A Parting Word?

Buddhist and Shinto Funerary Practices in Japan

Resumo

Cultures do not mourn and bury their dead in a common fashion. No death is felt by the bereaved in a universal way. No person, no matter how familiar they are with the death rites and rituals of their own religion or culture or that of another can truly claim not to feel in some way unsettled when the matter of marking the passing of a loved one is at hand. My reaction, as a British woman attending the Buddhist funeral of my young Japanese friend was in equal parts one of sadness and confusion. The first emotion was perhaps a perfectly natural one, the second was due to my unfamiliarity with the rituals unfurling around me.  I knew that as a former student of Maya’s any faux pas that I committed would be forgiven, if indeed noticed at all, but I was nonetheless acutely aware of the fact that I had a role to play in marking her death, but had not been given my lines. Yet this desire to understand and explain was perhaps borne out of my discomfort at being one small part of an unfamiliar ritual played out in a language that I had in no way mastered. Would I have felt the same discomfort in attending a Christian burial in the United Kingdom? Unlikely. Do the Japanese focus on the minutiae of the wakes and funerals that they attend?