In the Judeo-Christian view—and thus, the dominant Western view—to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5.)
The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It’s viewed as a selfless, even honorable act. The samurai introduced the practice of seppuku, literally “cutting the abdomen,” self-disembowelment by sword to prevent capture by the enemy. In World War II, nearly 4,000 men died as kamikaze pilots, turning their planes into missiles and crashing into enemy ships. Apocryphal but famous legends tell of the practice of ubasute, where elderly women were carried on their sons’ backs into the forest to be abandoned in times of famine. The woman would stay dutifully put, succumbing to hypothermia or starvation.
Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a “suicide culture.” But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than about fascination with mortality itself. Furthermore, “foreign scholars can look at statistical numbers on suicide, but they will not understand the phenomenon,” argues writer Kenshiro Ohara. “Only Japanese people can understand the suicide of the Japanese.”
For me, observing death in Japan was like gazing through the looking glass: everything familiar but distorted. Like America, Japan is a developed nation, where funerals and cemeteries are big business. Large funeral corporations play a sizable role in both Western and Japanese markets. Their pristine facilities are staffed by professional death workers. If that were the whole story, it would have made no sense for me to visit. But that is not the whole story.
KOUKOKUJI BUDDHIST TEMPLE, a seventeenth-century building tucked away off a quiet street in Tokyo, is home to a modest cemetery, with aged headstones representing generations of families that have come to worship here. A black and white cat lounged on the stone path. We stepped out of modern Tokyo and into a Miyazaki movie. Yajima jūshoku (jūshoku means head priest or monk) emerged to greet us, an affable man in a brown robe with close-cropped white hair and glasses.
In contrast to his archaic surroundings, Yajima jūshoku is a man of new ideas, specifically, how to memorialize cremated remains (my kind of guy). Funeral directors in the United States blanch with fear at the thought of a national “cremation culture,” which would undercut profit margins in embalming and casket sales. In reality, we have no idea what a homogenous “cremation culture” might look like. But the Japanese do. They have a cremation rate of 99.9 percent—the highest in the world. No other country even comes close (sorry, Taiwan: 93 percent; and Switzerland: 85 percent).
The emperor and empress were the final holdouts, still choosing full body burial. But several years ago, Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko announced they would also be cremated, breaking with four hundred years of royal burial tradition.
When Koukokuji Temple reached capacity, the priest Yajima could have invested in an old-fashioned cemetery space. Instead, seven years ago he built the Ruriden columbarium. (Columbaria are separate buildings for storing cremated remains.) “Buddhism has always been state-of-the-art,” he explained. “It is quite natural to use technology alongside Buddhism. I see no conflict at all.” With that, he showed us through the doors of the complex’s newest hexagonal building.
We stood in the darkness while Yajima punched something into a keypad at the entrance. Moments later, two thousand floor-to-ceiling Buddhas began to glow and pulse a vivid blue. “Woooaahhh,” Sato-san and I bleated in unison, stunned and delighted. I had seen photographs of Ruriden, but to be surrounded, 360 degrees, by the luminous Buddhas was overwhelming.
Yajima opened a locked door, and we peeked behind the Buddha walls at six hundred sets of bones. “Labeled to make it easy to find Miss Kubota-san,” he smiled. Each set of cremated remains corresponded to a crystal Buddha on the wall.
When a family member comes to visit Ruriden, they either type in the name of the deceased or pull out a smart card with a chip, similar to the cards used on Tokyo’s subways. After the family keys in at the entrance, the walls light up blue, except for one single Buddha shimmering clear white. No need to squint through names trying to find Mom—the white light will guide you straight to her.
“All of this evolved,” said Yajima. “For example, we started with a touch pad, where you type in your family member’s name. One day I saw a very old woman struggling to type a name in, so that’s when we got the smart cards. She just had to tap the card and can immediately find her dead person!”
Yajima headed back to the keypad controller, and instructed us to stand in the center of the room. “The autumn scene!” he announced, and the formation of Buddhas turned yellow and brown with shifting red patches, like piles of freshly fallen leaves. “Winter scene!” and the Buddhas turned to snowdrifts of light blue and white. “Shooting star!” and the Buddhas turned purple as white spots jumped from Buddha to Buddha, like a stop-motion animation of the night sky.
The majority of columbaria leave no room for innovation. Their design is the same the world over. Endless rows of granite walls, where ashes reside behind the etched names of the dead. If individuality is a priority, you may be allowed to affix a small picture, a stuffed bear, or a bouquet of flowers.
This LED light show could have been a Disney production, but there was something in the sophisticated design of the lights that made it feel as though I were being swaddled in a Technicolor womb.
“The afterlife of Buddhism is filled with treasures and light,” Yajima explained.
Religious scholars John Ashton and Tom Whyte described the Pure Land (the celestial realm of East Asian Buddhism) as “decorated with jewels and precious metals and lined with banana and palm trees. Cool refreshing ponds and lotus flowers abound and wild birds sing the praises of the Buddha three times a day.”
In designing Ruriden, Yajima was creating “an afterlife along the path of Buddha.”
The Buddha lights weren’t always this elaborate. One of the early visitors to the new facility at Ruriden was a light designer, and she volunteered to create the scenes from different seasons. “At first, the lights looked like a Las Vegas show!” Yajima laughed. “This is not a toy, I said! Too much! We canceled that. As natural as possible, I said. The work is still happening to create that atmosphere, as natural as possible.”