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The story
A Yahoo! News article about Japanese people who, despite cremation rates topping 99%, wish to be buried in the ground when they die sparked discussion on 5channel’s News Speed+ board. Thread participants shared firsthand accounts from regions that still practiced burial as late as the Showa era, traced the historical shift from “one grave per person” to family graves during the Meiji era, and traded interpretations of the actual wording of the Grave and Burial Law. The conversation also turned to the thorny issue of accommodating foreign residents in Japan who want burial plots, a topic that split opinion.
Some Japanese Want to Be Buried, Not Cremated: Rethinking Burial Options in a Country Where 99% Choose Cremation
Mon, Aug 31, 15:54 JST
Yahoo! News Original Feature
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article
What people said
But even then, it's often only open to specific families who've lived in that area for generations.
Even in the countryside it's cremation.
Way back in the day, apparently my neighbor's family used to scatter (remains) in their field back home. I heard bits of tissue paper were scattered all over the place.
As a body decomposes, bodily fluids, nitrogen compounds (nitrate and nitrite nitrogen), and pathogens can seep into the soil and contaminate groundwater. The risk is especially high in places like Japan, with its humid climate and high water table.
Not in Japan's acidic soil — the body doesn't survive. It decomposes, contaminates the surrounding soil, and eventually even the bones dissolve away. That's exactly why ancient regional lords were buried in stone coffins or coated in resin.
I'd hate having grave robbers dig up my silver teeth. Plus your rotting, ugly corpse just sits there exposed. Burial is way worse to me.
Having bugs swarm you and lay eggs in you sounds worse to me.
Originally, up until the Meiji era, every person had their own individual grave. Then the Meiji government said there wasn't enough land, so families should share one grave each — and even that wasn't enough space, so it became one shared ancestral family grave. Honestly though, given today's land prices, one grave per person would be an insane luxury, so it was probably the right call…
My paternal grandfather was buried, not cremated — right at the boundary between the Showa and Heisei eras.
My old boss started going on about "vibrations" or whatever right before he retired. I mean, human consciousness is ultimately just electrical signals in the brain, so I said maybe you could model it as a wave and run a Fourier series expansion on it — and he got mad at me.
Well, once you're burned, you've pretty much already returned to nature (the atmosphere) at that point.
Seriously, stop treating this junk title like it's some kind of authority.
"Professor Emeritus" is just the title given to accomplished professors after they retire from the university — "former professor" would be clearer. He's just some retired old man now.
The Burial Law doesn't authorize burial anywhere, not even once.
There's no provision banning burial either.
Cattle culled for foot-and-mouth disease are buried too, you know. Aren't you just assuming things?
Liar lol
Act on Cemeteries, Burial, etc.
Article 2: In this Act, "burial" means interring a corpse (including a stillborn fetus of four months' gestation or more; same below) in the ground.
So some dead old geezer's DNA gets soaked into the crops and ends up inside your body…
The nutrients in the soil that grows crops come from dead plants and animals to begin with, you know.
The old Mongolian version of sky burial involved chopping the body up to make it easier to eat.
You can go full nude right now if you want, you know.
Reading this, it seems burial was still around until fairly recently. Come to think of it, an acquaintance of mine, whose family runs a shrine, said the head priest there was buried, not cremated.
We did it as a matter of course right up until the year of the Great Hanshin earthquake (1995). We stopped since then because the foundation stones got in the way during burials. So now you see a lot of graves where the headstone is old but the base stone is new.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Japan’s cremation rate exceeds 99%, one of the highest in the world, yet the Act on Cemeteries, Burial, etc. (1948) itself does not explicitly ban burial. In practice, however, local governments designate almost no cemeteries for burial and rarely grant permits, leaving burial in a commonly misunderstood state of being “not illegal on paper, but practically impossible.” The shift from burial to cremation was driven mainly by the Meiji government’s move toward family graves, the surge in population from roughly 26 million in the Edo period to over 122 million today (which strained available burial land), and hygiene concerns — not by any uniform religious policy shift. The thread also turned into a debate over accommodating Muslim foreign residents in Japan who want burial, a real and practical issue given how few dedicated burial cemeteries exist domestically, rather than a purely emotional argument.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (News Speed+) thread “[What started it: someone pooping in the wild] Some Japanese Want to Be Buried, Not Cremated: Rethinking Burial Options in a Country Where 99% Choose Cremation.”
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