Automated graves: The precarity and prosthetics of caring for the dead in Japan

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products, the precarity of irregular workers, and new death practices in "post-familial" Japan. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994)—an ethnography of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining employees and customers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs; Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (University of California Press 2000)—a collection of essays analyzing the complex desires linking motherhood, pornographic comics, and popular culture; Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006)—a study of the intermeshing of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of Japan's brand of "cool" youth-goods on the global marketplace, and Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) about the socio-economic shifts in post-corporatist Japan towards precaritization of work, sociality, and everyday security. Her most recent book, Being Dead Otherwise (Duke University Press, 2023) looks at changes in mortuary practice when the family grave--once so conventional in Japan--is becoming outdated, even abandoned. Examining new trends for where dead wind up "otherwise (such as automated columbaria) in Japan today, the book considers historical, socio-economic, and existential factors involved in the place (or lack thereof) of a final resting place for those with (or without) others to tend to them.