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Hikaru Suzuki, The Price of Death: The Funeral

Industry In Contemporary Japan. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000

Article in Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology · March 2005

DOI: 10.1007/s10823-005-3801-z

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Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 20: 79–81, 2005.

C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 79
DOI: 10.1007/s10823-005-3801-z

Book review

LY
Hikaru Suzuki, The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry In Contemporary
Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

N
O
Using a combination of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical methods,
Hikaru Suzuki has produced an important book that fills an awkward gap in

G
the social scientific study of funerary practices in Japan between research on

IN
community rituals and studies of commercialized ceremonies. Her overarch-
ing argument is that the urbanization and modernization of Japanese society

D
during the last 50 years has produced a shift from community to commercial
funerals, resulting in the mass consumption of funeral services that replace
EA
the traditional role of death in the extended household, among neighbors, and
in religious belief as a basis for social and cultural cohesion. The fruit of her
FR

labor is a finely tuned processual analysis that reveals much about the meaning
and function of funerary rites in contemporary Japan.
O

The introductory chapter quickly initiates the reader to the modern dynam-
ics of funerary meaning through an ethnographic sketch in which a jilted lover
O

reports the death of his ex-girlfriend to a commercial funeral hall on the day
PR

of her wedding. Interestingly, this occurrence does not devastate the bride nor
frustrate the funeral staff who consider the ex-boyfriend’s act of resistance
to be a mere “April Fool’s Joke.” Through this episode, Suzuki demonstrates
R

that the funeral itself at least in urban Japan is no longer negatively associated
FO

with impurity, pollution, and superstition—a dramatic change in attitude to-

ward funerals and death in comparison to earlier periods. Throughout the rest
of the book, Suzuki shows how this transformation occurred and is played out
in contemporary Japanese society anthropologically as the funeral experience
has evolved through different stages of commoditization during the postwar
period.
Suzuki’s portrayal of funerary commoditization is highly effective in part
because she addressed the topic from the vantage point of bereaving fami-
lies, funeral professionals, religious officiates, and the general public whom
she encountered as a funeral worker in Moon Rise Funeral Hall where she
conducted fieldwork. According to Suzuki, contemporary Japanese funerals
emphasize what friends, family, and colleagues remember about the deceased
and seek to evaluate the deceased’s life and personality on an individual basis,
instead of focusing on the loss within the context of the extended household or
as a reaffirmation of community history, solidarity, and local ties as in the past.
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80 BOOK REVIEW

Throughout the book, Suzuki sees the role of professional funeral homes
in controlling the funeral experience for their mourning customers to be a key
element in the reconstruction of contemporary death. Through the execution of
a carefully structured argument, Suzuki shows how changes in the meaning of
death have resulted from the commercialization of the treatment of the corpse.
More specifically, she argues that by taking over the responsibility of handling
the corpse upon a person’s death, funeral professionals have commoditized
death by making it unnecessary for a family member to engage in the removal
of the deceased, encoffining, and transporting the body to the crematorium—
all activities that used to function to unite cultural values among the family
members and helped to facilitate solidarity among members of the deceased’s
residential community. Suzuki sees in the contemporary Japanese funeral a
prime example of how the social function of death has been forever changed.
The funeral, a rite of passage that used to take days, has now been condensed
by professional funeral providers into a one-hour time frame.
During the nineteenth century, theorists such as Marx have described the
capitalist mode of production and the fetishism of commodities as the cause
of social alienation, class conflict, and intrinsic contradiction in industrial so-
cieties. But Suzuki sees things differently. Citing Daniel Miller, she reminds
us that on the other hand, mass consumption can be viewed also as a “partici-
patory normative activity.” From this perspective, both the commercialization
and mass consumption of funeral services can be seen as a positive force that
encourages homogenous cultural practices. From this vantage point, Suzuki
argues that the commercialization and consumption of funeral services serve
as a means and a vehicle through which to express individual differences in
contemporary Japan. Here, she suggests that despite their different meaning
and function, commercial funerals are similar to community funerals in many
ways. Commercial funerals help to create new ties between individuals and fu-
neral companies, reconfirming the individual’s relationship to the workplace.
They also promote certain societal values and patterns of integration. But they
accomplish these tasks at the individual level instead of at the community level
as in the past.
In the last few chapters of her book, Suzuki elaborates on the cultural con-
struction of the Japanese funeral by describing how funeral industry leaders
during the early postwar years studied traditional funerary rites and customs,
adopting many of them into contemporary practice, but sometimes even cre-
ating new ones for marketing purposes. In the concluding chapter, Suzuki
observes that the loss of funeral knowledge that was once passed from gen-
eration to generation and the acquisition of this knowledge by the funeral
industry have discouraged ordinary people from conducting funerals them-
selves. Consequently, funeral companies with specialized knowledge have
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BOOK REVIEW 81

come to dominate the field and have widened the knowledge gap between
professionals and consumer. Ultimately, Suzuki sees commercial funerals as
part of the larger process of mass consumption that has stratified individuals by
a common denominator and dissolved local heterogeneity into a homogeneity
of cultural practice.
One has to be impressed with the number and variety of Suzuki’s infor-
mants within the Japanese funeral industry. Her supporting data, numerous
explanatory flow-charts, and field photographs also enhance the text nicely.
Yet I found myself wondering whether Japanese funerals are really always as
secular and rational as Suzuki portrayed them—and conversely, whether in
the past Japanese funerals were really always as wholesome and integrative
as she described them to be. Another criticism could be that Suzuki portrays
the development of the Japanese funeral industry as linear in progression, her
interpretations driven at least in part by the social and economic theories she
uses to explain the changing meaning of death in Japan instead of drawing
patterns from her varied experiences in the field. Nor does Suzuki address
the resurgence of traditional funerary practices in recent years in some rural
quarters of Japan, which might indicate some dissatisfaction with the indi-
vidualized and commoditized characteristics of Japan’s contemporary funeral
practices.
Despite these weaknesses, Suzuki has written an account of contemporary
Japanese funerary practices well worth reading. This book will excite and
enlighten anyone interested in the sociocultural process of death.

Christopher S. Thompson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Culture
Linguistics Department
Ohio University
Athens, OH. 45701 USA
E-mail: thompso@ohiou.edu

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