Andrew Bernstein, Modern Passings. Death Rites, Politics and Social Change in Imperial Japan

Abstract

"What to do with the dead? In Imperial Japan, as elsewhere in the modernizing world, answering this perennial question meant relying on age-old solutions. Funerals, burials, and other mortuary rites had developed over the centuries with the aim of building continuity in the face of loss." "Following an overview of the early development of funerary rituals in Japan, Andrew Bernstein demonstrates how diverse premodern practices from different regions and social strata were homogenized with those generated by middle-class city dwellers to create the form of funerary practice dominant today. He describes the controversy over cremation, explaining how and why it became the accepted manner of disposing of the dead." "In the process, Bernstein shows how today's "traditional" funeral is in fact an early twentieth-century invention and traces the social and political factors that led to this development." --Book Jacket.