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DEATH AND DYING IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN. Japan Anthology Workshop Series. Edited by Hikaru Suzuki. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. xviii, 240 pp. (Figures, tables, B&W photos.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-63190-7.
Death has a bad rep. No one likes it, yet it comes to us all. Books on death are, therefore, generally gloomy and depressing, making us further abhor dying. Although Death and Dying in Contemporary Japan is not a particularly cheerful book, it is not only about death but also about the authentic cultural traditions and cosmology of Japan that are intricately related to this subject. Based mostly on ethnographic case studies, the research presented in each chapter stimulates enough of our intellectual curiosity that the grim subject seems to lose its sting. In the end, one feels not depressed but enlightened.
In past centuries, Japan experienced dramatic shifts in demography (e.g., lower birth rate, higher life expectancy, decrease and delay of marriage), economy (e.g., unprecedented prosperity after WWII and the economic bubble/bust), politics (e.g., feudal system to imperialism to the current democracy/capitalism), and social/environmental (e.g., near environmental- collapse and dissolving of traditional family/community cohesiveness). As a result, according to editor Hikaru Suzuki, death-related ideologies and practices also went through a series of transformations, and this book attempts to answer why and how these changes occurred.
The book consists of three sections: meaning of life and dying in contemporary Japan, professionalization of funerals, and new burial practices in Japan. The first section focuses on the concept of ikigai ("that which makes one's life worth living"). Mathews claims that...