Book launchThursday 4 December 2014
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death
Drinks reception: 7:00pm – 7:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace (Outer Circle), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo- Japanese Foundation
By Sébastien Penmellen Boret
Published by Routledge
Tree burial (樹木葬, jumokusou), a new form of disposing the remains of the dead in Japan, was initiated in 1999 by a Zen Buddhist temple in the northeast region of Tohoku. Unlike conventional cemeteries filled with ancestral gravestones, its graveyards are vast woodlands where newly planted trees and small wooden tablets inscribed with the names of the deceased mark the burial sites. Although varying in style and scale, over fifty cemeteries are now popularizing tree burial as an alternative mode of dealing with death in Japan.
This book, drawing from ethnographic research and comparative analysis, explores the phenomenon of tree burial by tracing its development and ecological advocacy as well as the socio-cultural conditions that motivate Japanese people to choose this practice. Conversely, the author examines the impact of tree burial on traditional views of death and the afterlife. He argues that tree burials and other non-ancestral grave systems have become a means of negotiating new social orders. Unwrapping its symbiosis of memorialization and environmentalism, the book demonstrates how tree burial fits with new ideas of ecology where the individual’s corporality nourishes the earth and re-enters the cycle of life in nature.
About the contributors
Professor Sébastien Penmellen Boret
Professor Sébastien Penmellen Boret is currently Assistant Professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Sciences (IRIDeS) of Tohoku University in Japan. Penmellen Boret is a French anthropologist who holds a PhD in Anthropology from Oxford Brookes University and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. His current project, Remembering Disasters, investigates the relationship between memorialisation and social recovery during the aftermath of catastrophes (rememberingdisasters.com). His first book entitled Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death draws from five years of doctoral research supported by the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the Toshiba International Foundation and a scholarship from Oxford Brookes University. He is currently preparing a new edited volume on The Anthropology of Death in the Early Twentieth Century.
Professor Emerita Joy Hendry (Chair)
Professor Joy Hendry is Professor Emerita of the Social Anthropology of Japan at Oxford Brookes University and a Senior Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She also supervised Penmellen Boret’s doctoral thesis. She has spent most of her working life researching in and teaching about Japan and has published several books on aspects of Japanese society and culture.