BEING DEAD OTHERWISE | By Anne Allison

Anne Allison’s expertly researched and compellingly articulated Being Dead Otherwise brings to the fore the significant changes that have taken place in Japanese death practices over the last few decades. Given Japan’s rapidly aging population, where since 2006 deaths have exceeded births (53), combined with the nation’s declining rates of marriage and childbirth, ancestral graves, where spirits of the dead are cared for by their descendants, are no longer assumed to be an individual’s final resting place. Instead, increasing numbers of Japanese are dying either with no one to care for them, or, facilitated by a range of new businesses and services, having made their own mortuary preparations. With relationships between the living and the dead changing significantly, and in particular “the effects and affects of death making in the absence of intimate others,” understandings of what constitutes a “good death” are notably in flux. Although focused on Japan, throughout her study, Allison considers Japan “a case study of possible futures in the weaning, transforming, and redesigning of others in the management of the dead” (5).

Following an introduction, Being Dead Otherwise is divided into four sections: histories, preparations, departures, and machines. The monograph concludes with an epilogue.

“Histories,” the first part of Being Dead Otherwise, contains two chapters—chapter 1: “Ambiguous Bones: Dead in the Past” and chapter 2: “The Popular Industry of Death: From Godzilla to the Ending Business.” Chapter 1 explores what Allison terms “the making of the unmaking of death” across Japanese history, from earliest times through the aftermath of the Fukushima compound disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown) of March 11, 2011. For its part, chapter 2 spotlights ENDEX, a national convention for individuals in the “ending business”—“those in the business of funerals, graves, and anything pertaining to either” (52), as the challenge of the “family-less dead” (70) accelerates.

In “Preparations,” the second part of Being Dead Otherwise, attention turns to “Caring (Differently) for the Dead” (chapter 3) and “Preparedness: A Biopolitics of Making Life Out of Death” (chapter 4). Chapter 3 considers “how both care and the relationality attending it are shifting, sometimes quite radically, in Japan today” (77), with attention to “new designs for mortuary arrangements” as well as “new sociological arrangements between the living and the dead” (94). In chapter 4, Allison analyzes responses to the (potential) “burden of unclaimed remains” (110), especially “my-death,” or “arranging ahead of time both a final dwelling place and its tending” (120).

“Departures,” the third part of Allison’s monograph, begins with a chapter on “The Smell of Lonely Death and the Work of Cleaning it Up” (chapter 5). With “lonely death” on the rise in Japan together with “loneliness and social isolation more generally,” businesses that “dismantle a [deceased person’s] home with precision and care” are in demand (125), acting more like kin than compensated cleanup workers (133). For its part, chapter 6, “De-parting: The Handling of Remaindered Remains,” turns to the care of unclaimed remains, including their cremation. As Allison rhetorically postulates, “might we conceive of rituals emerging in Japan today as caring for not merely the deceased but also the departed relationality that once enveloped the dead?” (170).

“Machines,” the fourth and final part of Being Dead Otherwise, consists of one chapter—“Automated Graves: The Precarity and Prosthetics of Caring for the Dead” (chapter 7). This chapter draws attention to the growing embrace of pre-planned burials, especially “automated delivery system columbaria that are techno-futuristic but nonetheless organized around a grave” (176). Responding both to scarcity of space in Japan as well as the scarcity of care for Japan’s aged population, automated columbaria are in many ways performing death care (176–177). Allison perceptively reads these as a social prosthesis, “a device, external or implanted, that substitutes or supplements a missing or defective part of the body” (177). And she rightly links them to other forms of technological innovation. In a time of anxiety over being “stranded in death,” technology, and in this case automated graves, provide “a way of mass housing the dead in a manner that maintains the symbolism of the traditional grave by using a just-in-time mechanism that allows thousands to share it, if only prosthetically” (190). By providing a model of according “a semblance of humanity by maintaining some social ritual for the deceased in the process,” the automated delivery system columbarium “shifts the calculus of what it means to be human after death” (190).

Being Dead Otherwise concludes with an epilogue that among other insights addresses the concept of “otherwise,” which Allison explains she uses “to reference a struggle, a potential, a willingness, and a need to strike out in new directions for…managing the dead” (196). Noting the range of choices contemporary Japanese now have “beyond the patrilineal national code of death making that has become even more hierarchical and exclusive in recent years,” Allison provocatively wraps up Being Dead Otherwise by questioning whether practicing a form of grieveability that is “outside the governance of the nation-state, the normativity of the patriarchal family, or the ‘no future’ of social reproduction dependent on children and ancestors” in fact contains “the germ of being otherwise in life as well” (196).

As its ending suggests, Being Dead Otherwise is an astute analysis of changing practices surrounding death in contemporary Japan. This monograph joins a growing corpus of rigorous scholarship, including James Wright’s Robots Won’t Save Japan: An Ethnography of Eldercare Automation, published the same year, on death and dying in a nation with a population that is aging more rapidly than any other in history. To be sure, the term “lonely death,” the usual English translation of kodokushi, is something of a misnomer: those who die alone (i.e., with no one else present) are not necessarily lonely, given that loneliness is “the feeling that there is a gap between the connections we would like to have with other people and what we actually experience” (Jeremy Nobel, Project UnLonely, New York: Avery, 2023, 12). Yet without question, increased isolation from family and kin has led to significant changes in Japanese death practices, which are powerfully captured in Being Dead Otherwise.

Karen Thornber

Harvard University, Cambridge