With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means---ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests---for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and author of Precarious Japan, also published by Duke University Press, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, and Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club.

-- M. White Choice

Prelude  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
Histories
1. Ambiguous Bones: Dead in the Past  25
2. The Popular Industry of Death: From Godzilla to the Ending Business  47
Preparations
3. Caring (Differently) for the Dead  73
4. Preparedness: A Biopolitics of Making Life Out of Death  99
Departures
5. The Smell of Lonely Death and the Work of Cleaning It Up  123
6. De-parting: The Handling of Remaindered Remains  149
Machines
7. Automated Graves: The Precarity and Prosthetics of Caring for the Dead  173
Epilogue  191
Notes  197
Bibliography  215
Index  231