Japan: "grave companions" wanted, collective burials supplant traditional ones
Messrs Kano – a nice Japanese couple in their seventies – for some time now they have gotten into the habit of often seeing a group of people with whom they go on excursions, exchange books, go out to dinner. If these activities appear very usual, almost trivial, for a group of friends, less usual is the purpose to which this attendance tends. In fact, the Kanos are looking for "gravemates", people who are so compatible and similar that they can share eternal rest with them in a collective burial, thus avoiding the costs of a family tomb.
Lo Shintoismin fact, to whose customs Buddhism has also adapted, it gives great importance to the relationship between ancestors and descendants, who are required to take care of the burials of deceased relatives and to periodically bring offerings to the ashes of the deceased. Traditional tombs, which appear as stone stems on which the names of the deceased and those of the most revered Shinto deities are engraved in elegant ideograms, can be very expensive and for this reason the trend of being buried in collective tombs is emerging, side by side with specially selected people.
"My husband," says Ms. Kano, "saw his brother spend all his savings to buy a family tomb and decided he didn't want to see his money run out or be a burden on our children." "Today's young people" she then explains "do not always live close to their parents, perhaps they even live abroad, and in these cases taking care of the grave as tradition prescribes can become a problem". Haruyo Inoue, professor of sociology at Toyo University and director of a non-profit organization that promotes the formation of groups for collective burials, he says that the category most interested in this type of solution is that represented by couples who have only daughters – tradition in fact requires that women are "co-opted" into the tombs of their husbands -, then follows that of couples with sons, but who, like Mr and Mrs Kano, for various reasons, not least of which economic ones, they do not want traditional tombs. The third is that of childless couples, the fourth that of singles. Finally, in the fifth we find married women who, despite having a few decades of happy marriage behind them, do not wish to spend eternity in their husband's family tomb.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/a-dying-business-family-graves-in-japan
