Qualitative case analysis reveals shifting mortuary practices toward individual planning and high-tech columbaria in Japan, highlighting evolving structures of social kinship and care.
In the face of shifts to a high-aging/low-fertility population, a post-growth economy, and a trend toward solo sociality, the family system that once handled mortuary care in Japan is coming undone. In this “era of dead without family,” a new wave of businesses, services, and initiatives is emerging to offer ending plans not dependent on kin or the family grave. The essay explores two different trends in Japan’s new ending industry ( shūkatsu ). One is the anticipatory planning that individuals are enjoined to take up ahead of time to avoid winding up in a plot for the disconnected in death. The other is new-style urban columbaria, high-tech and high-rise, that are becoming increasingly popular for even the reinterment of ancestral remains. Considering how the socio-ontology for honoring the dead is getting redesigned, the essay argues for a social imagination emerging here with potentially radical implications for the living.
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Anne Allison (2026) studied this question.
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