%0 Journal Article
%T Review Essay: Mortuary Practices, Buddhism, and Family Relations in Japanese Society
%A Nam-lin Hur
%J Cross-Currents : East Asian History and Culture Review
%D 2013
%I University of Hawaii Press
%X Mark Rowe. Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp. $91 (cloth), $29 (paper).Satsuki Kawano. Nature¡¯s Embrace: Japan¡¯s Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. 232 pp. $47 (cloth), $27 (paper).In Bonds of the Dead, Mark Rowe, who focuses on ¡°the grave as the center of the ancestral orbit¡± in Japanese mortuary practices, observes that, due to the gradual loss of its gravitational pull, ¡°the economic and social bedrock of temple Buddhism in Japan has eroded to the point where even its continued existence is publicly called into question¡± (222). Here, Rowe speaks to the decline of what is commonly known as the danka system. In contrast, in Nature¡¯s Embrace, Satsuki Kawano finds that the dominance of Buddhist death-related rituals couched in the tradition of the danka system remains by and large intact...
%K Mark Rowe
%K Bonds of the Dead
%K Satsuki Kawano
%K Embrace
%K Buddhism
%K mortuary practices
%K Japan
%U https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-6/Kawano-Rowe