How Japan Handles Death: Funerals, Ancestors, and the Buddhist Way of Grief
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
My father died on a Tuesday morning in early November.
I was at work when my mother called. By the time I arrived at the hospital, the nurses had already begun the specific procedures that Japanese medical culture has developed for the period immediately following death — the matomegashi (preparation of the body), the specific washing and dressing that prepares the deceased for the next stages of the process that would unfold over the following days with a regularity and a structure that I, in my grief, found more sustaining than I had expected.
The structure was not mine. I did not create it and I could not have. It had been created, over centuries, by the Japanese Buddhist tradition and by the specific conventions that Japanese culture has developed for moving through the experience of loss. All I had to do was follow it. The structure held me in the days when I could not have held myself.
I have been thinking about this in the years since — about what the Japanese way of death and grief provides, what it requires, and what it reveals about the Japanese understanding of the relationship between the living and the dead.
This article is my attempt to share that thinking.
The First Hours: Immediate Procedures
In Japan, when a person dies in a hospital or medical facility, the body remains in the facility briefly while the family makes arrangements with a funeral company (sōgisha). Most families have a specific funeral company they use or that they have been recommended by the hospital.
The funeral company assumes responsibility for the logistical management of the funeral process — transportation of the body, preparation of the saidan (funeral altar), rental of the igan (funeral hall) if needed, coordination of the Buddhist priest, preparation of the various materials required for the service. The involvement of a professional funeral company in Japanese funerals is nearly universal; the logistics are too complex and too time-sensitive to be managed by a grieving family without professional assistance.
The yukanshi — the person who performs the ritual washing and dressing of the body (kan or yukan) — is a specific professional role. The body is washed with warm water, dried, dressed in white burial garments (specifically a white Buddhist robe called a kyōkatabira, sometimes printed with Buddhist sutras), and laid in a specific position. Close family members typically assist in the washing — an act of final care for the person they love.
Cotton is placed in the body’s orifices — a hygiene measure that is also, in the Japanese tradition, understood as preparation for the journey. Small amounts of rice or other food may be placed with the body. A small knife or a fan may be placed at the body’s side — protection for the journey.
The body is then placed in the hitsugi (coffin) for the wake and funeral services.
The Wake: Otsuya
The otsuya (お通夜) — the wake — is typically held on the evening before the funeral, often in the family home or in a dedicated funeral hall. It is a vigil — the family and close friends spending the night near the deceased, keeping them company for this final night before the cremation.
The traditional otsuya was genuinely overnight — the family and closest friends would remain with the deceased through the entire night, burning incense continuously, taking turns to maintain the vigil. Contemporary practice has shifted toward a shorter hankoku-otsuya (half-night wake) of two to three hours in the early evening, though more traditional families maintain the overnight format.
The physical arrangement: the body in the coffin, placed at the head of the room on a saidan (funeral altar) decorated with white chrysanthemums (the flowers most associated with Japanese funerals and death), photographs of the deceased, candles, incense, and specific food offerings. Incense burns continuously throughout the wake — the specific smell of funeral incense (mosōkō) is one of the most immediately evocative smells in Japanese sensory memory.
Guests who attend the otsuya: family members, close friends, work colleagues, neighbours. The attendance protocol is important. Guests arrive dressed in black (mofuku — formal black clothing, specific in style for men and women). They present a kōden — a condolence gift of money in a specific black-and-white envelope — at the entrance. They proceed to the altar, bow, light incense (a specific procedure: pinching incense between the fingers, raising it to forehead height, placing it in the incense burner), bow again, and offer silent prayer. Then they take a seat and remain for a period of time appropriate to their relationship with the deceased, before departing with a brief expression of condolence to the family.
The kōden — the condolence money — is a specific social obligation with specific conventions. The amount varies by the closeness of the relationship and the social position of the giver. The envelope must be of the correct type — a specific black-and-white envelope sold at convenience stores and stationery shops specifically for this purpose. The bills inside should be old, not new — the logic being that preparing new bills implies you anticipated the death. The envelope is written in a specific format with the giver’s name and, for groups, the group name.
Returning guests receive a kōden-gaeshi — a return gift, typically of a specific value (often approximately half the kōden amount), delivered in the days or weeks following the funeral. This obligation — to acknowledge and return the condolence gift — is one of the specific post-funeral administrative tasks that falls to the bereaved family alongside their grief.
The Funeral: Soshiki
The soshiki (葬式) — the funeral — typically takes place the day after the otsuya, in the late morning. In contemporary Japan, most funerals are conducted in dedicated funeral halls (sōgijō) rather than temples or homes, though temple funerals are still common in rural areas and for families with strong temple connections.
The Buddhist funeral service is conducted by a priest from the family’s affiliated temple. The affiliation with a specific Buddhist temple — the bodaiji (family temple) — is traditional and was historically mandatory. In the Edo period, every Japanese family was required to be registered with a specific temple (terauke seido), and the temple maintained records of births, deaths, and marriages for all registered families. This system was abolished in the Meiji period, but the tradition of family temple affiliation persists and is the basis for most Japanese Buddhist funerals.
The priest conducts the sōgi (funeral service): the recitation of sutras, the specific ritual procedures of the Buddhist funeral tradition, and the conferral of the kaimyō — the posthumous Buddhist name.
The kaimyō (戒名) — the posthumous name — is one of the most distinctively Japanese elements of the Buddhist funeral tradition. Every deceased person who receives a Buddhist funeral receives a kaimyō — a new name, given by the priest, that the deceased will carry in the afterlife. The kaimyō is written in classical Chinese characters and follows a specific format indicating the person’s Buddhist rank (which correlates, in practice, with the size of the temple donation made by the family).
The kaimyō is inscribed on the ihai (memorial tablet) — the small lacquered tablet that will be placed in the family’s butsudan (household Buddhist altar) and that becomes the primary locus of the family’s ongoing relationship with the deceased.
Cremation: The Japanese Way of the Body
Japan has the highest cremation rate in the world — approximately 99.97% of the deceased are cremated. This extraordinary rate reflects a combination of the Buddhist prohibition on leaving the body intact (in the specific Japanese interpretation of Buddhist teaching about the body after death), the practical limitations of burial land in a mountainous island nation, and the specific ritual significance that the cremation process has in Japanese Buddhist culture.
The cremation in Japan is not a private industrial process, hidden from the family. It is a ritual in which the family participates directly.
The family accompanies the coffin to the crematorium. After the cremation, the family gathers around the cremation tray on which the remains — the bones, the okotsu — are laid. The family members then, using special chopsticks (long, split chopsticks — the reason that passing food between chopsticks at ordinary meals is considered extremely bad luck, because it mimics this specific funeral ritual), transfer the bones from the tray into the bone urn (kotsutsubo), beginning with the foot bones and ending with the skull. The transfer is performed by two family members simultaneously — each holding one chopstick — for each piece of bone. The final piece placed is the nodogotake — the “throat apple,” the hyoid bone — because it is said to look like a Buddha in a seated meditative position.
This ritual — the direct, hands-on handling of the loved one’s remains — is one of the most powerful and most specifically Japanese elements of the funeral process. The family does not simply receive an urn of ashes after an anonymous industrial process. They participate in the final physical care of the person they loved. The bone transfer is intimate and demanding and, for many Japanese people, one of the most emotionally significant moments of the entire mourning process.
The Ancestors: Continuing Relationships
What happens after the funeral is, in Japanese religious culture, not the end of the relationship with the deceased. It is the beginning of a different phase of the relationship.
The butsudan — the household Buddhist altar — is the physical centre of this ongoing relationship. Present in most traditionally observant Japanese homes, the butsudan contains the ihai (memorial tablets) of the family’s deceased members, photographs of the deceased, and the various offerings — fresh flowers, water, incense, food — that are provided daily or at specific ritual intervals.
The family relationship with the butsudan is one of the daily practices that most clearly expresses the Japanese understanding of the dead as continuing presences rather than simply absences. Many Japanese people — particularly of older generations — begin their day by offering water, incense, and a report to the butsudan: informing the ancestors of what is happening in the family’s life, seeking their protection, acknowledging their continued presence in the household.
The spirit of the deceased is understood to remain near the family for forty-nine days following death — a period of specific rituals and observances during which the spirit is still transitioning. The shijūku-nichi (forty-ninth day) ceremony — the final major ritual of this period — marks the transition of the spirit to the realm of the ancestors. After forty-nine days, the deceased joins the ancestors — the senzo — who watch over the family from the world of the dead that is adjacent to but separate from the world of the living.
This relationship — between the living family and the deceased ancestors — is maintained through the ritual calendar I have described in my article on O-Bon, through the seasonal visits to the ohaka (family grave), and through the daily practices of the butsudan. The ancestors are not forgotten. They are not gone. They are elsewhere, and the elsewhere is attended to.
The Grave and the Grave Visit
Japanese graves — ohaka — are typically located at Buddhist temples, though municipal cemeteries exist in larger cities. The family grave (haka) is a shared grave — multiple generations of a family share a single grave marker, with names inscribed on the stone, and the ash remains of successive generations interred together in the grave chamber below.
The maintenance of the family grave is a specific ongoing obligation: visiting, cleaning, providing fresh flowers and water, burning incense, and praying at specific ritual intervals throughout the year. The ohaka mairi (grave visit) is performed at O-Bon, at the spring and autumn equinoxes (higan), and on the anniversary of specific deaths.
The grave cleaning is itself a ritual act — removing dead flowers, scrubbing the stone, pouring fresh water over it, arranging new flowers. This care for the physical grave is understood as care for the deceased who rests within it. The grave that is neglected — without fresh flowers, without the evidence of regular attention — reflects on the living family’s relationship with its dead.
What the Japanese Way of Death Provides
I said at the beginning that the structure of the Japanese mourning process held me in the days when I could not have held myself. I want to be specific about what I mean.
Grief is disorienting. It interrupts the ordinary structure of time — the sequence of days and obligations that gives life its navigation. The person who has just lost someone they love is, for a period, lost in a specific way: unable to feel the ordinary meaning of ordinary activities, unable to see forward into a time when the loss will be less acute.
The Japanese funeral and mourning process provides, in this disorientation, a counter-structure: a sequence of specific things to do, specific obligations to fulfil, specific rituals to perform, that gives the bereaved a temporary scaffolding on which to move through the most acute phase of grief. The otsuya, the funeral, the cremation, the bone transfer, the forty-nine days of specific observances — each is a defined thing to do, and the doing provides direction when direction has been lost.
This is the gift that structured mourning ritual provides. It does not resolve grief. It does not make the absence smaller. But it gives the bereaved something to do with the days when doing nothing would be unbearable, and it keeps the deceased present and attended to during the period when the living are learning to live with the loss.
The Japanese relationship with the dead does not end the mourning in forty-nine days. It transforms it — from the acute, disorienting grief of fresh loss into the ongoing, sustainable practice of maintaining a relationship with the absent. The butsudan, the ohaka, the O-Bon return — these are the forms that the relationship takes after the initial crisis has passed.
My father’s ihai is in the butsudan. I speak to it when I have something to say. I visit his grave in August and clean it and leave chrysanthemums. I tell him things.
He is not here. He is elsewhere. The elsewhere and the here are not as far apart as I once imagined.
— Yoshi 🏮 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “O-Bon: Japan’s Festival of the Dead — and Why It’s Actually Beautiful” and “New Year in Japan: What Really Happens When the Country Shuts Down” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
