From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty

The machines still burned wood instead of gas, which made the process a lengthy one. The family had to leave the crematory and return home while the body burned overnight.

Social anthropologist Hikaru Suzuki explained that in modern Japan (as in the West) “professionals prepare, arrange, and conduct commercial funeral ceremonies, leaving the bereaved only the fees to pay.”

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 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.

a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn.

It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita.”

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.”

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?”**

It is disheartening that in the U.S., the professionalization of deathcare led to a greater fear of the body than ever before.

It was a place to hang out with the dead, in comfort, with none of the strict time limits imposed by an American funeral home.

To have that period to visit the body as often as you like, no reservations needed, seemed graceful and civilized. Antithetical to the “you paid for two hours in the viewing room and you’ll get two hours in the viewing room” rules of a Western funeral home.