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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 3, Number 12
 December 1992 
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My family just returned from three weeks in Japan. The trip was part vacation, part estate settlement, my father-in-law having died in August.
By Japanese law the dead are cremated. Customarily, the ashes are interred in the family tomb during a Buddhist ceremony. We had arranged to have the ceremony delayed until we had arrived in Kyoto.
The Japanese are not a religious people. Their weddings are at Shinto shrines, their funerals at Buddhist temples. In between they engage in no regular religious practices.
The interment service was at the temple where my wife's family has its tomb. (My wife is a convert, but her father was not.) The monk chanted a litany in ancient Japanese. During it the mourners approached the altar on which the ashes rested and sprinkled incense onto a brazier, the smoke symbolizing hope the deceased will see paradise.
Although I sat through the service, I refrained from the incense ritual, even though to Japanese it is more a custom than a religious act. (Analogy: Think how even agnostic American men once tipped their hats in passing graveyards).
Perhaps I puzzled some of the mourners by declining, but there was a question of scandal. The ritual may not have been, properly speaking, an act of worship in their eyes or mine, but by engaging in it I might have allowed some to think I believe my religion is on the same level as their custom. Since I don't, I couldn't.
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