Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

Religious Practices in an Industrialized Society

D. P. Martinez, Jan Van Bremen, D. P. Martinez, Jan Van Bremen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134818549
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Japan is one of the most urbanised and industrialised countries in the world. Yet the Japanese continue to practise a variety of religious rituals and ceremonies despite the high-tech, highly regimented nature of Japanese society. Ceremony and Ritual in Japan focuses on the traditional and religious aspects of Japanese society from an anthropological perspective, presenting new material and making cross-cultural comparisons.
The chapters in this collection cover topics as diverse as funerals and mourning, sweeping, women's roles in ritual, the division of ceremonial foods into bitter and sweet, the history of a shrine, the playing of games, the exchange of towels and the relationship between ceremony and the workplace. The book provides an overview of the meaning of tradition, and looks at the way in which new ceremonies have sprung up in changing circumstances, while old ones have been preserved, or have developed new meanings.

Part I

The question of tradition

1Wedding and funeral ritual

Analysing a moving target

Robert J. Smith

I am by no means the first, and surely will not be the last to try to make some sense of the Japanese scene as it flashes by. Perhaps it would be more fitting to say as it appears to be flashing by the necessarily fixed vantage point on which any observer must stand. In that effort, I find myself in numerous, if not always the best of company. Among the more illustrious of that number is Arnold Toynbee who, it has been pointed out (Gibney 1985:107), in The Study of History noted that Japan was a classic instance of cultural conflict between two contending factions which he identified as the Herodians and Zealots. It is highly likely that Toynbee assumed initially that one of them was destined to win out in the end, the other to be vanquished. The Herodians, named after Herod Agrippa, who ruled Galilee, pursued a policy of assimilating foreign culture as thoroughly as possible. The Zealots, who take their name from the Maccabees and the early Jewish zealots, championed traditional culture. In the course of his analysis of the Japanese case, it appears that Toynbee had second thoughts about the aptness of his scheme for Japan, for he concludes that the Meiji Restoration represented a pursuit of Zealot ends by Herodian means. Marius Jansen (1970: 111) was making what I take to be the same point when he wrote of the policies pursued by the Meiji oligarchs: ‘Seeking revolution, they preached restoration’. And only thirty years after that revolutionary restoration, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1898:2, 3, 8) commented on one of its salient outcomes:

Whatever you do, don't expatiate, in the presence of Japanese of the new school, on those old, quaint, and beautiful things Japanese which arouse your most genuine admiration. . . . [For] all this is [today regarded as] merely a backwater. Speaking generally, the educated Japanese have done with their past. They want to be somebody else than what they have been and still partly are. . . . [Yet] it is abundantly clear to those who have dived beneath the surface of the modern Japanese upheaval that more of the past has been retained than has been let go.

The impatient reader of this kind of thing is bound to protest and ask, ‘Well, which is it?’ And so we may recommend that the question be directed to the editors of a volume that has attracted a great deal of attention in the past few years, for there appears to be the beginnings of an answer in Hobsbawm's comment towards the end of The Invention of Tradition (1983:266):

A ‘modernization’ which maintained the old ordering of social subordination (possibly with some well-judged invention of tradition) was not theoretically inconceivable, but apart from Japan, it is difficult to think of an example of practical success.

Indeed it is difficult to think of another example, and so we must regret that there is no answer to our question, for not a single contributor to the book makes so much as a passing reference to Japan. But we are used to such snubs from our Eurocentric colleagues and until they give up marginalizing the rest of the world there is nothing for it but to get on with the job of analysing that singular society ourselves.

Although it leaves much to be desired I now realize, I was much taken with a distinction drawn by Hobsbawm between custom (which he defines as ‘mere usages’) and tradition, which combines ritual and symbol. Imagine my astonishment when I came across the following passage in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989:195). Wittman Ah Sing, the Chinese-American anti-hero of this curious work, takes his new wife to meet his family. When he discovers that his grandmother's room is empty, he suspects that his mother has put her in an old folks’ home without letting him know. As Wittman Ah Sing and his Caucasian bride set out to look for the old lady, he says:

‘See how neglectful of her family my mother is? I wouldn't put it past her to give Grandma the old heave-ho.’

‘You have the same custom as the Eskimo?’ asked Taña.

‘I don't know. How many times does something have to be done for it to be a tradition? There has to be ceremony. You can't just toss a grandmother on an iceberg and run.’

He might have added another question or two. How long does it take for something to become a tradition? Must customs or traditions necessarily reflect established cultural predispositions and constructs? Is it possible simply to make them up out of whole cloth?

My topic is Japanese weddings and funerals. Rather it is, on the one hand, the style of weddings in which most people are married these days – the typical and without a doubt what will come to be commonly viewed as the traditional wedding ceremony. On the other hand, and in sharp contrast, I propose to consider only one kind of funeral – the kind represented by that of the Shōwa Emperor. The contemporary ordinary wedding and the recent extraordinary imperial funeral reveal something of the nature of Japanese culture, why I have called it a moving target, and what forces appear to cause it never to reach stasis even while giving every appearance of being highly conservative in character.

Let me hasten to add that I do not think Japan is at all unique in this respect, but it does seem to me a particularly striking instance of that seemingly boundless capacity for invention and malleability which can easily be represented as cultural conservatism. In stressing the flexibility of culture, I follow Edmund Leach (1989:138, 141):

Ever since the days of Herodotus . . . ethnographers have written as if customs were normally static. When change occurs it has to be explained as if it were an anomaly. But historical records everywhere suggest that what would need to be explained is an ethnography that did not change. Why should anthropologists take it for granted that history never repeats itself but persuade themselves that cultures never do anything else? The answer is that it is often convenient so to believe. Malinowski believed that the Trobriand kula, as he observed it, had been working like that for hundreds of years. He mentions this belief only in a footnote. The evidence is that it had in fact been in existence for less than 50 years and was changing rapidly all the time.

Would it have made any difference had Malinowski realized that the kula trade had been in existence for only fifty years – or ten – or five hundred? I rather doubt that functionalism would have assumed a different form, but knowing how deep or shallow the history of this particular cultural practice might well have had a profound impact on the anthropological study of system change.

And so we come to my metaphor of the moving target. As I have argued elsewhere, we begin with the realization that we have lost our anchor in time (Smith 1989a: 718). Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, culture has never depended on genuine antiquity to lay legitimate claim to authenticity. I would argue that the proper study of culture requires us to slip our moorings in history and accept that all points once thought fixed in fact are in constant motion. Sally Falk Moore (1978:6) has put it with characteristic eloquence in a discussion of law as process, in which she takes the view that existing social and symbolic orders are being made and reiterated continuously. They are made, unmade, remade, and transformed endlessly, and even when they are only ‘maintaining and reproducing themselves, staying as they are, [that too] should be seen as a process’. It is that process that I wish to consider in the Japanese context.

Were you to ask a young Japanese to describe a typical wedding, I have no doubt that you would be given an account of one version or another of a ceremony of no great antiquity. Indeed, its major components assumed their present relationship only a generation or two ago. This in no way means that the ceremony is somehow ‘less Japanese’, for it has no real parallel in any other society. Does it, then, mean that because it is a recent invention it is not traditional? It is not old, but it is rife with ritual and symbol, some appropriated from the Japanese past, some from the pasts of other peoples, and some inventions as new as yesterday. We know how all this came about, for the history of wedding ceremonies is well documented (Edwards 1989; Ema 1971; Emori 1986). A salient theme of most of these surveys of changes since the 1870s is how the old commoner classes attempted to emulate the customs of the warrior class. There can be no doubt that this was the case in many matters of etiquette and ceremony.

It is clear, however, that the Japanese wedding ceremony of today owes less to the traditions of the old warrior class than to a far more august inspiration – the wedding of the Crown Prince (later the Taishō Emperor) in 1900, which was the first to be held at a Shintō shrine. When I asked them, virtually none of my Japanese acquaintances turned out to know this, nor is there any reason why they should. It came as a surprise, of course, because today by far the majority of weddings have two major components. One is a ‘religious’ ceremony specifically Shintō in character; the other the highly secular reception that follows it. It is fair to say that the contemporary ritual has only the shallowest of roots in this century, for when weddings by custom were held in the home, the only specifically religious observance in the domestic rites was the presentation of the bride (or in-marrying groom) to the ancestors of the household. The memorial tablets were displayed in a Buddhist altar (butsudan) or on an ancestor-shelf (senzodana) and no priest's services were required. The marriage being a domestic matter, those who officiated at the ceremony were members of the household.

By now, however, it has become the almost universal practice to hold weddings in a commercial wedding hall, hotel, or Shintō shrine. The first act in the ritual drama is a very contemporary Shintō ceremony (Edwards 1989:15–19). As an illustration, we may take the establishment described by Edwards, which has a standard shrine-room in which a Shintō priest officiates. He is trained and certified by a shrine, but need not necessarily be of a priestly family.¹ He is assisted by two ‘shrine-maidens’ (maiko), wedding-hall office workers who receive no training other than that given them by the management of the firm. Most of the rites performed by these people in this shrine-room are indeed drawn directly from Japan's past, but the ways they are combined and the manner in which they are meshed with new elements are quite striking. An example or two will suffice. It is the groom alone who reads the wedding vows, which have no precedent in the past. For her part, the bride is required only to acquiesce to them silently, surely a tribute to the persistence of strong cultural predispositions concerning gender-linked propriety. Today the occasion is likely to close with a double-ring ceremony; the rings are brought to the couple by one of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The myth of the secularization of industrialized societies
• Part I The question of tradition
• Part II Rituals for the dead
• III The tools of ceremony
• Index