Bodies of Evidence: Imperial Funeral Rites and the Meiji Restoration

Abstract

Prior to the Meiji period (1868-1912) imperial funerals and memorial rites in Japan had been conducted as Buddhist ceremonies for over a millennium. It is said that the emperor Meiji's father, Kōmei, was buried according to Buddhist protocols; it was not until memorial rites in 1869 marking the third anniversary of Kōmei's death that all vestiges of Buddhist liturgy were ostensibly proscribed as part of a wider attempt to purify the nation of the evil of Buddhism. But these observations tend to obscure what is actually known about the imperial mortuary tradition, especially at critical moments in its modern metamorphosis. This essay questions the historical judgment that Kōmei's mortuary rites mark a clean break with tradition, suggesting instead that the twentieth-century conventions of imperial mortuary practice did not in fact get established until after the Meiji period had come to an end.