tombstone company — Izumi Memorial Park in Machida City, Tokyo, and Kobe Yamada Cemetery, Kobe City — have


created joint spaces for human and pet interment. Both cemeteries are of-ficially owned by Buddhist temples, Kansenji and Kongōji, respectively, but Ōnoya handles the marketing and day-to-day operations.

In 2005, Ōnoya conducted an Internet survey of 309 forty- to sixty-year-old men and women. Fifty-three percent of those questioned approved of being buried with pets. Eighty-two percent gave as the reason for this ap-proval that the animal was a family member. Fifty-seven percent indicated that the pet could be memorialized with the family. Twenty-four percent stated that it would be pitiful if the animal were left alone after death.57 Re-sponding to popular demand, Ōnoya began, in 2003, to offer joint burials to its clients in 2003. The demand for the plots has been high: the cemetery sold nine in 2003, twenty-eight in 2004, and fifty-four in 2005. The sales of joint plots make up a quarter of the total plot sales of the cemetery.58 The company’s website explains its rationale:

You have the same option as at a pet cemetery, but the difference is that humans can be buried with all kinds of sentient beings. We have created a completely independent cemetery section for those people who wish to be buried with the pet that they used to live with. It is a new style of grave that extends into eternity the growing bond between humans and other sentient beings that were their lifetime companions.59

The company invokes the relatively new concepts of pets as companions and the bond between humans and their pets to advertise its joint burial section. Personal preferences and habits such as pet ownership can be ex-tended into necral spaces.

Nevertheless, as in the case of the Buddhist altar and the pet sections of Buddhist cemeteries, the joint burial section is confined to a marginal space that indicates its peripheral status. Both in Machida and in Kobe, the joint plots are in distinct sections separated from graves that contain only human cremains (figure 16). In Machida, the “with pet” section is located in the rear of the cemetery. The cemetery also includes an even more peripheral pet cemetery with individual plots and a collective pet os-suary, which contains no human cremains. This section is segregated not only horizontally but also vertically by being located on a slope below the human cemetery. In Kobe, the joint human-pet section is separated from the remaining cemetery by a parking lot and an eternal memorial stupa for clients without descendants.60 This effectively isolates the “with-pet”


section from the human-only section for clients whose descendants might take offense at the joint arrangement. What the company has actually done is not to allow pets to be buried in human burial space but to allow hu-mans to be buried in animal burial space. Even a few Buddhist temples are adopting this model. For example, Ushitayama Kannonji in Hiro-shima allows joint burials of pets and humans in a segregated section of its cemetery — both under a single tombstone or with a separate marker.61

Azusawa Boen in Itabashi, Tokyo — where Ms. N. plans to be buried with her dogs — is more flexible in regard to joint pet-human burials. Joint graves intermingle freely with human-only graves in most sections of the cemetery, but pets without intended human interment at a later date are not accepted.62 Self-declared pet enthusiasts, the founders, a stonemason and his partner, Suzuki Wajun, the abbot of the Jōdo temple Seiganji, in-vestigated whether there were any legal restrictions against joint burial. They discovered that while the law strictly regulates the treatment of human remains, the treatment of animals is not subject to regulation. In-

Fig. 16. Map of Izumi Memorial Park, Machida City, Tokyo.


stead, animal carcasses are treated legally as burnable waste. Hence, burial with humans is not prohibited.63 There are no legal barriers against es-tablishing a cemetery that allows joint-species burials. According to one of the founders, the company wanted to provide a cemetery that allows pet owners to be buried in the same space as their pets and that provides a spacious, bright setting — in contrast to many pet cemeteries that are confined, small, and dark.64 Two cemetery clients indicated in interviews that it was exactly the bright setting that attracted them to the cemetery.

The cemetery has no explicit boundaries between human only and joint pet-human sections, but even here subtle lines exist. The face of the tomb-stones contain the names of both the human and pet occupants, but the human names are usually found on the right side while the pet names are engraved on the left. According to the management, the reasons are a mix-ture of, on the one hand, aesthetic considerations (creating a visual balance) and practical motivations (pet names are shorter than human posthumous names) and, on the other hand, a practice imposed by the stonemason who produced the engravings. In other words, the arrangement is not dictated by the management but nonetheless seems to occur with regularity as a result of other factors. Furthermore, the cemetery has different types of collective ossuaries: those containing human-only cremains and others with joint pet-human cremains. Collective ossuaries have become popular as an alternative for those who have no descendants to tend their graves. Since some of Azusawa Boen’s clients may not wish to be buried with other people’s pets, a creative solution was to provide several options. Some graves are for humans only, whose occupants may not want their cremains min-gled with pet cremains. Some contain separate urns for pets and humans, whereas others have urns with the mixed cremains of pets and humans.

It is of interest that one of the founders of the Azusawa Boen is a Bud-dhist cleric who is directly involved in the management of the cemetery. Despite the general resistance of Buddhist temples to joint burials on tem-ple grounds, individual Buddhist clerics seem to have no objections to the practice. In fact, Suzuki Wajun had initially hoped to create such a burial space at his own temple but decided to open a new cemetery when he ran into resistance from his parishioners. The resistance of the temples seems to be based not only on doctrinal concerns but also on the need to obtain the consensus of their parishioners and of family members.

This is illustrated by the following example. Chōfukuji, a Sōtō Zen tem-


ple in rural Niigata Prefecture, is a rare example of a Buddhist temple that allows joint human-animal interment in its cemetery. According to the vice abbot, Yokota Harumasa, who is in charge of animal funerals and me-morial rites at Soul Mate, the temple-operated pet cemetery, Chōfukuji has a long tradition of joint human-animal burials. He attributes this to the agrarian setting of the village, which fostered a sense of connectedness with animals, even beyond death. Presently, the temple offers the option of joint burial for its current parishioners and devotees — not outsiders — and it is not accepting further additions to its parish (figure 17). Nonparishioners can rent a shelf space or choose to have their pet’s cremains interred in a group grave.65

In an interview, the abbot explained that since the temple and its par-ish were so small, it was relatively easy to obtain agreement among its pa-rishioners given the historical precedent at the temple’s cemetery. Inter-estingly, he noted that in his experience people who tended to keep their animals in the home during their lifetime had them buried in their own

Fig. 17. Family grave in the cemetery of Chōfukuji, a Sōtō Zen temple in Niigata Prefecture. The ancestral grave contains a plain rock commemorat-ing the family dog, also interred in the grave.


plots, whereas people who kept them outside had them buried in an ad-jacent plot. Yokota, a self-styled “Buddhist cleric for animals,” is disdain-ful of social hierarchies in general — he avoids wearing colorful monastic robes that indicate monastic rank whenever he can. He asserts that there are no doctrinal foundations for the differentiation of human and animal necral spaces in Buddhist cemeteries but that the practice is rooted in this-worldly conventions and communal traditions. These conventions can be overcome only by reaching a consensus. The more parties involved in the decision-making process, the more difficult it will be, but, according to Yo-kota, a change is inevitable. In his opinion, his small rural temple is merely at the forefront of a larger change in necral practices, a change that he sees himself as actively spurring on through his work at the Tokyo branch of the pet cemetery.

Yokota’s argument that a change is in the making appears to be accu-rate. Chōfukuji is not the only Buddhist temple in Japan that allows joint burial among human graves. As boundaries between humans and pets are continually challenged, even religious funerary institutions are gradu-ally becoming more accommodating to new options and learn to balance collective traditions and individual choices. Some temples have found compromises that allow joint interment without violating sensitive issues surrounding the ancestral grave. For example, Jikei’in (Rinzaishū; Fuchū, Tokyo) and Shinryōji (Nichirenshū; Shinagawa, Tokyo) have established columbaria for humans that can also accommodate pet cremains. As Rev-erend Mizuno, the abbot of Shinryōji, explained, he was not personally opposed to joint interment, but parishioners who wanted to inter their pets in their ancestral grave could not overcome the opposition of other family members. The ancestral altar–style columbarium offered a feasible solution: pet owners could establish their own graves that did not contain ancestral cremains; they thus had control over the burial sites and could enshrine their pets’ cremains with them (figure 18). As the staff mentioned, other columbarium clients are likely not even aware that the altar next to theirs might contain both human and pet cremains. Hence, there has been no conflict. The columbarium offers a maximum degree of individuality. A survey of Shinryōji and Jikei’in revealed that the altar owners appear to regard the altars as their property that they can arrange as they please. The altars were arranged randomly, without any clear sense of hierarchy or distinction of the species.


Another solution has been to avoid placing the cremains within the family burial chamber. A number of parish temples in western Tokyo have begun to allow the use of pet-shaped stone urns produced by One Heart Stone, a company run by the abbot of Chōfukuji, a Jōdo temple in Kyoto. The company provides individualized stone urns modeled after the breed of the pet. The lifelike likeness of the pet reminds the owner of the liv-ing animal. According to Hallam and Hockey, because photographs and various types of anatomical models resemble the physical form of the body, they serve as powerful means of preserving the memory of and intimacy with the dead.66 These urns thus help preserve the memory of the pet in tangible form. In addition, these pet urns are so heavy that they can func-tion as a miniature grave. Several temples associated with One Heart Stone are beginning to open their parish cemeteries to pet owners who want to be buried with their companion animals and allow the placement of a One Heart Stone urn on the ancestral tomb. This means the pet’s cremains are close to the owner’s ancestors yet separate. The distinction prevents family discord.

Fig. 18. Daihiden at Jikei’in, Tokyo. The building houses an altar-style columbarium in which the temple allows joint pet-human interment.


The problem of discord and embarrassment has been creatively solved by Renge’in, a Nichiren temple in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, which runs a large pet cemetery by the name of Tetsugakudō. The abbot personally vis-ited the homes of all his six hundred parishioner families to get their con-sent to allow joint human-pet interment for parishioners. Since the entire parish granted its consent, joint human-pet interment has taken place oc-casionally. However, the graves are not especially marked. This means that those unaware of the temple’s policy would never suspect that there are joint graves present. Moreover, the temple does not advertise this service on its pet cemetery website. Therefore, the practice remains visually hidden, causing little conflict or embarrassment among parishioners and again al-lowing a high degree of individual choice among temple clients.

Conclusion

As recent publications by Andrew Bernstein, Satsuki Kawano, John Nel-son, Mark Rowe, and Hikaru Suzuki have documented, funeral practices have undergone much change in modern Japan due to the development of a commercial funeral industry, the acceptance of cremation as the pre-ferred method of disposal for dead bodies, and dramatic demographic changes in Japan’s increasingly graying and urban landscape. Since the dis-mantling of the mandatory temple registration system in the early Meiji period (1868–1912), Buddhist temples no longer hold a monopoly over funeral rites. Many contemporary Japanese are questioning the necessity of posthumous names and Buddhist funerals. Secular cemeteries service urban clients, who seek increasingly individualized burial options. Urban dwellers with modern aesthetic sensibilities can choose European-style in-dividual tombs and designer ancestral altars that do not follow traditional Buddhist models. Some urbanites are even exploring nontraditional forms of burial: the scattering of ashes or interment with friends or in collective ossuaries rather than with family members.67

The presence of individualized options has affected the mortuary practices involving pets: cremation has become the preferred method of disposal for pet bodies, pet cemeteries are ubiquitous in the urban land-scape, and joint human-pet burials are gaining currency. Pet cemeteries and human-pet cemeteries alike cater to the individual needs of their clients. Thus Ms. N. was attracted to Azusawa Boen because she had the option to be interred with her dogs and could determine the unique design of the


tombstone for her plot. Yet despite the questioning of traditional practices, the material culture of pet funerals and pet memorials nostalgically and sentimentally invokes an image of domesticity and family, albeit a newly defined one that includes pets.

As pets, particularly dogs and cats, are increasingly included in human living spaces in Japan — apartments, hotels, restaurants, and cafés — they are also becoming part of the human necral landscape. They are human-ized in rites that mimic mortuary rites for humans. Traditionally, there were clear boundaries between animals and humans, reflected in linguistic usage. Take, for instance, the verbs used to refer to dying: humans “pass away” (naku naru or shibō suru) and nonhuman animals “die” (shinu). In the mid-1990s, an acquaintance’s dog died of old age. My friend, who was living in Tokyo, had no idea what to do with the dog’s body. At that time, the most common practice was to put the dog in a cardboard box and con-tact the sanitation department to arrange for pickup. My friend, who was British and spoke serviceable but not perfect Japanese, put the dead dog in the trunk of his car and drove to the nearest police station. There he informed the police officer on duty: “Uchi no inu ga naku narimashita ga . . .” (Our dog has passed away . . . ). The police officer, who usually did not handle dead dogs, heard: “Uchi no inu ga inaku narimashita ga . . . (Our dog has disappeared . . . ). He proceeded to question my increas-ingly impatient friend in detail about what color the dog was and what breed, when he had last been seen, and so on. Eventually, the police of-ficer informed my friend that nothing could be done since it was Saturday and that he should come back on Monday. My exasperated friend replied angrily, “But he is going to start decaying in this heat!” This was when it dawned on the police officer that the dog had not disappeared but died. The problem here was my friend used the verb naku naru, which, as men-tioned, was used only for humans, whereas the verb shinu was used unsen-timentally for animals. Therefore, the officer concluded that my friend had really meant inaku naru (to disappear).

Recently, however, this usage has been changing. As the clear bound-ary between human and animal burial practices is becoming permeable, many pet owners and providers of funerary services for pets have begun to use the term naku naru for pets, thereby treating them linguistically as humans. Some funerary companies, in good undertaker tradition, even use the honorific form naku narareru in order to treat their customers with


utmost respect.68 To those seeking the inclusion of pets in the human ne-cral landscape, the presence of pets familiarizes, domesticizes, and enlivens burial and memorial spaces. To rephrase Hallam and Hockey, dead pets not only are framed within the spaces of everyday life but also frame necral spaces as spaces of everyday life. As Fudge has it, “home, in fact, is where the pet is.”69

However, despite the growing humanization of pets, many boundaries remain. In necral spaces, pets are generally treated as liminal beings: they are relegated to marginal spaces on the Buddhist altar and in the cemetery. In many cases where clear boundaries are not maintained, the presence of the pet is hidden by the absence of physical markers to give a semblance of a purely human necral landscape. This is an indication that despite their prominent place in family life pets are peripheral members of the family, marginal members of society. Pets are usually treated as lesser beings, lower than mizuko, though they are given higher status than animals that do not share the intimate living spaces of humans. Physical boundaries between pets and humans in the necral landscape are meant to ensure order and sta-bility in the world of the living and to grant repose to the dead. Conversely, the blurring of these boundaries is thought to be an expression of excessive attachment, which leads to suffering and misfortune. It also offends the ancestors. To those seeking the exclusion of pets from the human necral landscape, the presence of pets debases, desanctifies, and dehumanizes burial and memorial spaces. Their presence challenges and undermines the family order. As Fudge has noted, pets are hybrid beings that give humans a sense of ontological security and simultaneously undermine this same sense of ontological security: “They are a constant reminder of the fragility of our status and at the same time they show us how our status might be and can be secured.”70

Documents

Reli 73h Textbook Chapter 4