Yajima invited us for tea inside the temple and offered me a stool, brought out for visiting foreigners. He believed I couldn’t endure sitting cross-legged on the floor mats for the duration of tea and conversation. I assured him I absolutely could. (I couldn’t. My legs fell painfully asleep within the first three minutes.)
I asked Yajima why he had designed Ruriden the way he did, and his response was impassioned. “We had to act, we had to do something. Japan has fewer children. Japanese people are living longer. The family is supposed to look after your grave, but we don’t have enough people to look after everyone’s grave. We had to do something for those people left behind.”
A FULL QUARTER of Japan’s population is over the age of sixty-five. That, combined with a low birthrate, has caused Japan’s population to shrink by one million people in the last five years. Japanese women have the longest life expectancy in the world; Japanese men have the third longest. More importantly, their “healthy life expectancy” (not just old, but old and independent) is the longest for both genders. As the population ages, the need for nurses and caregivers is swelling. People in their seventies are caring for people in their nineties.
My interpreter, Sato-san, knows this well. She herself is responsible for the care of six people—her parents, her husband’s parents, and two uncles. All are in their mid-eighties or early nineties. A few months ago, her great aunt died at one hundred and two.
This army of the elderly (the “silver market”) worked their whole lives, saved money, and had few if any children. They have money to burn. The Wall Street Journal said that “one of Japan’s hottest business buzzwords has become ‘shūkatsu’ or ‘end of life,’ referring to the explosion of products and services aimed at people preparing for their final years.”
Revenues in the Japanese death industry have increased by 335 billion yen (3 billion US dollars) since the year 2000. A company called Final Couture markets designer shrouds and specialized photographers create end-of-life portraits to be displayed at funerals.
People show up years in advance to purchase their Buddhas at Ruriden. Yajima encourages them to visit often and pray for others, and thereby face their own death. When they die, “they will be welcomed by the people who went to Buddha before you.”
Then there are those who do not plan ahead, who have no close family. Their bodies leave dismal reddish-brown outlines on carpets or bedspreads when they are not found for weeks or months after death. They are victims of Japan’s epidemic of kodokushi, or “lonely deaths”: elderly people who die isolated and alone, with no one to find their bodies, let alone to come pray at their graves. There are even specialized companies hired by landlords to clean what is left behind after a kodokushi.
When Yajima built Ruriden, he “thought of the man who doesn’t have any children and says, ‘What will I do, who will pray for me?’ ”
Each morning, Yajima enters Ruriden and punches in the day’s date. That morning he punched in May 13. Several Buddhas glowed yellow, representing the people who had died on that day. Yajima lit incense and prayed for them. He remembers them, even if there is no family left to do so. For an elderly man or woman with no remaining family, the glowing Buddhas at Ruriden will act as their afterlife community.
Yajima jūshoku may be a powerful priest, but he is also a designer. “When I pray, I also think about creating. How do we create something new, filled with dazzling light? How do we create new Buddhas?”
For him, the act of prayer is essential to creativity. “Every time I pray, the different ideas pop up. . . . I’m not a man who sits at a desk to create a plan. It’s all while I’m praying.”
What if Ruriden fills up with ashes? “If it fills up then I will consider a second or third.” Yajima smiled. “I’m already thinking of them.”
IN THE EARLY twentieth century, Japan’s privately operated crematories were (at least in the eyes of the press) dens of iniquity. The men who operated the crematories were rumored to steal gold teeth from the dead. Even stranger, they were said to steal body parts, which were then processed into medicines purported to cure syphilis. The machines still burned wood instead of gas, which made the process a lengthy one. The family had to leave the crematory and return home while the body burned overnight. Historian Andrew Bernstein explained that “as a precaution against the theft of body parts, gold teeth, jewelry, or articles of clothing, mourners were given keys to the individual ovens, which they had to bring back to the crematory to recover the bones and ashes,” like lockers at a bus station.
The Mizue Funeral Hall, founded as a public crematory in 1938, introduced a more modern approach. The machines used fuel, allowing the families to handle everything in one day (no keys necessary). Advocates argued that crematories should be rebranded “funeral centers” and placed in gardenlike settings as a form of “aesthetic management.” Eighty years later, the Mizue Funeral Hall continues to operate, and still benefits from “aesthetic management.” The sprawling complex abuts a river to the west, gardens and a playground to the south, and a junior high and two elementary schools to the east.
Like Mizue, Rinkai, the crematory I visited, offers the full death experience. That day, four separate funeral halls were set up, with funerals staggered throughout the day. Private funeral company employees arrived long before the families with flower wreaths and other swag add-ons to decorate the room: bamboo, plants, glowing orbs (I was most impressed by the glowing orbs). Social anthropologist Hikaru Suzuki explained that in modern Japan (as in the West) “professionals prepare, arrange, and conduct commercial funeral ceremonies, leaving the bereaved only the fees to pay.”
One of Suzuki’s interview subjects, an eighty-four-year-old man, bemoaned the loss of ritual around death. In the 1950s, he complained, everyone knew exactly what to do when someone died; they didn’t need to pay someone to help them. “Look at young people today in the presence of death,” he said. “The first thing they do is call a funeral company. They act like helpless children. Such an embarrassing situation never arose in the past.” The truly shocking part, his wife chimed in, is that “young people today don’t seem to be embarrassed about it either.” So not only do the young have zero death literacy, they don’t seem to mind.