Of course, the younger generations raise their eyebrows at the superstitions of the old. The same man admitted that his granddaughter (a medical student) made fun of him when he hearkened back to funerals past, where “when a woman was pregnant she wasn’t allowed to go near the deceased. It was said that if a cat jumped over the deceased’s head, the evil spirit of the animal would go into the corpse and make the body rise up.” To prevent the corpse from transforming into an evil cat zombie, well, “the cat was kept away from the dead . . .”
Each of the four halls at Rinkai was set up for the funeral of a different elderly woman. Digital photo frames with portraits of the women were placed at the front of the hall near the casket. In her portrait, Mrs. Fumi wore a blue sweater over a white collared shirt.
In a tiny side room, Mrs. Tanaka lay unembalmed in a lavender cremation casket, dry ice* tucked around her body to keep her chilled. Her family surrounded her, their heads bowed. Her funeral would be held from 10 a.m. to noon the next day, directly followed by the cremation.
The old men assembled in a separate room, smoking, segregated from the general grievers. “I remember funeral halls before the smoking rooms,” Sato-san told me. “Mixing the cigarette smoke with the funeral incense was terrible.”
The crematory itself, where the bodies were taken after their funerals, was like the foyer of a fancy New York office building, everything made of imposing dark granite. This was the shiny new Lexus to America’s old Dodge pickup truck. Ten cremation machines were hidden behind ten silver doors, meticulously polished free of smudges. Grey stainless steel conveyor belts deposited the dead into each machine. It was cleaner and sleeker than any crematory I had ever seen.
Prices were posted outside the crematory: to cremate an unborn baby cost 9,000 yen, a single body part 7,500 yen, 2,000 yen to divide up the bones of a grown person into separate urns. Also posted was a list of items the family was not allowed to cremate alongside their dead loved one, including but not limited to cellphones, golf balls, dictionaries, large stuffed animals, Buddha figures made of metal, and watermelons.
“Wait, watermelons, really?”
“That’s what it says!” Sato-san shrugged.
Three or so close family members, including the chief mourner (most likely the husband or eldest son), accompany a body into the crematory, and watch it glide into the machine. The family does not watch the cremation process itself, but instead joins the reception upstairs. When the cremation is complete, they continue past the crematory to three rooms designated for the kotsuage.
After the cremation, a fragmented (but complete) skeleton is pulled from the machine. Western crematories pulverize these bones into powdery ash, but the Japanese traditionally do not. The family walks into the shūkotsu-shitsu, or ash/bone collecting room, where the skeleton of their loved one awaits.
The family are handed pairs of chopsticks, one made of bamboo, one made of metal. The chief mourner begins with the feet, picking up bones with the chopsticks and placing them in the urn. Other family members join in and continue up the skeleton. The skull will not fit into the urn intact, so the cremator might intervene to break it up into smaller bone fragments using a metal chopstick. The final bone, the hyoid (the horseshoe-shaped bone underneath the jaw) is placed in the urn last.
In People Who Eat Darkness, a brilliant nonfiction account of two women murdered in Tokyo in the 1990s, Richard Lloyd Parry describes the funeral of an Australian named Carita Ridgway. Her parents had flown in to arrange for the funeral of their daughter, and were outsiders to the kotsuage custom.
. . . they made the long drive to the crematorium on the outer edges of suburban Tokyo. They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next. After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita’s remains, as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of legs and arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognisable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita’s calcined skeleton; as the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn. “Rob [her boyfriend] couldn’t handle it at all,” Nigel [her father] said. “He thought we were monsters, even to think of it. But, perhaps it’s because we were the parents, and she was our daughter . . . It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita.”
The kotsuage was not part of the Ridgway family’s culture, yet at the most difficult time in their lives it gave them a meaningful task to complete for Carita.
Not all of the bones may fit in the urn. Depending on the region of Japan where Mom was cremated, the family might take the remaining bone and ash home in a separate smaller bag, or leave it behind at the crematory. The crematory staff pulverizes the leftover bones and places them in sacks, then piles the sacks out of public view. When the pile is large enough, the pulverized bones are picked up by another specialized group, the ash collectors. From there they are placed in large graves in the mountains, eight by ten feet and over twenty feet deep. According to the sociologist Hikaru Suzuki, the ash collectors plant cherry trees and conifers atop the ash pits. “These cherry trees attract many visitors, but few of them recognize the secret of the trees’ beauty.”
Cherry groves offer a more elegant solution than the old method. In the past, the ashes would simply be buried on crematory property. But with the rise of fancier, parklike complexes such as Mizue Funeral Hall, the “dumping the bones out back” idea fell out of favor. Suzuki heard this group of ash collectors referred to as the haibutsu kaishūsha, or literally “person who collects trash.” According to her, the cremators “look down on ash collectors for being mere manual laborers who have no responsibility for the spirit of the deceased.” Having to deal with the corpse and the family is what makes a crematory employee “professional.”
This was a strange distinction, between the cremators and the ash collectors. In my years cremating, those two jobs were one and the same. The body goes into the machine as a corpse, and comes out as bones and ash. In the West, where there is no kotsuage, families suffer great anxiety that they might receive the wrong set of ashes. They obsess over the question, “Is that really my mother in the urn?”** After a cremation, I attempt to remove every last fragment of bone or ash from the cremation machine. Nevertheless, some shards of bone fall into the cracks, and are eventually collected into bags. In California, we scatter those bags at sea. I am both cremator and ash collector, both “professional” and “collector of trash.”