Japan's expensive funerals and declining birthrates are transforming ancestral traditions

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Whenever I drive amid the mazelike bustle of Tokyo's Shuto Expressway, where approximately 1 million vehicles transit daily, I see billboard advertisements for all manner of businesses: dentists, hotels, car and tire companies, and affordable funerals. Lots and lots of funerals.

For generations, Japan's funeral system rested on family and community networks and Buddhist temples. Together, they sustained the traditional system of burials into the 20th century. Today, Japan is facing a crisis of funerals and burials.

Funerals averaged approximately 1.2 million yen, or about $7,600, according to a 2024 national survey—approximately one-quarter of an average Japanese worker's annual gross earnings. Consequently, many Japanese are thinking about whether to continue burial traditions that will place on their children and grandchildren the financial, logistical and emotional costs associated with maintaining the family grave. Japan's falling birthrate means there are fewer people to care for their ancestors' graves, which has made the problem more urgent.

As a professor of religion who researches death rituals, I am struck by the innovative death rituals that are emerging in Japan, where I was born and raised. These new rituals reshape some traditions but preserve the importance of remaining connected with the dead. Japanese funerary rites involve both cremation and burial.

First, the deceased is cremated; then their bones are buried, typically weeks, months or years after cremation. Cremation is overwhelmingly standard for Japanese burials today, with between 99.7% and 99.9% of the deceased cremated. In any given year, fewer than 400 people are buried without cremation.

After the deceased is cremated in a coffin, family members place some or most of the bone fragments into a funerary urn. Family members take the urn home to be placed on a Buddhist altar. The bones are later interred in a grave, ossuary or columbarium—"nōkotsudō"—which are permanent structures where bones are interred in compartments.