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

Abstract

Once dependent on family to bury and memorialize the dead, caring for the deceased has become increasingly precarious in the wake of a decreasing and aging population, a trend towards single households, and downsizing of social relationality—including the temple parishioner system once key in mortuary rituals. In the new “ending” marketplace emerging today to help Japanese manage this precarity, automated graves offer customers a convenient burial spot in an urban ossuary where ashes, interred in a deposit box, are automatically transferred to a grave upon visitation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines the just-in-time delivery system at work in automated graves, arguing that the mechanism serves as a social prosthesis, propping up the allure of social caring for the dead, even for those whose ashes are never visited by human relations. With over 30 such institutions now operating in Japan, automated graves are a sign of changing sociality between the living and the dead.