Anti-Christianity and Funerary Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan

Life free of Buddhism was almost impossible in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), where Buddhist temples covered every comer of the country. It is estimated that, by the late seventeenth century, there were at least more than 100,000 Buddhist temples, and this number remained undiminished until the early Meiji years when an anti-Buddhist movement, known as "abolish the Buddha and discard Śākyamuni" (haibutsu kishaku), swept the country.U Morethan 100,000 temples (probably about 200,000-250,000 when subtemples such as jiin, tacchil, anshitsu, and the like were all individually counted and included) in a country whose population was grown from around twelve million at the turn of the sixteenth century to around thirty million by 1700 and stabilized thereafter, or where there were about 73,000 administrative units (about 63,000 village [mural units and 10,000 ward [machi] units) meant that, on average, 300 people (or sixty households on the assumption that each family unit has five members), or each village or ward supported at least oneor two temples.U This is what the Tokugawa Japanese had to shoulder inaddition to regular tax obligations and corvee duties to the government and to the ruling class

Mortuary Practices, Buddhism, and Family Relations in Japanese Society

Mark Rowe. Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp. $91 (cloth),$29 (paper).Satsuki Kawano. Nature’s Embrace: Japan’s Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. 232 pp. $47 (cloth),$27 (paper).In Bonds of the Dead, Mark Rowe, who focuses on “the grave as the center of the ancestral orbit” in Japanese mortuary practices, observes that, due to the gradual loss of its gravitational pull, “the economic and social bedrock of temple Buddhism in Japan has eroded to the point where even its continued existence is publicly called into question” (222). Here, Rowe speaks to the decline of what is commonly known as the danka system. In contrast, in Nature’s Embrace, Satsuki Kawano finds that the dominance of Buddhist death-related rituals couched in the tradition of the danka system remains by and large intact..