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The story
A video of a Buddhist monk lamenting that the growing number of Japanese people closing down their family graves are “too poisoned by capitalism” went viral on 5ch. The thread saw a wide range of opinions fly back and forth — from complaints about posthumous-name fees and temple-severance fees, to questions about how flush temples and monks themselves seem to be, to arguments that cremation alone is enough and graves aren’t even necessary.
[Grave Closures Are Surging] The Result Capitalism Brought Us
Source: youtube.com / Original video here
What people said
Just cremate me and call it done.
Just do a subsidized cremation-only send-off.
Leave the ashes with the funeral home and forget about them — they'll end up in some communal grave eventually anyway.
Even yakuza want to get their hands on temples, so yeah, that's basically it.
So true.
They call it a "heartfelt donation, pay what you feel," but then get pissed if it's too little and phone in the service — makes no sense.
Though it all ends with me.
You don't have kids?
Yo, last of the line lmaooo
Don't need one.
I'm fine with a tree burial.
Apparently once you've got too many of those piled up over the generations, you can thin them out.
A Shinto priest told me that.
Honestly it's super convenient.
You still wipe it down by hand afterward, of course.
The monk in my neighborhood is cruising around in a brand-new S-Class too.
I really hate how lavishly Kyoto's crappy monks live it up.
Back when I worked as a floor manager at a host club, monks would just show up wasted and hassle the girls.
I remember thinking, this guy's a walking bundle of worldly desires.
I think that's a huge factor, honestly.
Truly the Age of Dharma Decline we're living in. (mappō — the Buddhist doctrine that the teachings are in terminal decline)
It'll end up an abandoned grave once I'm gone anyway.
Yeah, it really did cost a lot.
Disposing of the grave itself costs money, but a lot of temples also slap you with this absurd "temple-severance fee" on top.
That riverbank's gonna end up looking like the Heian period.
Buddhism's the one causing the trouble here.
Wait, seriously???
Can't you just renounce the inheritance?
Why do you think Musashibō Benkei went around armed?
Spreading a religion wasn't about winning converts through preaching — it was about crushing rival religions by force and scooping up the believers who'd lost their faith's home.
That's why Benkei carried weapons.
And where does the gambling happen in period dramas?
At temples.
The bookies running the gambling dens were temple monks — they were also the moneylenders of the era, and they used yakuza to collect debts.
They'd let the yakuza run the gambling den, then lend money to the losers.
That's actually where the word "terasen" (the house's cut of gambling winnings) comes from — "tera" means temple.
The bell Benkei looted from Mount Hiei is actually on display at Onjō-ji Temple.
Fun fact, both are in Ōtsu, right next door to Kyoto.
And Mount Hiei, of course, is the place Nobunaga burned to the ground.
Lol.
No wonder ordinary people were so eager to join the anti-Buddhist purges back in the day.
Should we do it again?
Nobody even knows whether there's a Buddhahood to attain in the first place.
What, are you anti-Buddha now?
Lately they're clanging these cymbal-looking things nonstop — so damn loud.
Sounds like a heavy spender (like a whale in a gacha game).
That's just how Nichiren Buddhism does things.
Background and Key Points
The danka system that underpins this argument dates to the Edo period, when the shogunate’s terauke policy forced every household to register with a local Buddhist temple as proof it wasn’t Christian. That arrangement outlived its original anti-Christian purpose and became hereditary: families stayed tied to “their” temple for centuries, paying for kaimyō (posthumous Buddhist names, which are ranked and priced), annual memorial rites, and, if they ever try to leave, a rihikiryō (“temple-severance fee”) that can run into hundreds of thousands of yen. Meanwhile haka-jimai — closing and removing a family grave — has been rising sharply for years as rural populations shrink, families move to cities, and fewer households have heirs able to maintain a plot; local governments report grave-relocation permits roughly doubling over the past decade. Religious corporations (shūkyō hōjin) also enjoy broad tax exemptions, which is part of why lavish monk lifestyles read as galling rather than merely eccentric.
The thread wasn’t united on where to place blame: some treated the monk’s “capitalism” complaint as projection from an institution that itself invented fee after fee, while others pushed back that shrinking, urbanizing families are the real driver and temples are simply losing customers, not corrupting them.
What’s easy to miss is that danka membership was never a matter of personal faith to begin with — it was inherited registration, not conversion — so framing today’s exodus as people “losing religion” misreads a bureaucratic relationship as a spiritual one.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Monk Snaps at Japanese People Who Keep Closing Down Their Graves: “Too Poisoned by Capitalism””.
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