Moreover, most of my informants, of all ages, were aware that in order to avoid calamities they needed to engage in ritual practices at specific times of their life cycle, but also at particular times of the year during so-called ‘annual events’. In this chapter I have focused on the latter types of celebrations, which are linked with a ‘native’ notion of seasonality.
Although the scale and intensity of the ritual calendar in contemporary Japan might be surprising to non-Japanese, participants in this study, like most Japanese, were aware that in order to have a happy, fulfilled life it is necessary to regularly create and re-create connections with other human as well as non-human entities. Importantly, although the New Year is celebrated by all, the number of other ‘annual events’ in which a particular family might actively participate depends on their specific circumstances. For those without deceased in their immediate family group, and more and more those without children, the annual cycle of events is far less dense. The overall decrease in family size, the scarcity of informal networks through which food and other goods can be redistributed, and, more broadly, the occurrence of blockages in the disposal of festive goods has also resulted in a decline in opportunities for social and spiritual sociality at the base of the ritual system of regeneration. Still, this chapter also hints at the development of innovative practices that enable new forms of sociality. The market plays a key role in this process.
The focus of ‘annual events’ used to be on invigorating the local neighbourhood, but as school and work networks have gained in significance in peoples’ everyday lives, practices that celebrate the welfare of children, the celebration of intimate family life inside the home and business prosperity (Ito 1995) have taken centrestage. Ritual knowledge pertaining to specific ‘annual events’, once transferred through local communities and the extended families within, is now primarily managed by commercial businesses such as funeral and wedding companies as well as producers and distributors of advice literature. Moreover, through resourceful commodity promotion and innovation, local businesses have been able not only to adapt to and align themselves with, but also successfully to steer domestic rhythms of consumption. In the home the life cycles of commodities become closely connected with the embodied temporal and spatial rhythms of the inhabitants, whose biographies are thought to be directly influenced by larger cosmological principles.
Notes
- The majority of dwellings studied were inhabited by families, but the sample also includes university students, recently married couples and elderly people living alone. Like some 90 per cent of the country’s population (Taira 1993: 169), all considered themselves to belong to an undifferentiated Japanese middle class. However, in Japan, as elsewhere, social distinctions are constructed around consumption. This research was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the British Academy. Special thanks goes to my Japanese mentor Prof. Senda Minoru and all those who opened up their homes for me, but especially the family Kagemori, Kadonaga, Kuwahara, Matsui, Nakao, Nishiki, Sakai and Takahashi.
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• Inge Daniels