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This chapter discusses the modern history of animal mortuary and propitiatory rites in Japan. Modern animal memorial rituals have been nostalgically constructed as continual embodiments of Japanese tradition and respect for the natural world, but this chapter argues that they are in fact a response to modernity with its inherent commodification and consumption of animals. The chapter first provides an overview of premodern precursors for animal memorial rites before considering animal memorial rites in the early modern period. It then explores the memorialization of military and zoo animals as well as postwar animal mortuary rites in the food industry and memorial rites for laboratory animals. It shows that the proliferation of memorial rites for animals is linked to the development of a modern military, industrialized whaling and fishing, food industries, and modern educational and research facilities that rely on killing or commodifying large numbers of animals.

This chapter examines legal controversies surrounding the taxation of pet memorial rites in Japan. Between 2005 and 2008, two different regional courts in Nagoya and Tokyo grappled with the issue of whether pet memorial rites were religious activities and thus tax-exempt, and each came with opposite conclusions. The cases challenged the legal boundaries of religion and demonstrate the deeply rooted public discontent with the perceived tax privileges of religious corporations under the current tax law. They also highlight the perceived differences between pet memorial rites on the one hand and memorial rites for other animals and for inanimate objects on the other. This chapter first provides a brief overview of the tax exemptions enjoyed by religious corporations before discussing the Jimyōin corporate income tax case and the Ekōin property tax case.

This chapter considers the ongoing debate about the posthumous fate of animal spirits, which has been influenced by animistic, Buddhist, Christian, and spiritualist notions of the next life. It begins with a discussion of Japanese mainstream Buddhist views of the spiritual status and the afterlife of animals, with particular emphasis on how Buddhist clerics tend to promote the notion of pets as fellow sentient beings and the idea of rebirth near the former owner in this life or the next, while others specializing in pet memorial rites tend to avoid equating pets with the beastly existence. It then examines the portrayal of pet spirits in the psychic literature of the 1990s as vengeful spirits, along with the emergence of contemporary views that present a comforting, benevolent rather than frightening, vengeful vision of the afterlife of pets. It shows that pets nowadays are often presented as beloved family members and as faithful companions even after death, rather than as a threatening other.

This book examines the culture industry of pet mortuary rites in contemporary Japan. It considers the necrogeography of the physical and mental landscapes that have produced the current configurations of pet memorial rites in Japan. It explores what religious and intellectual traditions constructed animals as subjects of religious rituals and how pets have been subjected to inclusion or exclusion in the necral landscapes. It looks at spatial arrangements produced by pet mortuary rituals that symbolize the relationships between human and nonhuman animals, as well as the boundaries—physical, legal, and spiritual—that pet mortuary rites draw to contrast the species or cross to blur their differences. Finally, the book discusses the ways in which various kinds of animal mortuary rites symbolically reify the ontological distinctions between pets and other nonhuman animals.

This book has shown that the Japanese discourse about pet memorial rites is a complicated one and involves multiple voices and positions, from pet owners and funerary institutions to temple parishioners, cemetery clients who don't own pets, and the state. It has explained how the boundaries between pets and humans in the necral landscape are continually contested and how pet spirits have been reconceptualized as benevolent companions rather than as potentially vengeful spirits. This epilogue discusses the emergence of Japanese dogs as emblems of the superior qualities that the fascist state hoped to inspire in its subjects, focusing on the case of Hachikō who was considered the perfect embodiment of loyalty. The spirit of Hachikō is commemorated each year on April 8, through the Hachikō Spirit Propitiation Festival (Hachikō Ireisai).