Shinsosai

The first thing to say about the Shinto funeral is how rarely it happens, and why. Japanese religious life has long been divided by occasion rather than by allegiance: the same family takes a newborn to a shrine, marries in Shinto dress, and buries its dead through a Buddhist temple. That is not confusion or lapsed belief. It is a working division of labour that both institutions accepted for centuries, and the phrase often used of it, born Shinto and buried Buddhist, is a description rather than a criticism.

The reason on the Shinto side is kegare, the impurity attached to death, birth blood and illness. Kegare is not sin. It is a condition that separates a person from the kami until it is discharged, and the whole apparatus of shrine practice, the washing of hands and mouth at the basin, the purification wand, the periods of abstention required of priests, exists to manage it. A corpse is the strongest source of it there is. Shrines therefore do not take the dead onto their grounds, and a priest who has been near a death withdraws from shrine duty for a set period.

The result is that from the medieval period until the nineteenth century almost all Japanese funerals were Buddhist, and the temple registration system of the Tokugawa period made the arrangement compulsory in practice. A tradition with no funeral of its own was not a gap anyone in it felt the need to fill.

Shinsosai exists because a political argument made it necessary. From the eighteenth century, nativist scholars in the kokugaku movement argued that Japanese should be buried by Japanese rites rather than by an imported religion, and worked out funeral orders from classical precedents and from the practice of a few priestly houses that had kept their own. Some domains permitted Shinto funerals for shrine priests before the Restoration.

The Meiji government took the argument up. Its separation of Shinto from Buddhism after 1868 required Shinto to be able to do what Buddhism did, and for a period in the early Meiji years Shinto funerals were actively promoted and in some places imposed. The promotion did not hold. Buddhist funeral practice was too deeply established in family and parish life, the new rite had no comparable network of temples and graves behind it, and the state changed course. What survived is a real but minority form, kept by shrine families, by some Shinto-derived new religions, and by households that choose it.

The service itself is held at home or in a funeral hall rather than at a shrine. Its stages parallel the Buddhist sequence, with offerings of food, sakaki branches presented in place of incense, and a norito-style address rather than sutra chanting. The dead person is not given a posthumous Buddhist name; they are installed as a spirit of the household, honoured at a spirit shelf in the home on set days and thereafter as an ancestor of the family.