Research Seminar Series: The (Un)social Smells of Death: Changing Tides in Contemporary Japan

Presenter: Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, United States. Her books include Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club; Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination; and Precarious Japan. Being Dead Otherwise, on new Japanese practices regarding the dead, and the relations between self and other in caregiving them, was published this spring.

In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and post-growth economic shifts, sociality is downsizing in Japan away from the family to more single lifestyles. The effects this has had on mortuary care, once managed by kin around an ancestral grave, is examined here for what is becoming a new era of “family-less dead.” On the one hand, there is a rise in the incidence of “lonely death” (those who die alone with remains that go untended) and, on the other hand, a booming “ending industry” is now arising that offers alternatives to the family grave. As will be argued in the talk, at both ends of the spectrum, smell can be used to register both the unsociality of a bad death, as well as the shifting sociality of new ways of handling the dead.