Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan

Robert J. Smith is an anthropologist, and this Stanford University Press book is his scholarly ethnographic study of ancestor worship as it was actually practiced in contemporary Japan at the time of his fieldwork, examining household altars, memorial rites and the living relationship between families and their dead. Its strength is direct ethnographic engagement with how ancestor veneration functioned in ordinary Japanese households, rather than describing the practice only through formal Buddhist or Shinto doctrine. Its limit is that it documents Japanese practice as observed in the early 1970s, so a claim about how ancestor worship is practiced in Japan today, after decades of subsequent social change, needs a more recent source rather than assuming this study's findings still hold unchanged.