The Speakers

Signing up for Death: Mortuary Plans for the Solitary Dead in Japan

Released in summer, 2022, Plan 75 is a Japanese film about a new governmental plan that encourages senior citizens to sign up to be euthanized. The premise is that those who are single, lonely in life with little means or social ties to be buried by at death, will be incentivized by having death plans paid for and handled by the government. Through the lens of this dystopic fiction, the paper considers the very real situation of an increasing demographic in Japan—aging seniors facing the prospect of no family grave to enter at death. What, precisely, is the existential, sociological dilemma this poses to aging Japanese and why would a solution, such as “plan 75” be even imaginable? The paper tracks this question through what is a new trend (seizen seiri) of anticipating, by preparing (against), such a fate by making one’s own mortuary arrangements ahead of time. Such anticipatory death-planning, done by individuals, is also being adopted by local municipalities such as Yokosuka City that encourages its residents to sign up for a pre-death identity card. Questioned here is whether such plans prevent, or symptomize, a death in excess of sociality.

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Anne Allison (she/her). Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, her work on contemporary issues in Japan has ranged from the nightlife and pornography to lunch-boxes, Pokémon, and precarity. Her books include Nightwork, Precarious Japan, and, forthcoming in spring 2023 on the condition of managing death without familial others, Being Dead Otherwise.

A burden of bones and abundance of ash: Becoming a buddha in Nagoya

Japanese mortuary tradition has long been distinguished cross-culturally by the preservation of whole bone fragments, which are typically interred in ancestral graves. These bones are deeply symbolic and are at the heart of rites like hone-age (‘bone picking’) via which the living care for the dead. However, as the structures organising social life in twentieth-century Japan have fragmented, so too have inter-generational systems of deathcare. New graves are expensive, scarce, and difficult to maintain. And for many, bones are now encountered as a burden, as epitomised by the numbers of cremains abandoned at crematoria or forsaken on commuter trains. This paper examines the fragmentation of contemporary Japanese death rites as a material process that transforms the very stuff of the dead from solid bones to pulverised ash. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Nagoya, I describe how one community comes together to handle the excess remains of their dead and to make ash, which is then formed into monumental statues of Amida Buddha, known as kotsubutsu(骨佛). These buddhas distribute the dead, and the burden of caring for them, amongst new configurations of social relation, ensuring ongoing care for the dead into the future. Where solid bone is an identifiable, persistent, instantiation of the deceased, the slippery materiality of ash provides much-desired malleability for necro-social relations in contemporary Japan.

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Hannah Gould (she/her) is the Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow for Arts, in the School of Political and Social Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Her work explores the areas of death, religion, and material culture, focusing on processes of disposal and decay (of both the human dead and objects) across Australasia. Her forthcoming manuscript, When Death Falls Apart (University of Chicago Press) is an ethnography of how cultural traditions around death can themselves ‘die’, be replaced, or transformed.

“Mass Death (Tobacco or Salt)”

Freud's “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death” elaborates on how the experience of mass death shifts one’s understanding of individual death and vice versa. Conceived as a primitive relation between loved ones and enemy combatants (of identifications and cathexes), the fundamental distinction between life and death occurs, he suggests, through the experience of being next to the corpse. Disillusionment in the face of body bags disturbs the relations among a band of brothers. Elaborating on the friend-enemy distinction through Totem and Taboo, I address implicit notions of the political as they unfurl in relation to mourning and the group. Extending the writing from war into the pandemic, I consider also the perversity of amity lines and national borders in relation to global problems (for example, a rampant virus or climate crisis) through group identification, and the question of individual agency in relation to mass death.

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Vice-President, American Comparative Literature Association

Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

Professor, English, Literature Program, and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies

'Look Around as Though They Were Here’: Cemeteries, the Disabled Dead, and Disability Futures

MetFern Cemetery, in Waltham, MA, is the final resting place for 298 people incarcerated at Metropolitan State Hospital, a residential psychiatric facility, and the Fernald School, the United States’ first institution for youth with social and intellectual disabilities. At MetFern and many similar burial grounds, graves are marked only with numbers—the names, context, and relationships effaced. This paper describes the intertwined histories of mass institutionalization and de-institutionalization, American eugenics, and the anonymous burials of people labeled mentally ill or disabled. Since the 1980s, ex-patients and disability activists have fought to preserve these places and remake them as public space—in the process arguing, against ongoing erasure, for the existence and importance of disability history. As they construct this narrative continuity in abandoned cemeteries, they also build new forms of belonging and kinship linking them to the disabled dead through acts of care. The paper ends by looking at the ongoing fight over these cemeteries and the larger carceral ruins around them, how the “excess” demand that their histories be preserved is part of a broader vision of disability futures.

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Adam Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015), and the forthcoming Cemetery Citizens (Stanford University Press, 2023), an ethnography of grassroots groups working to preserve and honor places of the marginalized dead. In Durham, Rosenblatt works with the Friends of Geer Cemetery, teaches community-engaged courses, and is the co-founder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, a collaboration between Duke, North Carolina Central University, Stagville State Historic Site, descendants and activists at multiple local Black cemeteries.

Surveilling the Dead

Each year in late June, elders from a mountain community in northern Togo make the rounds of the village’s nine tombs, inspecting them to see if the dead have engaged in foul play during the previous year. Their worry is that an ill-intentioned cadaver might have taken food or the souls of the living into the grave with them, thus risking famine and death to those left behind. In promenading the tombs, the elders look for signs of evil doers and when they find them they pulverize the bones of the deceased. The paper reflects on the meaning of these transgressions and the remainder or excess that death elicits.

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Charlie Piot is a professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Duke. He is currently conducting research in West Africa on death, informal economies, and migration.