Making Relations, Managing Grief: The Expression and Control of Emotions in Japanese Death Rituals

Despite a great deal of work on death and mortuary rituals in Japan, scant attention has been paid to the importance of emotional responses to death and their social and cultural implications. In this article based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Japanese rural town, I examine the ways in which grief is experienced and perceived by the surviving family members, specifically how it is expressed and controlled and under what circumstances, by focusing on their emotional condition, grieving demeanour, mortuary practices, ritual process, gender roles and pollution. I found that the emotional response to death is closely related to social relationships between the bereaved and the non-bereaved as well as the proximity of bonds between the living and the dead. Thus, the analysis as a whole seeks to elucidate why the Japanese notion of grief and the process of mourning must be understood, first and foremost, in terms of these interpersonal relationships.